NEW ORLEANS (AP) — Authorities in Louisiana say they are in pursuit of 10 inmates — at least one of whom is convicted of murder — who escaped from a New Orleans jail. Another inmate was captured Friday after a brief foot chase through the French Quarter, the Louisiana State Police said in a post on the social media platform X.
Authorities first noticed the 11 inmates were missing during a Friday morning headcount.
One of the fugitive inmates, Derrick Groves, was convicted on two charges of second-degree murder and two charges of attempted second-degree murder last year for his role in the 2018 Mardi Gras Day shootings of two men. Groves also faces a charge of battery against a correctional facility employee, court records show.
Orleans Parish Sheriff Susan Hutson said the department is actively working with local, state and federal law enforcement agencies to search for the escaped inmates.
“We are launching a full investigation to determine how this escape occurred, including reviewing facility protocols, staff performance and physical security measures,” Hutson said. “Any lapses or failures that contributed to this incident will be addressed swiftly and with full accountability.”
Investigators are focusing on an opening inside a cell through which at least one inmate is believed to have escaped into a maintenance corridor, according to one current and one former law enforcement official who were not authorized to discuss the ongoing investigation and spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity.
“That’s how they escaped,” the current official said, adding investigators were reviewing surveillance footage that captured the jailbreak.
The AP obtained a photograph the current law enforcement official confirmed shows the opening in question. A former law enforcement official who worked in the jail for several years said such an opening — of just a few feet — would typically be covered by a sink and toilet that may have been removed in this case.
Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill called the escape “beyond unacceptable” and said local authorities had waited too long to inform the public.
“Someone clearly dropped the ball and there’s no excuse for this,” Murrill said in an emailed statement. “My office will do whatever it takes to determine how this happened and make sure that it won’t happen again.”
New Orleans Police Department Superintendent Anne Kirkpatrick said her agency has put “a full court effort” to respond to the escape and are working with the FBI and U.S. marshals.
“It’s more than likely that someone had help and they are not running around in a jumpsuit — but if they are, you’re going to stand out,” she said.
Officers were focused on identifying and providing protection for individuals who may have testified in their cases or may be in danger. One family has been “removed” from their home, Kirkpatrick said.
“If there is anyone helping or harboring these escapees, you will be charged,” Kirkpatrick added.
Associated Press writer Jim Mustian contributed to this report.
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — The internet wouldn’t be the same without the Like button, the thumbs-up icon that Facebook and other online services turned into digital catnip.
Like it or not, the button has served as a creative catalyst, a dopamine delivery system and an emotional battering ram. It also became an international tourist attraction after Facebook plastered the symbol on a giant sign on that stood outside its Silicon Valley headquarters until the company rebranded itself as Meta Platforms in 2021.
A new book, “Like: The Button That Changed The World,” delves into the convoluted story behind a symbol that’s become both the manna and bane of a digitally driven society.
It’s a tale that traces back to gladiator battles for survival during the Roman empire before fast-forwarding to the early 21st century when technology trailblazers such as Yelp co-founder Russ Simmons, Twitter co-founder Biz Stone, PayPal co-founder Max Levchin, YouTube co-founder Steve Chen, and Gmail inventor Paul Buchheit were experimenting with different ways using the currency of recognition to prod people to post compelling content online for free.
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As part of that noodling, a Yelp employee named Bob Goodson sat down on May 18, 2005, and drew a crude sketch of thumbs up and thumbs down gesture as a way for people to express their opinions about restaurant reviews posted on the site. Yelp passed on adopting Goodson’s suggested symbol and, instead, adopted the “useful,” “funny” and “cool” buttons conceived by Simmons. But the discovery of that old sketch inspired Goodson to team up with Martin Reeves to explore how the Like button came to be in their new book.
“It’s something simple and also elegant because the Like button says, ‘I like you, I like your content. And I am like you. I like you because I am like you, I am part of your tribe,’ ” Reeves said during an interview with The Associated Press. “But it’s very hard to answer the simple question, ‘Well, who invented the Like button?’ ”
The social wellspring behind a social symbol
Although Facebook is the main reason the Like button became so ubiquitous, the company didn’t invent it and almost discarded it as drivel. It took Facebook nearly two years to overcome the staunch resistance by CEO Mark Zuckerberg before finally introducing the symbol on its service on February 9, 2009 — five years after the social network’s creation in a Harvard University dorm room.
