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Girl Scout troop disbands after parent chapter blocks Palestine fundraiser
At the height of cookie season, a time when Girl Scouts across America fundraise by selling their famous Thin Mints, Caramel deLites and shortbread, one troop in Missouri wasn’t in the mood.
Instead, the eight girls of Troop 149 decided to make and sell bracelets, and donate the proceeds to a cause they felt was more urgent than their own: the Palestine Children’s Relief Fund. As the violent siege in Gaza rages on with more than 30,000 killed, many of whom are children, troop leader Nawal Abuhamdeh agreed to the girls’ wishes.
“At every meeting, they would just ask me about making bracelets, so I knew it meant something to them and that they felt so passionate about it,” said Abuhamdeh, whose daughter Mariyah is also in the troop. “They were so excited. They felt, like many of us, helpless just watching from a screen.”
But soon after the St Louis-based troop announced their plans, they received a fierce response from their parent chapter, Girl Scouts of eastern Missouri. The message was clear: Girl Scouts did not participate in political and partisan activities.
“Girl Scouts of Eastern Missouri and Girl Scouts of the United States have no other choice than to engage our legal counsel to help remedy this situation and to protect the intellectual property and other rights of the organization,” the organization wrote.
The response was surprising to Abuhamdeh, who recalled other Girl Scout troops organizing to help families in Ukraine after Russia invaded in February 2022. According to the Girl Scouts website, a troop in Westlake, Ohio collected medical supplies and pack first-aid kits to be distributed in Ukraine, and “also exchanged small gifts like friendship bracelets and cookies”.
Their efforts were rewarded with the Girl Scout Bronze Award, one of the organization’s highest recognitions.
Abuhamdeh, who is Palestinian, said the stark contrast in response to her own troop’s similar effort was “hurtful”, and a triggering reminder of feeling excluded as a child because of her identity.
“I said, ‘I’m very disappointed that you would deem this as a humanitarian crisis as a political and partisan activity.’ I wanted them to be empathetic to what we were trying to do, instead of trying to slap our hand,” she said.
Faced with the difficult decision to either stop selling the bracelets or to disband from Girl Scouts entirely, Abuhamdeh left the choice up to the girls.
“They stayed quiet for a while, and their first question to me was ‘Well, what’s our group name gonna be?’” Abuhamdeh said. “It wasn’t a hard decision for them.
“It brought back emotions that I felt as a kid – like trying to be silenced or suppressed and told that my identity is political,” she added. “I didn’t really have anyone advocating for me, so I wanted to be the leader for them that could advocate for them – and tell them that they matter, and noble causes that they support matter.
“That was really one of the main reasons we disbanded. We have some important work to do and we’re not going to jeopardize our values.”
The support they did not find within Girl Scouts, Abuhamdeh said they found within their community in St Louis. On Saturday more than 200 people gathered in the community center of the Dar Al Jalal Mosque to help the girls make thousands of bracelets – using red, green, black and white beads to spell “Palestine” or “Gaza”. Together, they raised more than $20,000 for Palestinian children through the PCRF.
“It feels so heartwarming to know how many people are in solidarity with us who say ‘We’re here with you, we’re here with Gaza and we’re here with Palestine,’” she said.
The incident caught the attention of the Council on American Islamic Relations (Cair), who wrote directly to Girl Scouts of the USA for an explanation.
In response, Bonnie Barczykowski, the Girl Scouts’ chief executive, said it was “disappointed and disheartened by what recently transpired” and “we recognize that greater clarity and additional education is needed regarding our Girl Scout fundraising policies”.
Barczykowski added: “This is a learning moment for our organization as we realize we can always do better. We know we should always lead with empathy and recognize the incredible need for kindness and compassion during this difficult time.
“We are also deeply committed to advancing belonging, inclusion, and anti-racism as an organization and within our membership, and we will continue to ensure that we address all communities, including the Muslim and Arab communities.
“GSUSA will be working alongside our council partners to review this incident and make the necessary adjustments to prevent it from happening in the future. We realize we missed an opportunity to champion our troops while they make a difference.”
Cair said it welcomed the response as a “positive first step”, as did Abuhamdeh – although the now-disbanded Troop 149 has as yet received no direct apology.
“People make mistakes,” Abuhamdeh said. “We make mistakes. That’s how organizations and people get it better. It would be nice to hear from them, but at this point, it’s been so long.”
What’s more important to her is that “the girls found a voice in themselves. So in a way, this has been like a blessing in disguise for them. It’s something they will never forget. And I hope that it inspires them to always use their voice for good.”
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Crew members safely eject after Navy jets collide during Idaho air show
BOISE, Idaho (AP) — Four crew members ejected safely after two Navy jets collided Sunday at an air show in Idaho, a show organizer said.
Emergency crews responded after the two planes collided during the show at the Mountain Home Air Force Base in western Idaho.
All four of the crew members from the planes ejected safely, said Kim Sykes, marketing director with Silver Wings of Idaho, which helped to plan the air show. Sykes said the crash occurred off base and she did not see the crash but saw the smoke afterward.
