AP News in Brief at 6:04 p.m. EDT
Governors feel heat to reopen from protesters, president
AUSTIN, Texas (AP) — Stores in Texas can soon begin selling merchandise with curbside service, and hospitals can resume nonessential surgeries. In Florida, people are returning to a few beaches and parks. And protesters are clamoring for more.
Governors eager to rescue their economies and feeling heat from President Donald Trump are moving to ease restrictions meant to control the spread of the coronavirus, even as new hot spots emerge and experts warn that moving too fast could prove disastrous.
Adding to the pressure are protests against stay-at-home orders organized by small-government groups and Trump supporters. They staged demonstrations Saturday in several cities after the president urged them to “liberate” three states led by Democratic governors.
Protests happened in Republican-led states, too, including at the Texas Capitol and in front of the Indiana governor's home. Republican Texas Gov. Greg Abbott already said that restrictions will begin easing next week. Indiana Gov. Eric Holcomb — who signed an agreement with six other Midwestern states to coordinate reopening — said he would extend his stay-at-home order until May 1.
For the first time in weeks, people were able to visit some Florida beaches, but they were still subject to restrictions on hours and activities. Beaches in big cities stayed closed.
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In nod to normalcy, Pence celebrates Air Force Academy grads
AIR FORCE ACADEMY, Colo. (AP) — In a symbolic nod to normalcy, Vice President Mike Pence delivered a commencement address to the U.S. Air Force Academy's graduating class on Saturday, telling the cadets that by setting off on their mission to defend the nation they “inspire confidence that we will prevail against the invisible enemy in our time as well.”
Pence's trip, only his second outside Washington in the last six weeks, was aimed at showing that the country is on course to gradually reopening after weeks of the coronavirus shutdown.
He spoke at a scaled-down ceremony at the academy outside Colorado Springs, where hundreds of graduating cadets in blue and white dress uniforms sat eight feet apart, taking up an area nearly as large as a football field.
“I know we gather at a time of great challenge in the life of our nation,” Pence said as he began his remarks. “And while we don’t quite look like the usual graduation at the Air Force Academy, let me tell you, this is an awesome sight. And I wouldn’t be anywhere else but with the 62nd class of the Air Force Academy, the class of 2020.”
The event usually attracts a big crowd to Falcon Stadium, which has a maximum capacity of more than 46,000. President Donald Trump spoke last year. But this year, the pandemic forced the academy to close the ceremony to visitors, including friends and family of the nearly 1,000 graduates.
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The week that was: Stories from the coronavirus saga
The pressure is on to reopen America for business — even as the hardest hit areas in the United States and around the world are still struggling mightily to contain the coronavirus.
The debate over easing lockdowns has taken on partisan tones in the United States, with Republican President Donald Trump urging supporters to “liberate” three states led by Democratic governors.
But the crisis is still surging.
In Africa, lockdowns to slow the spread of the coronavirus may be having an unintended effect — choking the continent's already vulnerable food supply. In Spain, where the virus has killed nearly 19,000 people, the AP followed how one funeral home is coping with the disaster.
And China, where the pandemic originated, provides something of a case study for how hard it may be to get economies going again even when things do start to reopen. Worries about losing jobs or getting sick have left workers there wary of spending much or even going out at all.
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Fear meets fortitude in Peru hospital hard hit by COVID-19
LIMA, Peru (AP) — Seated in a wheelchair at one of Peru's oldest hospitals, 84-year-old Emma Salvador struggled for each breath, aided by an oxygen mask pinching her face. Her son fanned her with folded sheets of paper, wishing he could do more.
“Seeing her in such pain is what overwhelms me,” said José Gonzalez, 57, who confessed fearing that the worst outcome awaited his mother, while encouraging her to drink some water.
This scene Friday at the Dos de Mayo Hospital in Lima depicts just one of the 13,489 new coronavirus cases in the South American country, which faces a growing number of patients desperate for emergency attention.
