Archives for May 2021

ORLANDO, Fla. (AP) — When Rep. Matt Gaetz vacationed in the Bahamas in 2018, he was joined by a doctor who donated to his campaign and a former colleague in the Florida Legislature.

The Republican congressman, Dr. Jason Pirozzolo and Halsey Beshears were united in their enjoyment of politics, fancy travel and the company of beautiful women. They also had another mutual interest: Florida’s $1.2 billion medical marijuana industry.

The Bahamas trip is a central element of a federal investigation surrounding Gaetz that has suddenly endangered his political career. What began as an inquiry into sex trafficking and whether Gaetz paid women and an underage girl in exchange for sex has grown into a larger review of public corruption, according to people familiar with the investigation.

Investigators are looking at whether Gaetz and his associates tried to secure government jobs for some of the women, the people said. They are also scrutinizing Gaetz’s connections to the medical marijuana sector, including whether Pirozzolo and others sought to influence legislation Gaetz sponsored. The investigation includes legislation from 2018, when Gaetz was in Congress, and earlier work in the Legislature, according to one of the people.

Pressure on the congressman could build in the coming weeks as Joel Greenberg, a Gaetz associate who has been accused of trafficking a minor for sex, faces a May 15 deadline to strike a plea deal with prosecutors. If he does, Greenberg may be pressed to cooperate with federal investigators and deliver damaging information against Gaetz.

None of the people on the trip to the Bahamas has been charged with a crime. Gaetz has vehemently denied any wrongdoing and has retained high-powered lawyers.

A spokesman for Gaetz said Saturday that Gaetz “is a long-time policy expert on marijuana liberalization and passed legislation on the matter as far back as 2013. Rep. Gaetz has never been influenced by outside groups to take a stance on any given position.”

Beshears and a lawyer for Pirozzolo declined to comment for this story.

The Associated Press spoke with more than 10 people familiar with the dynamic among Gaetz, Pirozzolo and Beshears. Three of the people had knowledge of the investigation. They all spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not allowed to publicly discuss the ongoing investigation.

Gaetz’s interest in medical marijuana dates back nearly a decade, when he was a member of the Florida House of Representatives. Well before he would gain national attention for his steadfast support of Donald Trump, Gaetz would carve out an unusual reputation in Tallahassee as a Republican who wanted to liberalize marijuana laws.

In February 2014, Gaetz co-sponsored the first state effort to allow marijuana for medical use. His proposal allowing the use of a nonhallucinogenic marijuana extract was limited to patients with cancer or a severe form of epilepsy and slowly earned the support of his father, Don Gaetz, who was then serving as president of the Florida Senate and said he was “being pummeled” by his son about supporting it.

Gaetz cast his proposal as a pared-down alternative to a statewide ballot measure that would have broadly legalized medical marijuana. Gaetz’s law was approved with broad bipartisan support and signed into law by Republican Gov. Rick Scott in June 2014, while the statewide measure narrowly failed at the ballot box that November.

The day Gaetz’s measure was up for a final debate and vote in the Florida House, both Pirozzolo and Beshears were on the floor.

Beshears was a fellow Republican member of the Legislature who joined Gaetz to support the legislation. Pirozzolo, an Orlando hand doctor and pilot, was there serving as the physician of the day for the lawmakers — a role he would frequently take on by flying his own plane to Tallahassee.

Once the legislation passed, it created lucrative new opportunities for Beshears’ family and Pirozzolo.

The long-standing nursery owned by Beshears’ family was awarded one of five highly coveted licenses to cultivate and dispense medical marijuana.

The legislation was written to specify — and restrict — who could win such a license. An amendment added by another lawmaker in the state House limited the pool of applicants to nurseries that had been in continuous business for 30 years and had an inventory of 400,000 or more plants.

The Beshears family nursery, joining with two other growers, met that standard.

The Tampa Bay Times reported in 2014 that Beshears had failed to file a conflict of interest report when he voted on the bill, and the lawmaker who sponsored the amendment wanted to “err on the side of limiting who could qualify now” when embarking on such a new industry. More licenses have since been awarded, but the industry is still tightly controlled.

Another amendment added to the 2014 legislation the day Pirozzolo watched in the state House required dispensary applicants to employ a doctor as a medical director.

Eight days later, Pirozzolo started a consulting firm connecting marijuana businesses with medical directors, the Orlando Sentinel reported. He later co-founded a group called the American Medical Marijuana Physicians Association, which advocates for doctors who recommend medical cannabis.