As happens with many innovations, the Like button was born out of necessity but it wasn’t the brainchild of a single person. The concept percolated for more than a decade in a Silicon Valley before Facebook finally embraced it.
“Innovation is often social and Silicon Valley was the right place for all this happen because it has a culture of meet-ups, although it’s less so now,” Reeves said. “Everyone was getting together to talk about what they were working on at that time and it turned out a lot of them were working on the same stuff.”
The effort to create a simple mechanism to digitally express approval or dismay sprouted from a wellspring of online services such as Yelp and YouTube whose success would hinge on their ability to post commentary or video that would help make their sites even more popular without forcing them to spend a lot of money for content. That effort required a feedback loop that wouldn’t require a lot of hoops to navigate.
Hollywood’s role in the Like button’s saga
And when Goodson was noodling around with his thumbs-up and thumbs-down gesture, it didn’t come out of a vacuum. Those techniques of signaling approval and disapproval had been ushered into the 21st century zeitgeist by the Academy Award-winning movie, “Gladiator,” where Emperor Commodus — portrayed by actor Joaquin Phoenix — used the gestures to either spare or slay combatants in the arena.
But the positive feelings conjured by a thumbs up date even further back in popular culture, thanks to the 1950s-era character Fonzie played by Henry Winkler in the top-rated 1970s TV series, “Happy Days.” The gesture later became a way of expressing delight with a program via a remote control button for the digital video recorders made by TiVO during the early 2000s. Around the same time, Hot or Not — a site that solicited feedback on the looks of people who shared photos of themselves — began playing around with ideas that helped inspire the Like button, based on the book’s research.
Others that contributed to the pool of helpful ideas included the pioneering news service Digg, the blogging platform Xanga, YouTube and another early video site, Vimeo.
The button’s big breakthrough
But Facebook unquestionably turned the Like button into a universally understood symbol, while also profiting the most from its entrance into the mainstream. And it almost didn’t happen.
By 2007, Facebook engineers had been tinkering with a Like button, but Zuckerberg opposed it because he feared the social network was already getting too cluttered and, Reeves said, “is he didn’t actually want to do something that would be seen as trivial, that would cheapen the service.”
But FriendFeed, a rival social network created by Buchheit and now OpenAI Chairman Bret Taylor, had no such qualms, and unveiled its own Like button in October 2007.
But the button wasn’t successful enough to keep the lights on at FriendFeed, and the service ended up being acquired by Facebook. By the time that deal was completed, Facebook had already introduced a Like button — only after Zuckerberg rebuffed the original idea of calling it an Awesome button “because nothing is more awesome than awesome,” according to the book’s research.
Once Zuckerberg relented, Facebook quickly saw that the Like button not only helped keep its audience engaged on its social network but also made it easier to divine people’s individual interests and gather the insights required to sell the targeted advertising that accounted for most of Meta Platform’s $165 billion in revenue last year. The button’s success encouraged Facebook to take things even further by allowing other digital services to ingrain it into their feedback loops and then, in 2016, added six more types of emotions — “love,” “care,” “haha,” “wow,” “sad,” and “angry.”
Facebook hasn’t publicly disclosed how many responses it has accumulated from the Like button and its other related options, but Levchin told the book’s authors that he believes the company has probably logged trillions of them. “What content is liked by humans…is probably one of the singularly most valuable things on the internet,” Levchin said in the book.
The Like button also has created an epidemic of emotional problems, especially among adolescents, who feel forlorn if their posts are ignored and narcissists whose egos feast on the positive feedback. Reeves views those issues as part of the unintentional consequences that inevitably happen because “if you can’t even predict the beneficial effects of a technological innovation how could you possibly forecast the side effects and the interventions?”
Even so, Reeves believes the Like button and the forces that coalesced to create it tapped into something uniquely human.
“We thought serendipity of the innovation was part of the point,” Reeves said. “And I don’t think we can get bored with liking or having our capacity to compliment taken away so easily because it’s the product of 100,000 years of evolution.”
WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump’s administration on Friday asked the Supreme Court to allow him to resume his downsizing of the federal workforce, while a lawsuit filed by labor unions and cities proceeds.
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The Justice Department is challenging an order issued last week by a federal judge in San Francisco that temporarily halted Trump’s efforts to shrink a federal government he calls bloated and expensive.
U.S. District Judge Susan Illston’s temporary restraining order questioned whether Trump’s Republican administration was acting lawfully in trying to pare the federal workforce.
Solicitor General D. John Sauer asked the court to quickly put the ruling on hold, telling the justices that Illston overstepped her authority.
Illston’s order expires next week, unless extended.
The case is the latest in a string of emergency appeals the Trump administration has made to the Supreme Court, including some related to firings. The administration separately has filed an emergency appeal with the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco, which has yet to act.
Tens of thousands of federal workers have been fired, have left their jobs via deferred resignation programs or have been placed on leave as a result of Trump’s government-shrinking efforts. There is no official figure for the job cuts, but at least 75,000 federal employees took deferred resignation, and thousands of probationary workers have already been let go.
In her order, Illston gave several examples to show the impact of the downsizing. One union that represents federal workers who research health hazards faced by mine workers said it was poised to lose 221 of 222 workers in the Pittsburgh office; a Vermont farmer didn’t receive a timely inspection on his property to receive disaster aid after flooding and missed an important planting window; a reduction in Social Security Administration workers has led to longer wait times for recipients.
Among the agencies affected by the temporary restraining order are the departments of Agriculture, Energy, Labor, the Interior, State, the Treasury and Veterans Affairs. It also applies to the National Science Foundation, Small Business Association, Social Security Administration and Environmental Protection Agency.
Plaintiffs include the cities of San Francisco, Chicago and Baltimore; the labor group American Federation of Government Employees; and the nonprofit groups Alliance for Retired Americans, Center for Taxpayer Rights and Coalition to Protect America’s National Parks.
Some of the labor unions and nonprofit groups are also plaintiffs in another lawsuit before a San Francisco judge challenging the mass firings of probationary workers. In that case, Judge William Alsup ordered the government in March to reinstate those workers, but the U.S. Supreme Court later blocked his order.
DIKWA, Nigeria (AP) — Under the dappled light of a thatched shelter, Yagana Bulama cradles her surviving infant. The other twin is gone, a casualty of malnutrition and the international funding cuts that are snapping the lifeline for displaced communities in Nigeria’s insurgency-ravaged Borno state.
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“Feeding is severely difficult,” said Bulama, 40, who was a farmer before Boko Haram militants swept through her village, forcing her to flee. She and about 400,000 other people at the humanitarian hub of Dikwa — virtually the entire population — rely on assistance. The military restricts their movements to a designated “safe zone,” which severely limits farming.
For years, the United States Agency for International Development had been the backbone of the humanitarian response in northeastern Nigeria, helping non-government organizations provide food, shelter and healthcare to millions of people. But this year, the Trump administration cut more than 90% of USAID’s foreign aid contracts and $60 billion in overall assistance around the world.
Programs serving children were hit hard.
Bulama previously lost young triplets to hunger before reaching therapeutic feeding centers in Dikwa. When she gave birth to twins last August, both were severely underweight. Workers from Mercy Corps enrolled them in a program to receive a calorie-dense paste used to treat severe acute malnutrition.
But in February, Mercy Corps abruptly ended the program that was entirely financed by USAID. Two weeks later, one of the twins died, Bulama said.
She has no more tears, only dread for what may come next.
“I don’t want to bury another child,” she said.
‘Very traumatic’
Globally, 50% of the therapeutic foods for treating malnutrition in children were funded by USAID, and 40% of the supplies were produced in the U.S., according to Shawn Baker, chief program officer at Helen Keller Intl and former chief nutritionist at USAID.
He said the consequence could be 1 million children not receiving treatment for severe malnutrition, resulting in 163,500 additional deaths per year. For Helen Keller Intl, its programs in Bangladesh, Nepal and Nigeria have been terminated.
