By SARAH PARVINI

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Workplace communications platform Slack experienced an outage Wednesday morning as thousands of users reported they were unable to use the service.

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The tech company, based in San Francisco, said it was investigating reports of trouble connecting or loading Slack. On an update on the company’s website, Slack said it had “determined a variety of API endpoints, sending (and) receiving messages, and some threads loading” were impacted.

A spokesperson for Slack said updates on restoring services will be posted to status.slack.com.

At the peak of the outage, more than 3,000 users reported they couldn’t access the platform, according to the website DownDetector. Some services appeared to be coming back online by mid-morning Wednesday, including group and direct messaging as well as emoticon reactions.

By THALIA BEATY, Associated Press

NEW YORK (AP) — Though they know they can never replace all the money lost due to the Trump administration’s freeze on foreign assistance, nonprofits are fundraising to help organizations struggling with the cuts.

Unlock Aid, which advocates for U.S. Agency for International Development reforms, started the Foreign Aid Bridge Fund last week. It will take donations and make grants to groups around the world to try to avert some of the worst impacts of this policy change.

Other groups including Founders Pledge and The Life You Can Save have also launched fundraising campaigns. The Network for Empowered Aid Response, a coalition of civil society organizations from developing countries, has opened a fund, though it’s not accepting donations from individuals. GlobalGiving, a nonprofit that fundraises for grassroots international organizations, was one of the first to launch a campaign to support impacted groups.

As part of a barrage of executive orders in his first days in office, President Donald Trump ordered a 90-day freeze on U.S. foreign assistance to review whether it aligned with his policies. Secretary of State Marco Rubio turned off the funding spigots essentially overnight. At the urging of billionaire advisor Elon Musk, mass layoffs of USAID staff followed.

U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio waves as he departs Israel for Saudi Arabia, at Ben Gurion Airport in Tel Aviv, Israel, Monday, Feb. 17, 2025. (Evelyn Hockstein/Pool Photo via AP)

“I don’t think we’re under any illusion that the Foreign Aid Bridge Fund is going to close the entirety of the gap,” said Walter Kerr, co-executive director of the nonprofit Unlock Aid. “But I think in a moment like this, people need to do what they can.”

An independent group of advisors will recommend grants and has already approved several. While any organization can apply, it will prioritize giving to direct service providers and groups that have diversified sources of revenue.

The U.S. spent $68 billion on foreign aid in 2023 and is the largest global funder of humanitarian responses. Programs funding HIV treatment, disease monitoring, child vaccinations, refugee support and malnutrition treatments have halted because of the freeze. Many in the international aid sector believe U.S. funding will never fully return.

“This is not about ending foreign aid, but restructuring assistance to serve U.S. interests and ensure money spent on aid programs actually reaches people in need,” said a State Department spokesperson in an emailed statement.

A group of nonprofits sued over the freeze and a judge Tuesday ordered USAID and the State Department to resume payments by Thursday.

Donors won’t replace government funds

Founders Pledge and The Life You Can Save said just the nonprofits they have previously supported face almost $100 million in funding shortfalls because of the freeze.

Founders Pledge asks business people to promise a portion of the money they make from startups and investments to charities. They research and recommend different nonprofit programs their members can give to. Similarly, The Life You Can Save, founded by the Australian philosopher Peter Singer, recommends charities that work on reducing extreme poverty.

Demonstrators and lawmakers rally against President Donald Trump and his ally Elon Musk as they disrupt the federal government, including dismantling the U.S. Agency for International Development, which administers foreign aid approved by Congress, on Capitol Hill in Washington, Wednesday, Feb. 5, 2025. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)

David Goldberg, co-founder and CEO of Founders Pledge, hopes to raise tens of millions for their fund. But even “fractions of that money save real lives, prevent people from dying needlessly who otherwise would live,” he said. “So I think everything matters and we should be aiming to have as much public support for this as possible.”

Their rapid response fund has already donated $100,000 and will only give to organizations they’ve already vetted, Goldberg said.

The U.S. funding freeze has cascaded through the international development ecosystem. Many American businesses have also lost funding and thousands of American workers have lost jobs as the vast majority of U.S. foreign assistance actually went through U.S.-based organizations.

“I do deeply hope that philanthropy and individual donors step up in this moment. Philanthropy can never fill the gap that public funding fills,” said Victoria Vrana, CEO of GlobalGiving. “And yet, I do believe that organized philanthropy, corporate philanthropy, foundations can and should do more.”