Gaetz has spoken at least twice at the association’s annual conferences, including an appearance with longtime Trump confidant Roger Stone, according to the group’s social media posts and the recollections of a member.

With recommendations from Gaetz and Beshears in 2018, Pirozzolo was appointed by the current governor, Republican Ron DeSantis, to serve on a board that runs Orlando International Airport. In 2019, he stood next to DeSantis on an airport tarmac and greeted Trump as he arrived in Orlando to kick off his reelection campaign, according to video posted online by a Sentinel reporter.

Two years after Gaetz’s first medical marijuana law, he sponsored another measure in the Legislature to expand on it, allowing near-death patients to use nonsmokable marijuana of all strengths and doses.

The day it came up for a vote in the state House, Beshears voted for it, and Pirozzolo witnessed it, again serving as the doctor of the day.

By the time Gaetz was in Congress in 2018, he introduced legislation that would increase the number of entities that would conduct cannabis research. The legislation included provisions similar to what Pirozzolo’s group was pushing to also expand research.

Nearly five months later, the men would meet in the Bahamas.

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Balsamo reported from Washington. Associated Press writers Brendan Farrington in Tallahassee, Florida, and Terry Spencer in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, contributed to this report.

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Follow Price on Twitter at twitter.com/michellelprice and Balsamo at https://twitter.com/MikeBalsamo1.

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PIERREFITTE-SUR-SEINE, France (AP) — The man they call “the Captain” runs a tight ship, reaching into his years of military service to inculcate confidence, courage and a love of France in his proteges, youths from poor French suburbs,.

But first they must learn how to wake up on time and brush their teeth, says Nourouddine Abdoulhoussen, a former member of the 8th Marine Infantry Parachute Regiment, who heads an association called Laissez Les Servir (Let Them Serve) with a unique approach to integration.

In his own way, the white-bearded, 53-year-old Abdoulhoussen is working to uplift some of France’s battalions of impoverished youth, often from heavily immigrant housing projects known for unemployment and delinquency, and to restore French values to create “the citizens of tomorrow.”

Abdoulhoussen, a Muslim originally from India, has no sympathy for complainers.

“I, too, have a background,” he said. “I crossed the seas to come here. I lived the problem of integration. I know how it feels to have people stare at you because you behave differently. Or people look at you because you look different.”

A group of young troops snaps to attention on command. They sing the French national anthem, then move to their assigned stations in a gymnasium in Pierrefitte-Sur-Seine, north of Paris. In a minutely calibrated, military-style operation, they prepare and pack at least 400 meals daily for delivery to the poor during Ramadan, the Muslim holy month. Instructions are spelled out in lists on the wall at the gymnasium that is their “command post.”

Around the corner, residents of Les Fauvettes, a decrepit housing project with holes in the walls and mailboxes torn apart, hang from windows awaiting their meals, delivered by a group of Abdoulhoussen’s troops.

During a recent visit, 639 pieces of chicken, cut by the youth, were cooked along with vegetables in huge pots in a tent outside. During the year, the young people take kettles of soup into Paris train stations.

Other values are taught during outside expeditions, including military games in different parts of France. Donning camouflage uniforms, they learn about overcoming challenges in rugged terrain, discipline and working as a team.

“I took drugs, did some pretty stupid things….I had no dreams,” said a 29-year-old originally from Senegal who goes by the nickname Biline. Without the group “I could have ended differently.”

Two years ago, Abdoulhoussen bused 50 youths to the royal domain in Normandy of the pretender to the non-existent French throne for a lesson in etiquette. They sang the “Marseillaise,” the French anthem, to Prince Jean. That visit sparked Rayen Benayed, 19, into becoming a full-time association member, one of about 300 around France.

The more than two dozen youths helping to prepare the Ramadan meals came from backgrounds as mixed as the French suburbs: French-Afghan, Ivory Coast, Senegal, Gabon, Algeria, some born in France, others still hoping for residence papers. Many are students, others are still searching for a foothold in life. One woman who took up boxing to fend off her abusive husband is among the group’s female members.

“I consider myself French,” Biline said, “because I think that becoming French is not just papers. It’s behavior, knowing how to live and also speaking the language….For me, racism is now just ignorant people.”

Abdoulhoussen says the youths must work to overcome both their own bad habits and the rejection that often plagues people with different names, looks or addresses.

“These youth who don’t know how to wake up at 7 a.m.,” he said. “Why do we have to teach youth to brush their teeth?”