Doctors say they're doing all they can to treat patients throughout the country that's reporting the second largest number of coronavirus cases in Latin America following Brazil, which has more than double the number. Decades of economic growth in Peru did not include extensive investments in the health system.
Founded in 1875, the Dos de Mayo hospital has long been the preferred choice of medical students eager to gain experience treating a wide spectrum of illnesses. It's no different now, with tents recently set up on a patio to care for roughly 100 patients a day — including criminals hospitalized under police supervision.
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Former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill dies at age 84
Paul O’Neill, a former Treasury secretary who broke with George W. Bush over tax policy and then produced a book critical of the administration, died Saturday. He was 84.
O’Neill’s son, Paul O’Neill Jr. confirmed that his father died at his home in Pittsburgh after battling lung cancer for the last couple of years. After a few surgeries and chemotherapy, he decided against any further intervention four or five months ago, he said.
“There was some family here and he died peacefully,” the son said. “Based on his situation, it was a good exit.”
A former head of aluminum giant Alcoa, O’Neill served as Treasury secretary from 2001 to late 2002. He was forced to resign after he objected to a second round of tax cuts because of their impact on deficits.
O’Neill’s blunt speaking style more than once got him in trouble as Treasury secretary. He sent the dollar into a tailspin briefly in his early days at Treasury when his comments about foreign exchange rates surprised markets. In the spring of 2001, O’Neill jolted markets again when during Wall Street’s worst week in 11 years, he blandly declared “markets go up and markets go down.”
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Trump team targets Democratic advantage with people of color
For the majority of people of color who believe Donald Trump is a racist unworthy of reelection, the Republican president can point to Alice Marie Johnson.
The 64-year-old African American great-grandmother spent 21 years in prison for a nonviolent drug offense before Trump commuted her sentence in 2018. She then became the unwitting star of his reelection campaign’s $10-million Super Bowl ad, which featured footage of Johnson's emotional release from prison as she praised “Donald John Trump.”
“I’m an African American woman and he signed my paper. How could I turn around and say he’s a racist?” Johnson said in an interview this past week. “I believe in judging people by the things that they’ve done.”
As the next phase of the 2020 presidential campaign begins, Trump's team is betting that his actions, more than his words, on issues such as criminal justice, education and abortion will allow him to chip away at the Democrats' overwhelming advantage with African Americans, Latinos and women.
The high-stakes effort is backed by tens of millions of dollars, an expansive field program and a sophisticated digital operation aimed at peeling away even a narrow slice of the voters who make up the backbone of the Democratic Party's political base.
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Racial toll of virus grows even starker as more data emerges
As a clearer picture emerges of COVID-19’s decidedly deadly toll on black Americans, leaders are demanding a reckoning of the systemic policies they say have made many African Americans far more vulnerable to the virus, including inequity in access to health care and economic opportunity.
A growing chorus of medical professionals, activists and political figures is pressuring the federal government to not just release comprehensive racial demographic data of the country’s coronavirus victims, but also to outline clear strategies to blunt the devastation on African Americans and other communities of color.
On Friday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released its first breakdown of COVID-19 case data by race, showing that 30% of patients whose race was known were black. The federal data was missing racial information for 75% of all cases, however, and did not include any demographic breakdown of deaths.
The latest Associated Press analysis of available state and local data shows that nearly one-third of those who have died are African American, with black people representing about 14% of the population in the areas covered in the analysis.
Roughly half the states, representing less than a fifth of the nation's COVID-19 deaths, have yet to release demographic data on fatalities. In states that have, about a quarter of the death records are missing racial details.
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Lacking US coordination, states team up on when to reopen
President Donald Trump, in a roller-coaster week of reversals and contradictions, told governors to “call your own shots” on lifting stay-at-home orders once the coronavirus threat subsides. But then he took to Twitter to push some to reopen their economies quickly and tell them it was their job to ramp up testing.