Appeals to individual donors to step up

When Unlock Aid began planning their bridge fund, they wanted to make it as easy as possible for donors to give. Donors can give through Every.org, an online giving platform that can process payments from credit cards and stocks to cryptocurrencies. The fund is managed by Panorama Global, a philanthropic consulting nonprofit.

Amanda Arch, co-executive director of Unlock Aid, said their emergency fund has received gifts in all of those forms so far.

“When we think about the ability to do really quick and urgent mobilization, it’s just amazing to see the infrastructure and how it’s evolved to meet these types of moments,” she said.

They also reached out to people who had experience mobilizing money held in donor-advised funds (DAF), a type of investing vehicle for funds that are earmarked for nonprofits. Donors immediately get a tax benefit when they put money in a DAF, but there is no deadline when it must be given to a nonprofit.

While major foundations have been listening to grantees and watching closely, few have announced major changes to their funding strategies, even in the face of so much need. People who consult with major foundations said they may be waiting to see what comes next from the administration and to see how ongoing court challenges play out.

The amount of money stored in DAFs has ballooned in recent years from $148 billion in 2019 to $251 billion in 2023, according to the National Philanthropic Trust.

Kerr and Arch spoke with Jennifer Risher, who started a pandemic-era campaign called #HalfMyDAF along with her husband, Lyft CEO David Risher, that asked donors to give away half the money in their DAF accounts. With the Rishers matching some donations, the campaign has tracked $70 million in gifts in four years.

Risher said it was nice to take a tangible step and advise Unlock Aid.

“I love seeing them take action and setting a goal,” she said. “That’s exciting to see.”

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 LAURIE KELLMAN

The billionaire owner of The Washington Post, Jeff Bezos, narrowed the topics covered by its opinion section Wednesday to defending personal liberties and the free market, a pivot away from the traditional broad focus and prompting the news outlet’s opinion editor to resign.

Bezos, who also is the founder and largest individual shareholder of Amazon, said on X that “viewpoints opposing those pillars will be left to be published by others.”

The move was received by some as an indication that Bezos is making decisions for the Post with an eye toward avoiding retaliation by President Donald Trump. Bezos, though, cast the change as a modernization from the days when newspapers offered opinions on a broad range of topics. Now, he said, “the internet does that job.”

“We are going to be writing every day in support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets,” Bezos wrote in his post, adding that the new topics “are right for America. I also believe that these viewpoints are underserved in the current market of ideas and news opinion.” Opinions editor David Shipley resigned rather than lead the shift, Bezos said.

“I suggested to him that if the answer wasn’t `hell yes,’ then it had to be `no.’ After careful consideration, David decided to step away,” Bezos wrote.

The pivot echoes the Wall Street Journal’s editorial page banner: “free markets, free people.”

Bezos’ move Wednesday was the latest in a series of Bezos’ changes to the legacy news outlet, an award-winning organization that broke the Watergate scandal and whose motto is, “Democracy Dies in Darkness.”

Weeks before the November election, Bezos announced that the Post would not endorse a presidential candidate, sparking a wave of resignations and thousands of subscription cancellations. The Post’s editorial staff had been prepared to endorse Democrat Kamala Harris before publisher Will Lewis wrote instead that it would be better for readers to make up their own minds. Bezos defended the decision by saying in “a note from our owner” that editorial endorsements create a perception of bias at a time many Americans don’t believe the media, and do nothing to tip the scales of an election.

In January, cartoonist Ann Telnaes quit after an editor rejected her sketch of Bezos and other media executives bowing before Trump — after The Washington Post editor was seen with other executives at Trump’s Florida club Mar-a-Lago.

Some of Trump’s top allies tweeted their support for Bezos’ move.

“Bravo, @JeffBezos!” posted fellow billionaire Elon Musk. Added conservative commentator Charlie Kirk: “Good! The culture is changing rapidly for the better.”

Bezos bought the broadsheet and other newspapers in 2013 for $250 million in a surprise move viewed as a demonstration of how the Internet has created winners and losers and transformed the media landscape.

The narrowing of topics will be obvious. On the Post’s homepage Wednesday afternoon, headlines linking to opinion material included “Your showerhead is lying to you” and “What we learned about politics by talking about … wolves.”

By Tim Henderson, Stateline.org

Even as the Trump administration criticizes state and local sanctuary policies as an impediment to its deportation aims, officials touting the policies are finding there isn’t much they can do to prevent immigration arrests.

