10 things you need to know today: May 3, 2023

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1. Sudan's rival factions agree to longer cease-fire
2. Biden sends 1,500 troops to border to help handle expected migrant surge
3. Texas fugitive accused of killing 5 neighbors found hiding in closet
4. Palestinian prisoner dies after hunger strike, igniting violence
5. Ex-Minneapolis cop Tou Thao convicted of aiding manslaughter in George Floyd's death
6. Report: Text triggered panic that led Fox to oust Tucker Carlson
7. Friend says E. Jean Carroll called 5 minutes after alleged 1996 rape by Trump
8. 7 bodies found in search for 2 teens missing in Oklahoma
9. Job openings drop for 3rd straight month
10. Late-night shows go dark as writers' strike begins

published 3 May 2023

1. Sudan's rival factions agree to longer cease-fire

Sudan's warring military factions have reached a deal on a new seven-day ceasefire from Thursday, mediator South Sudan said Tuesday. The agreement was longer than previous cease-fires, which have ranged from 24 to 72 hours and been violated frequently by both sides. The fighting erupted in mid-April and has left civilians trapped in the capital, Khartoum. South Sudan's foreign ministry said both sides had agreed to the week-long truce as the previous three-day deal was set to expire on Wednesday. Under the new agreement, the rival factions of army chief General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan and paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) leader General Mohamed Hamdan Dagaloto also agreed to name envoys for peace talks, South Sudan said.

The Biden administration is sending 1,500 active-duty troops to the southern border to help immigration authorities handle a potential surge of migrants seeking entry into the United States as the Title 42 pandemic-era migration restrictions expire on May 11, Fox News reported Tuesday. The deployment is scheduled to last 90 days, CBS News reported Tuesday, citing a U.S. official. The soldiers won't detain or process migrants, or perform any law enforcement jobs. They will help with such duties as transportation and data entry. President Biden authorized the Defense Department to assist the Homeland Security Department on an emergency basis to fight drug trafficking.

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Police arrested Francisco Oropesa, the man accused of killing five of his neighbors with an AR-15 rifle, in the city of Cut and Shoot, Texas, on Tuesday, ending a four-day search. A tip to an FBI line led investigators to a house where they found Oropesa, 38. "He was caught hiding in a closet underneath some laundry," San Jacinto County Sheriff Greg Capers said. Oropesa is accused of gunning down five people, including a 9-year-old boy, in their Cleveland, Texas, home on Friday after a member of the family asked him to stop firing his rifle outside because a baby was trying to sleep. Oropesa faces five murder charges and is being held on $5 million bond, Capers said.

Palestinian militants fired 26 rockets into Israel from the Gaza Strip on Tuesday after Khader Adnan, a former Islamic Jihad spokesperson arrested in February on suspicion of terrorism, died after an 87-day hunger strike to protest his detention. Palestinian officials called his death a "deliberate assassination" and vowed reprisals. Israel, which said Adnan had refused medical care, directed tank fire and airstrikes at sites linked to Hamas, the Islamic militant group that runs the Gaza Strip. "He decided to go on hunger strike and he refused any medical examination and any medical treatment," said Hana Herbst, a spokesperson for the Israel Prison Service. "We couldn't have done anything different other than forcing him to take medical treatment, which we can't do."

A Minnesota judge on Tuesday found ex-Minneapolis police officer Tou Thao guilty of aiding and abetting manslaughter in the 2020 death of George Floyd. Thao kept back concerned bystanders while another officer, Derek Chauvin, pressed his knee onto Floyd's neck until he lost consciousness and died. "Thao, Chauvin's partner on that night, was an experienced Minneapolis police officer with almost a decade's experience. He knew that the officers' prone restraint could kill," Hennepin County District Judge Peter Cahill wrote. The death of Floyd, an unarmed Black man detained on suspicion of using a counterfeit $20 bill in a convenience store, fueled protests against police brutality against Black suspects. Thao's sentencing is scheduled for August.

A single text message from Tucker Carlson ignited a panic among Fox News executives that led to his firing, The New York Times reported Tuesday. In the message, which could have come out in the company's billion-dollar defamation trial over false election-fraud allegations against Dominion Voting Systems, Carlson told a producer about a video showing three men beating "an Antifa kid." Carlson noted that the men were white, and he expressed dismay that they ganged up on one man. "Jumping a guy like that is dishonorable obviously," he wrote. "It's not how white men fight." Carlson had espoused white nationalist views on his top-rated show, and Fox's board worried it could damage the network to have him appear in the trial, the Times said.

Author Lisa Birnbach testified Tuesday that her friend E. Jean Carroll called her about five minutes after Carroll said she was raped by former President Donald Trump in a dressing room at a Bergdorf Goodman department store in Manhattan in 1996. Birnbach, co-author of The Official Preppy Handbook, said Carroll, then an Elle advice columnist, sounded "breathless, hyperventilating, emotional." "She said, 'Lisa, you're not going to believe what happened to me,'" then gave an account of the incident that has remained consistent. Carroll is suing Trump for defamation, because he vehemently denied her allegation, saying she was "totally lying" after her account appeared as an excerpt of her book in New York magazine. Another accuser told the court Trump groped her on a 1970s airline flight.

Investigators found seven bodies at the home of a convicted sex offender this week. Authorities said Tuesday they believed the 39-year-old sex offender, Jesse McFadden, was one of those found dead. Two missing teenage girls — 14-year-old Ivy Webster and 16-year-old Brittany Brewer — who were last seen with McFadden, also were believed to be among the dead, Okmulgee County Sheriff Eddy Rice said. The medical examiner had not yet confirmed the identities of the bodies. The Oklahoma Highway Patrol had issued an endangered/missing advisory on the teens, who were last seen early Monday. They might have been traveling with McFadden. Janette Mayo said her daughter, who was married to McFadden, and three teenage grandchildren were among the dead.

U.S. job openings dropped to 9.6 million in March from 10 million in February, the third straight monthly drop, the Labor Department reported Tuesday. Layoffs increased to 1.8 million, the highest level since December 2020. The data added to signs that the labor market is softening as the Federal Reserve aggressively raises interest rates to fight inflation and businesses, bracing for a possible recession, desperately cut costs, often by trimming staff. Despite the changes, the job market remains tighter than normal, with 1.6 vacancies per unemployed person in March, although that's down from 1.7 in February and the lowest reading since October 2021.

Late-night shows will start running repeats immediately in early fallout from the Writers Guild of America strike that started Tuesday, The New York Times reported, citing people briefed with the plans. The shows going dark include The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, The Late Show With Stephen Colbert, Jimmy Kimmel Live!, Late Night With Seth Meyers, Comedy Central's The Daily Show, and HBO's programs hosted by John Oliver and Bill Maher. The writers are demanding more pay and a bigger share of residuals, which have fallen as TV production grew but streaming overshadowed broadcast TV. It wasn't immediately clear how long the shows would stay off the air. They gradually returned about two months into the last strike, in 2007.

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Harold Maass is a contributing editor at The Week. He has been writing for The Week since the 2001 debut of the U.S. print edition and served as editor of TheWeek.com when it launched in 2008. Harold started his career as a newspaper reporter in South Florida and Haiti. He has previously worked for a variety of news outlets, including The Miami Herald, ABC News and Fox News, and for several years wrote a daily roundup of financial news for The Week and Yahoo Finance.