“It is very traumatic,” said Trond Jensen, the head of the United Nations humanitarian office in Maiduguri, Borno’s capital, of the funding cuts, noting that other donors, including the European Union, have taken similar steps this year. “One of the things is the threat to the lives of children.”
UNICEF still runs a therapeutic feeding center nearby, which now supports Bulama’s surviving baby, but its capacity is stretched. It is turning away many people previously served by other aid groups that have pulled out due to funding cuts.
Intersos, an Italian humanitarian organization, has the only remaining facility providing in-patient services for malnutrition in Dikwa, treating the most perilous cases. Its workers say they are overwhelmed, with at least 10 new admissions of seriously malnourished children daily.
A sick child cries at the Intersos facility, an Italian humanitarian organization, the only remaining facility providing in-patient services for malnutrition in Dikwa, northeastern, Nigeria, Tuesday, April 29, 2025. (AP Photo/Sunday Alamba)
Malnourished children receive treatment at the Intersos facility, an Italian humanitarian organization, the only remaining facility providing in-patient services for malnutrition in Maiduguri, northeastern, Nigeria, Thursday, May 1, 2025. (AP Photo/Sunday Alamba)
A sick child cries at the Intersos facility, an Italian humanitarian organization, the only remaining facility providing in-patient services for malnutrition in Dikwa, northeastern, Nigeria, Tuesday, April 29, 2025. (AP Photo/Sunday Alamba)
A Malnourished child receives treatment at the Intersos facility, an Italian humanitarian organization, the only remaining facility providing in-patient services for malnutrition in Maiduguri, northeastern, Nigeria, Thursday, May 1, 2025. (AP Photo/Sunday Alamba)
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A sick child cries at the Intersos facility, an Italian humanitarian organization, the only remaining facility providing in-patient services for malnutrition in Dikwa, northeastern, Nigeria, Tuesday, April 29, 2025. (AP Photo/Sunday Alamba)
“Before the USAID cut, we made a lot of progress,” said Ayuba Kauji, a health and nutrition supervisor. “Now my biggest worry is high mortality. We don’t have enough resources to keep up.”
Intersos was forced to reduce its staff from 30 to 11 in Dikwa after the USAID freeze. Its nutrition and health facilities now operate solely on support from the Nigerian Humanitarian Fund, a smaller pot of money contributed by a few European countries. That funding will be finished in June.
The crisis is equally acute in Maiduguri, where the economy is reeling from massive terminations of aid workers. At another Intersos-run facility, 10 of the 12 doctors have left and four nurses remain, with 50 new admissions of malnourished children per week.
“It used to be far less,” said Emmanuel Ali, one of the remaining doctors.
Beyond nutrition
The effects of the funding cuts extend far beyond nutrition. At the International Organization for Migration’s reception center in Dikwa, thousands of displaced families and those escaping Boko Haram captivity are stranded. There are no new shelters being built and no support for relocation.
“Before, organizations like Mercy Corps built mud-brick homes and rehabilitated damaged shelters to absorb people from the IOM reception center,” said one official at the center, speaking on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly on the situation. “Now, that has stopped.”
Jensen, the U.N. humanitarian head in Maiduguri, said, “sadly, we are not seeing additional funding to make up for the U.S. cuts.” He warned that vulnerable people could turn to risky ways of coping, including joining violent groups.
A global problem
The crisis in Nigeria is part of a larger reckoning. According to Kate Phillips-Barrasso, Mercy Corps’ vice president for policy and advocacy, 40 of its 62 U.S.-funded programs with the potential to reach 3.5 million people in Nigeria, Central African Republic, Ethiopia, Somalia, Iraq, Sudan, Afghanistan, Kenya, Lebanon and Gaza have been terminated.
In Mozambique, where jihadist violence in the north has displaced over a million people since 2017, humanitarian organizations face steep shortfalls with “devastating” effects on the needy, said Frederico João, chairman of the forum of NGOs in the region.
More widely, the USAID funding cut compromises Mozambique’s health sector, especially in HIV/AIDS care, said Inocêncio Impissa, cabinet spokesman. The government now seeks alternative funding to prevent total collapse of health systems.
Charles Mangwiro in Maputo, Mozambique, contributed to this story.
The Associated Press receives financial support for global health and development coverage in Africa from the Gates Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.