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Some states and counties are nonetheless defending their sanctuary policies as a way to slow arrests, especially for purely immigration-related offenses, and to assure residents that local leaders are not taking part in the Trump administration’s deportation plans.

Localities in Connecticut, Oregon and Washington joined a February lawsuit led by the city and county of San Francisco and Santa Clara County in California against a Trump administration executive order calling for defunding cities with sanctuary policies, calling the order “illegal and authoritarian.” California is also preparing to defend its state policies limiting cooperation with immigration authorities, based on a 2017 law that withstood a court challenge under the first Trump administration.

The laws under scrutiny generally limit cooperation with federal immigration authorities. The policies either prevent local officials from holding prisoners for immigration arrests or, alternatively, from notifying immigration authorities what time prisoners will be released, so federal agents can arrest them on immigration charges that could lead to deportation. There are generally exceptions for some serious crimes.

Chicago, Philadelphia and Seattle — all high-profile sanctuary locations — are among the cities that have seen Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrests.

ICE can always find other ways to arrest a person, but it’s harder without local cooperation.

“You’re adding to the time and expense and resources ICE needs,” said Kathleen Bush-Joseph, a policy analyst for the Migration Policy Institute, a Washington, D.C., think tank devoted to immigration policy.

She noted a 2018 report from the CATO Institute, a libertarian think tank, suggesting that deportations fell in California after a 2013 law limited cooperation with ICE for minor and immigration crimes, though they later rose again.

“There is suggestive evidence that sanctuary policies reduce deportations but many reasons to also be skeptical of big effects,” the report concluded.

Most deportation arrests happen when ICE agents get fingerprint records from jails, whether run by city governments or independently elected sheriffs as they are in many counties, and identify people subject to court deportation orders. All jails regardless of sanctuary policy send the fingerprints for federal background checks during the booking process.

Still, federal officials complain that sanctuary policies can force them to arrest people on the street where it’s more dangerous and time-consuming than a transfer of custody inside a jail.

That happened recently in heavily Democratic Tompkins County in upstate New York, where the county and the city of Ithaca reaffirmed their sanctuary policies after criticism by the Trump administration.

A man who had been held in the county’s jail since 2023 was released on a judge’s order in late January, before ICE agents could arrive to arrest him for deportation. Several agencies, including state police, later arrested him in a parking lot in a show of force, according to local press accounts.

The 27-year-old man, a citizen of Mexico, had been identified for deportation in early January because he had returned to the United States after being deported seven times in 2016. He pleaded guilty to charges of assaulting a police officer and a jail guard and was sentenced to time served.

After the ICE arrest, acting U.S. Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove criticized the county, writing in a Jan. 30 statement: “We will use every tool at our disposal to prevent sanctuary city policies from impeding and obstructing lawful federal operations designed to make America safe again.”

Tompkins County Attorney Maury Josephson, in a statement to Stateline, called Bove’s statement “false and offensive.” Josephson wrote that the sheriff, Derek Osborne, had notified ICE about the prisoner’s release and that federal agents “had every opportunity to come to the jail to obtain the individual in question without any need for a pursuit or other incident.”

Many sanctuary policies are mostly symbolic, meant to assure residents that the city isn’t taking part in federal immigration enforcement. Many policies say city employees will not ask about immigration status when people seek services.

Some sanctuary policies can help indirectly fight deportations by providing legal help and advice for immigrants on how to respond to questions from federal agents, said Jennifer Ibañez Whitlock, a supervisory policy and practice counsel for the American Immigration Lawyers Association.

“There have been some steps forward in creating an immigration public defender system, but it’s not available at the federal level yet,” Ibañez Whitlock said. That can make it tricky when an immigration prisoner is moved to another state for detention, and they could lose their legal representation, she said.

Sanctuary policies also aim to improve public safety by assuring immigrants it’s safe for them to report and help investigate crimes. Often the policies forbid asking questions about immigration status for people seeking services.

“For us it’s simple. We are striving to create a culture of trust and security within our communities so that our residents know that they can come to the county when they are in need or when they can be of help,” said Tony LoPresti, county counsel for Santa Clara County, California, during a news conference announcing the San Francisco lawsuit this month.

“That includes feeling safe coming to local law enforcement to report crimes or to participate in investigations without fearing that they or their loved ones face deportation,” LoPresti added.

©2025 States Newsroom. Visit at stateline.org. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.