The U.S. Navy has exonerated 256 Black sailors found to be unjustly punished in 1944 following a California port explosion that killed hundreds of service members and exposed racist double standards among the then-segregated ranks. At Port Chicago naval weapons station near San Francisco, 5,000 tons of munitions detonated, killing 320 personnel and injuring 390. Black sailors concerned for their safety refused to return to loading bombs without training on how to safely handle the munitions. The Navy punished them. Now, Navy Secretary Carlos Del Toro has signed paperwork saying the sailors were unjustly tried and convicted, clearing their names. Del Toro signed the paperwork Wednesday, the 80th anniversary of the disaster.
By LORI HINNANT, VASILISA STEPANENKO and HANNA ARHIROVA Associated Press
Russia is intensifying its use of cheap glide bombs to lay waste to cities in eastern Ukraine. The latest generation of the retrofitted weapons have devastated Kharkiv, Avdiivka, Chasiv Yar and Vovchansk. Russia has nearly unlimited supplies of the bombs, which are adapted from Soviet-era stockpiles. They are dispatched from airfields just across the border that Ukraine has not been able to hit. An Associated Press analysis of drone footage, satellite imagery, Ukrainian documents and Russian photos shows that Russia has used the explosives to accelerate its destruction of front-line cities this year on a scale previously unseen in the war.