The base said in a social media post that it was locked down following the incident during the Gunfighter Skies Air Show. Responders were on the scene and an investigation was underway.
READ MORE: Navy loses two aircraft from USS Nimitz aircraft carrier within 30 minutes
Multiple witnesses reported two planes collided and crashed, and videos posted online showed four parachutes opening in the sky as the aircraft plummet to the ground near the base about 50 miles (80 kilometers) south of Boise.
No other information was immediately available, said a person who answered the phone at the 366th Fighter Wing public affairs office.
Organizers said the popular air show that includes flying demonstrations and parachute jumps is a celebration of aviation history and a look at modern military capabilities. The U.S. Air Force Thunderbirds headlined the show both days.
The National Weather Service reported good visibility and winds gusting up to 29 mph (47 kph) around the time of the crash.
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Bus riders to Montgomery retrace old steps while fighting a new fight
A man sings a spirtual song during a voting rally, Saturday, May 16, 2026, in Montgomery, Ala.
Mike Stewart/AP
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Mike Stewart/AP
MONTGOMERY, Ala.— In 1965, Black Americans peacefully demonstrated for voting rights and were beaten by Alabama state troopers before returning two weeks later to complete their march under federal protection. Keith Odom was a toddler then.
Now 62 years old, the union man and grandfather of three retraced some of their final steps. On Saturday, he came from Aiken, South Carolina, to Atlanta, where he joined several dozen other activists on two buses to Montgomery, Alabama. A few hours later, he stepped off his bus and onto Dexter Avenue, where the original march concluded.
“The history here — being a part of it, seeing it, feeling it,” said Odom, who is Black.

His voice trailed off as he saw the Alabama Capitol and a stage that sat roughly where the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. concluded the original march.
Odom lamented that he and his fellow bus riders were not simply commemorating that seminal day in the Civil Rights Movement. Instead they came to renew the fight. The 1965 effort helped push Congress to send the Voting Rights Act to Democratic President Lyndon B. Johnson to sign, securing and expanding political power for Black and other nonwhite voters for more than a half-century.
Saturday’s “All Roads Lead to the South” rally was the first mass organizing response after a U.S. Supreme Court ruling that severely diminished that landmark law. Striking down a majority Black congressional district in Louisiana, the justices concluded in a 6-3 ruling that considering race when drawing political lines is in itself discriminatory. That spurred multiple states, including Alabama, to redraw U.S. House districts in ways that make it harder for Black voters, who lean overwhelmingly Democratic, to elect lawmakers of their choice.
“I’m not trying to live a life that’s going backwards,” Odom said. “I want to go forward, for my grandchildren to be able to go forward.”
Keith Odom, a forklift driver from Aiken, S.C., looks out from his bus seat as he arrives in Montgomery, Ala., for a voting rights rally Saturday, May 16, 2026.
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Bill Barrow/AP
An old political battle is new again
The passenger rosters and the scene when riders arrived in Montgomery sounded the echoes and rhymes of past and present.
“I talked to my grandmother before I came, and she was so excited,” said Justice Washington, a Kennesaw State University student named because her mother and grandmother had faith in the American system. “My grandmother told me she did her part, and now it’s time for me to do mine.”
No one on the Atlanta buses had reached voting age when the Voting Rights Act became law. The youngest attendee was born as Democrat Barack Obama was elected the first Black president in 2008.
Kobe Chernushin is 18, white and just graduated high school in Atlanta’s northern suburbs. He is an organizer with the Georgia Youth Justice Coalition and spent the day filming Khayla Doby, a 29-year-old executive for the organization, doing standups for the group’s followers on social media.
“I believe in the power of showing up,” he said.

The buses launched from the congressional district in Georgia once represented by John Lewis, bloodied on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, when he was 25. Lewis died in 2020, but some on the buses Saturday celebrated that a proposed federal election overhaul is named for him. If some Democrats get their way, the bill would override the U.S. Supreme Court, reinvigorate the Voting Rights Act and outlaw the kind of gerrymandering competition that Republican President Donald Trump has instigated.
“I’m here because of the same forces that pulled on John Lewis when he was a student,” said Darrin Owens, 27. He has worked for former Vice President Kamala Harris and now trains Democratic candidates.
“Political activism is personal,” Owens said, explaining that he attended Saturday as a citizen, not a political professional. “Sometimes those lines are blurred, and as a Black person in America, a Black person living in a Southern state, I’m committed to action that stops what I consider to be un-American, this possibility that the person who represents me is someone who is not from my community and does not understand me or my community.”
When he arrived, Owens saw no federal authorities on Montgomery’s streets. A wounded, recovering Lewis did during the second march in 1965.
This time many of the Alabama troopers and local officers who walked the area were Black.
The buses and sandwich lunches had been arranged by Fair Fight Action, a legacy of the political network built by Georgia Democrat Stacey Abrams, who became a national figure in her unsuccessful runs in 2018 and 2022 to become the first Black woman elected governor in U.S. history. No Black woman has yet achieved that feat.