He claims the French government wastes time and money by throwing new programs into its troubled suburbs to cure problems. What must be done is “go to the bottom of the project stairwells, wake them up, make them work … to go produce what will make them feel valuable.”

Let Them Serve was founded in 2007 under a different name. It’s annual budget is only 120,000 euros ($144,000), money that comes from donations.

“I want to imprint in their minds, love of country,” he said. “You know, many of these teenagers’ minds are from abroad, so they think this country doesn’t belong to them … We don’t want to break their heritage, their past. We want to make them rich twice.”

Those are lessons learned for Ophelie Voisin, 25, a French-Afghan woman from Amiens, north of Paris. She is proud of her nine years in the association.

“Singing ‘La Marseillaise’ in the morning, it’s not a shame. It’s really a joy,” she said. “We should be proud of that because we’re in France.”

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Nicolas Garriga contributed from Pierrefitte.

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JERUSALEM (AP) — Hundreds of Christian worshippers made use of Israel’s easing of coronavirus restrictions Saturday, packing a Jerusalem church revered as the site of Jesus’ crucifixion and resurrection for an ancient fire ceremony a day before Orthodox Easter.

The faithful gathered at The Church of the Holy Sepulchre, waiting for clergymen to emerge with the Holy Fire from the Edicule, a chamber built on the site where Christians believe Jesus was buried and rose from the dead after being crucified.

Only a few people in the church wore masks, and there was no distancing. Entry was restricted to those who were fully vaccinated.

As bells rang and the top clerics from different Orthodox denominations appeared, the worshippers scrambled to light their candles and pass the fire on. Within a minute, the imposing walls of the old church glowed. The source of the flame is a closely guarded secret.

Greek-Orthodox Patriarch of Jerusalem Theophilos III led the event.

The scene at the church was a stark contrast to last year’s, when only a handful of religious leaders held the centuries-old ceremony in a near-empty setting enforced by the coronavirus pandemic.

Israel has significantly lifted most restrictions, including mask-wearing in public, after a world-leading vaccination drive. However, air travel to the country remains limited and requiring quarantine.

In normal years, Christian holidays, including Christmas and Easter, draw tens of thousands of tourists and pilgrims to holy sites in Jerusalem and Bethlehem.

Many countries will be restricting normal Orthodox Easter celebrations. Neighboring Lebanon for example went into a round-the-clock curfew to curb the spread of coronavirus, from Saturday until Tuesday morning. Churches will be allowed to hold Easter mass and prayers only at 30% capacity, and require special permits.

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MOSCOW (AP) — Russia’s state statistical service says the number of deaths nationwide in the first three months of 2021 was more than 25% higher than the same period a year ago, and it reported thousands more deaths due to COVID-19 in March than tallied by the country’s coronavirus task force.

More than 583,000 people died in January-March of this year in Russia, compared with 460,000 for those months in 2020, the Rosstat agency said in a report issued Friday.

The agency did not provide an explanation for the sharply higher death toll, but critics have suggested that Russian officials underplay the severity of the pandemic in the country.

The national coronavirus task force counted more than 12,300 deaths from COVID-19 in March, but Rosstat gave a substantially higher number. The agency said there were 15,003 deaths that month in which coronavirus was the leading cause, along with 2,454 cases in which COVID-19 was believed to be the leading cause and 1,401 deaths in which COVID-19 influenced other diseases and accelerated death.

According to the task force, throughout the pandemic 110,502 people have died in Russia of COVID-19 as of Saturday — 392 of them in the past day. The country has recorded more than 4.8 million confirmed cases.

Although Russia has boasted of being the first country to authorize a coronavirus vaccine — the Russian-made Sputnik V — the pace of its vaccination program is lagging well behind many other countries.

Only about 8% of Russians have gotten at least one vaccine shot, while 5% have been fully vaccinated. That puts Russia far behind Britain, where 50% of the population has gotten at least one shot; the United States at 43% and the European Union with nearly 27%.

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Follow more of AP’s pandemic coverage at https://apnews.com/hub/coronavirus-pandemic and https://apnews.com/hub/coronavirus-vaccine

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OKLAHOMA CITY (AP) — As the U.S. faces a reckoning over its history of racism, some Native American tribal nations that once owned slaves also are grappling with their own mistreatment of Black people.

When Native American tribes were forced from their ancestral homelands in the southeastern United States to what is now Oklahoma in the 1800s — known as the Trail of Tears — thousands of Black slaves owned by tribal members also were removed and forced to provide manual labor along the way. Once in Oklahoma, slaves often toiled on plantation-style farms or were servants in tribal members’ homes.