“This is mayhem,” New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo said Friday. “We need a coordinated approach between the federal government and the states.”
In the absence of one, Cuomo and sixteen other governors representing half the nation's population have organized three separate clusters of states each committed to working together on the details of relaunching businesses, schools and events while avoiding a resurgence of infections.
The pacts have formed among states mostly with Democratic governors on the West Coast, around the Great Lakes and in the densely populated Northeast, covering several big metropolitan areas that cross state lines, including New York, Chicago and Philadelphia.
With commuters using interconnected trains in the Northeast and family connections, vacation travel and tech hubs linking the West Coast states, California Gov. Gavin Newsom says the teamwork recognizes “that this pandemic virus knows no boundaries, knows no borders, you can’t build walls around it, and you can’t deny basic fundamental facts.”
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10 years after BP spill: Oil drilled deeper; rules relaxed
NEW ORLEANS (AP) — Ten years after an oil rig explosion killed 11 workers and unleashed an environmental nightmare in the Gulf of Mexico, companies are drilling into deeper and deeper waters, where the payoffs can be huge but the risks are greater than ever.
Industry leaders and government officials say they’re determined to prevent a repeat of BP’s Deepwater Horizon disaster. It spilled 134 million gallons of oil that fouled beaches from Louisiana to Florida, killed hundreds of thousands of marine animals and devastated the region’s tourist economy.
Yet safety rules adopted in the spill’s aftermath have been eased as part of President Donald Trump’s drive to boost U.S. oil production. And government data reviewed by The Associated Press shows the number of safety inspection visits has declined in recent years, although officials say checks of electronic records, safety systems and individual oil rig components have increased.
Today companies are increasingly reliant on production from deeper and inherently more dangerous oil reserves, where drill crews can grapple with ultra-high pressures and oil temperatures that can top 350 degrees (177 degrees Celsius).
Despite almost $2 billion in spending by the industry on equipment to respond to an oil well blowout like BP’s, some scientists, former government officials and environmentalists say safety practices appear to be eroding. And there are worries that cleanup tactics have changed little in decades and are likely to prove as ineffective as they were in 2010.
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Kesha, Andra Day kick off all-star event fighting COVID-19
NEW YORK (AP) — R&B singer Andra Day performed her inspirational anthem “Rise Up,” former One Direction member Niall Horan thanked health care workers and teachers, and pop star Kesha played piano while singing positive lyrics to kick off an all-star event aimed at fighting the coronavirus pandemic.
Matthew McConaughey, Jack Black, Heidi Klum, Jason Segel, Tim Gunn, Matthew Bomer and Jameela Jamil also made appearances in the first hour of “One World: Together At Home,” an eight-hour event broken in two formats: A six-hour stream which began at 2 p.m. EDT, followed by a two-hour TV special at 8 p.m. featuring Lady Gaga, The Rolling Stones, Paul McCartney, Stevie Wonder, Taylor Swift, Oprah Winfrey and Billie Eilish.
“It’s Kesha from quarantine day 500. I miss my fans so much,” the singer said, sitting in front of her fireplace as her cat made noises in the background. “I know that there’s so many people working and not sleeping and sacrificing so much to help figure this out for everyone and I just think the vulnerability of us all as human beings right now is really showing a really beautiful side to humanity."
After thanking those working on the front lines, she said: "I’m going to do the main thing I know how to do, which is play some music and hopefully this will just brighten your day, maybe just a little bit. That’s my goal.”
World renowned pianist Lang Lang, country singer Maren Morris, rock performer Hozier, British star Rita Ora and Emirati singer Hussain Al Jassmi also performed during “One World: Together At Home,” brought on by advocacy organization Global Citizen and in support of the World Health Organization. The six-hour stream, airing on YouTube, Apple, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and other digital platforms, also included videos focused on health care workers on the front lines fighting the spreading coronavirus. It also aired a package of people getting married — some in front of their homes, others inside — during the pandemic.