Bee Nguyen, left, talks to Carole Burton, center, and Tondalaire Ashford at a voting rights rally Saturday, May 16, 2026, in Montgomery, Ala.
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Different generations share their stories
At different points, Montgomery has branded itself as the cradle of the Confederacy and the cradle of the modern Civil Rights Movement.
“It feels like our country is stuck in this pattern of making progress, then there’s a huge backlash, and then people have to go through the same battle again just to get to where we were,” said Phi Nguyen, the 41-year-old daughter of Vietnamese refugees. She is now a civil rights lawyer in Atlanta.
She stood across from the church where a young King led the Montgomery Bus Boycott in 1955 and not far from where Jefferson Davis took the oath of office in 1861 as the slavery-defending Confederate president.
Nguyen and her sister Bee, a 44-year-old who served in the Georgia General Assembly and ran for statewide office, met two other women as they walked. Carole Burton and Tondalaire Ashford are 72-year-old Montgomery residents who have been friends since they were in a segregated junior high school and then newly desegregated Sidney Lanier High School.
“I don’t call it ‘integration,’” Ashford said, pointing at her dark skin. “It was never real integration, and it’s not like we can ever just blend in.”
Burton described them as being “in the second wave” of Black students. “It wasn’t easy,” she said. “And we had to support each other.”
They remember their parents not being able to vote in the era of poll taxes, literacy tests and other racist restrictions that the Voting Rights Act eventually outlawed. But they smiled as they swapped family histories with the Nguyens.
Burton said immigrants, descendants of enslaved persons and Native Americans have different but overlapping paths. “We just want to be treated like people with the same rights and opportunities the country has promised us,” she said. “They’ve never fully lived up to it.”
Aaron McGuire sings a spirtual song during a voting rally, Saturday, May 16, 2026, in Montgomery, Ala.
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Conflicting legacies are at stake
To Odom, who had begun his journey Saturday in South Carolina, the current U.S. Supreme Court reinforced that history by refusing to see some race-conscious election policy as a way to ensure fair representation, not simply the “technical right to vote.”
He recalls decades of his life being represented by Strom Thurmond, a segregationist Democratic governor who became a “Dixiecrat” presidential candidate and U.S. senator — by now as a Republican — into the 21st century. Odom said he fears his state losing U.S. Rep. Jim Clyburn, a senior member of the Congressional Black Caucus, through redistricting.
“They want to take away that legacy when we’re still living with Strom’s?” Odom said.
Odom said he is also worried that the young people who participated Saturday are not a vanguard but outliers.
“I was talking to a 20-year-old co-worker about this trip,” he said. “She told me she supported me but didn’t want to do it or work for anybody” running for office. “She wondered what any of them are going to do for her.”
Nonetheless, he said on the way home, “I’m still going to tell her what I saw and what I heard.”
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Louisiana Sen. Bill Cassidy loses in Republican primary, does not advance to runoff
One observer of the current Senate race in Louisiana noted that Sen. Bill Cassidy could lose his reelection bid.
Annie Flanagan for NPR
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Annie Flanagan for NPR
Sen. Bill Cassidy lost Saturday’s Louisiana Republican primary according to a race call by the Associated Press.
Cassidy, who served two terms in the Senate, was one of seven Republican senators who voted to convict President Trump after the January 6th insurrection at the Capitol. That vote put him at odds with Trump and his MAGA coalition, ultimately leading Trump to push Rep. Julia Letlow to run against Cassidy.
Cassidy’s bid for a third term was viewed as a test of Trump’s grip on the party–and of what voters want from their representatives in Washington. The primary pitted Cassidy, a veteran lawmaker, former physician and chair of the powerful Senate health committee, against Letlow, a political newcomer and a millennial MAGA loyalist.
A detailed view of a hat that reads, Run Julia Run, is seen at a campaign event for Rep. Julia Letlow (R-LA) on May 6, 2026 in Franklinton, Louisiana.
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A former college administrator, Letlow won a special election in 2021 for the House seat her late husband, Luke, was set to assume before he died from COVID in 2020.
In Congress, Letlow sponsored a bill to collect oral histories from the pandemic and has focused on education and children. She introduced the “Parents Bill of Rights Act,” which would allow parents to review classroom materials like library books and require schools to notify parents if their child requests different pronouns, locker rooms or sports teams.
She also serves on the powerful appropriations committee and has embraced Trump’s agenda.
Letlow, who came first in Saturday’s primary, will face Louisiana state Treasurer John Fleming in the runoff on June 27. Cassidy came in third.
The election result is a victory for President Trump who has put Republican loyalty to the test on the ballot so far this year in Indiana state senate primaries and in Cassidy’s race.
Another major test of Trump’s influence comes in Kentucky’s primary on Tuesday when Republican Rep. Thomas Massie, who has found himself at odds with the president, faces a challenger endorsed by Trump.
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