Nearly 200 years later, many of the thousands of descendants of those Black slaves, known as Freedmen, are still fighting to be recognized by the tribes that once owned their ancestors. The fight has continued since the killing of George Floyd last year by a Minneapolis police officer spurred a reexamination of the vestiges of slavery in the U.S.

CHEROKEE NATION FREEDMEN

The Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Muscogee (Creek) and Seminole nations were referred to historically as the Five Civilized Tribes, or Five Tribes, by European settlers because they often assimilated into the settlers’ culture, adopting their style of dress and religion, and even owning slaves. Each tribe also has a unique history with Freedmen, whose rights were ultimately spelled out in separate treaties with the U.S.

Today, the Cherokee Nation is the only tribe that fully recognizes the Freedmen as full citizens, a decision that came in 2017 following years of legal wrangling.

“I think that we are a better tribe for having not only embraced the federal court decision but embraced the concept of equality,” said Cherokee Nation Chief Chuck Hoskin Jr., a longtime supporter of citizenship rights for the Freedmen.

The Cherokee Nation, among the largest Native American tribes, has about 5,800 Freedmen citizens who have traced an ancestor on the tribe’s original Freedmen rolls in the late 19th century.

When the federal government sought to break up tribal reservations into individual allotments after the Civil War, they created two separate tribal rolls — one for members with American Indian blood and one for Freedmen. In many cases, tribal citizens who appeared Black were placed on the Freedmen rolls, even if they had blood ties to the tribe.

Of the Five Tribes, only the Chickasaw Nation never agreed to adopt the Freedmen as citizens, according to the Oklahoma Historical Society.

SEMINOLE NATION CONTROVERSY

The Wewoka-based Seminole Nation in particular faces fierce criticism after several Black tribal citizens were denied COVID-19 vaccines at a federally operated American Indian health clinic.

LeEtta Sampson-Osborn, a Seminole Freedman who has a tribal identification card and serves on the tribe’s governing council, said she sought a vaccine in February at a clinic operated by the Indian Health Service, an agency within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. She said a worker told her the Seminole Nation doesn’t recognize Freedmen for health services. When she asked for additional explanation, the worker called over a tribal police officer, she said.

“So, I left,” said Osborne-Sampson. “Even the worst person would try to help when there’s a pandemic all over the world, but they don’t care about the Freedmen. I feel like they want us to die.”

Three other Seminole Freedmen shared similar experiences with The Associated Press about the same clinic.

The Seminole Nation says the decision about whether to provide vaccines to Seminole Freedmen rests with the IHS, not the tribe.

“To be clear, the Seminole Nation does not operate the Wewoka Indian Health Services clinic, has absolutely no policy oversight and was in no way involved with administering COVID-19 vaccines,” Seminole Nation Chief Greg Chilcoat said in a statement.

The agency said in a statement that it was reviewing eligibility of Seminole Freedmen and will be working with the tribe to determine what services IHS will provide.

FIGHTING FOR CITIZENSHIP

Seminole Freedmen say they are unable to receive services other tribal citizens get, including health care, tribal license plates and housing subsidies. The Seminole Freedmen have been fighting for years to be recognized as full tribal citizens in legal battles that underscore the systemic racism that Freedmen from all Oklahoma-based tribes say they have experienced from tribal governments and their members.

Many Seminole Freedmen are descendants of freed Black slaves who joined the Seminoles in Florida during their wars against the U.S. government.

“We fought in three wars with them to get where we’re at, and now they’ve turned against us,” said Anthony Conley, who also said he was denied a vaccine at the clinic.

Conley said he believes racism and an unwillingness of tribal citizens to share tribal funds is at the core of the tribe’s decision to exclude Freedmen from full citizenship, a claim that Chilcoat disputes.

TRIBAL SOVEREIGNTY

The Muscogee (Creek) and Choctaw nations have cited tribal sovereignty as reasons for their opposition to citizenship for Freedmen. When Democratic U.S. Rep. Maxine Waters of California last year attempted to force the tribes to reconcile the Freedmen issue by inserting language into a housing bill, Choctaw Nation Chief Gary Batton said the U.S. government is responsible for the Freedmen’s plight, not the Choctaw Nation.

“There is no more fundamental element of tribal self-governance than the authority of a Tribe like the Choctaw Nation to determine our own citizenship,” Batton wrote in a letter to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

Ultimately, it might be a decision for the federal courts to make. Osborne-Sampson said she and other Freedmen are consulting with an attorney on how to proceed.

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