AP News in Brief at 6:04 a.m. EDT

After COVID-19: Anxious, wary first responders back on job

The new coronavirus doesn't care about a blue uniform or a shiny badge. Police, firefighters, paramedics and corrections officers are just a 911 call away from contracting COVID-19 and spreading it.

With N95 masks hanging off their duty belts and disposable blue gloves stuffed in their back pockets, they respond to radio calls, make arrests and manage prisoners. But their training never covered something quite like this — what has been called an "invisible bullet.”

It's sickened thousands of America’s first responders and killed dozens more.

But many have recovered, and they're going back to work — back to the crime scene, back into the ambulance, back to the jail. Going back to this deadly pandemic's front lines.

They go with a lingering cough and lost weight. They toss and turn at night, wondering if the claims of immunity are true. They fear that picking up extra overtime shifts may expose them, and their families, to additional risks.

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Invisible virus, invisible fear: How to navigate the unseen?

Back in the early 20th century, the baseball pitcher Walter Johnson confounded opposing batters by throwing the fastest fastball they’d ever seen. “You can’t hit what you can’t see,” they would say.

A century later, it’s an apt saying for those navigating this unusual moment.

The surreptitious and the invisible are defining the human landscape during these weeks in ways we are only barely beginning to understand. There is, of course, a fast-moving and elusive new virus. But the attitudes and fears that have emerged in the battle against it can be equally unsettling.

Now the entire world — its physical well-being, its economy, its people’s livelihoods — is being upended by something unseen and aggressive and hard to avoid. Is it any wonder that unease and disorientation are the result?

“There’s this invisible threat of a virus, but then there are visible threats of me losing my job or my livelihood or the economic shutdown or my mental health because I’m isolated,” says Lindsey Root Luna, a clinical psychologist who teaches at Hope College in Michigan.

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Nations, US states each chart their own path on reopening

LONDON (AP) — Nations and U.S. states have begun easing coronavirus lockdowns, each pursuing their own approach but all with a common goal: restarting their economies without triggering a new surge of infections.

Restrictions are being lifted in a piecemeal fashion with no clear signs of coordination among countries. Some have restarted construction work, while others never shut down building sites in the first place. Hair salons and restaurants were reopening in some U.S. states, while elsewhere such steps are still weeks away.

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson was back at work Monday after a bout with the virus that by his own account nearly cost the 55-year-old leader his life. His government was resisting the trend toward reopening.

Johnson said Britain was starting to “turn the tide” on the outbreak but added “it is also the moment of maximum risk” because easing the lockdown that now lasts until May 7 could produce a second spike in infections.

“I refuse to throw away all the effort and the sacrifice of the British people and to risk a second major outbreak and huge loss of life and the overwhelming of the NHS (National Health Service),” he said. “I ask you to contain your impatience."

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South Korea maintains Kim Jong Un health rumors are untrue

SEOUL, South Korea (AP) — A top South Korean official said his country remains confident there have been no “unusual developments” in North Korea, suggesting that rumors about the possible ill health of leader Kim Jong Un are untrue.

Unification Minister Kim Yeon-chul told a closed-door forum in Seoul on Sunday that South Korea has “enough intelligence to confidently say that there are no unusual developments” in rival North Korea that would back up speculation about Kim Jong Un's health, according to his ministry.

The minister said he would not reveal what specific intelligence led to that conclusion, but stressed that it had undergone a complex analysis.

The rumors about Kim’s health began to swirl after he missed the April 15 commemoration of the 108th birthday of his grandfather, North Korea founder Kim Il Sung. Kim Jong Un is the third generation of his family to rule North Korea, and he hadn’t missed the event, one of the most important in the North, since assuming power after his father Kim Jong Il’s death in late 2011.

The unification minister's comments are a reiteration of earlier South Korean statements that Kim Jong Un appeared to be handling state affairs normally and that no unusual activities had been detected in North Korea. Those comments failed to dispel the rumors about Kim, which have been fed by the silence of North Korea's state media about their leader's whereabouts.

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Many failures combined to unleash death on Italy's Lombardy

ROME (AP) — As Italy prepares to emerge from the West’s first and most extensive coronavirus lockdown, it is increasingly clear that something went terribly wrong in Lombardy, the hardest-hit region in Europe’s hardest-hit country.

Italy had the bad luck of being the first Western nation to be slammed by the outbreak, and its official total of 26,600 fatalities lags behind only the U.S. in the global death toll. Italy's first homegrown case was recorded Feb. 21, at a time when the World Health Organization was still insisting the virus was “containable” and not nearly as infectious as the flu.

But there is also evidence that demographics and health care deficiencies collided with political and business interests to expose the 10 million people in the northern Italian region of Lombardy to COVID-19 in ways unseen anywhere else, particularly the most vulnerable in nursing homes.

Virologists and epidemiologists say what went wrong there will be studied for years, given how the outbreak overwhelmed a medical system long considered one of Europe’s best, while in the neighboring Veneto region, the impact was significantly more controlled.

Prosecutors, meanwhile, are deciding whether to lay any criminal blame for the hundreds of dead in nursing homes, many of whom don’t even figure into Lombardy’s official death toll of 13,325, half of Italy’s total.

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Mosque’s makeshift morgue shows virus toll on UK minorities

BIRMINGHAM, England (AP) — The holy month of Ramadan is underway, and the Central Jamia Mosque Ghamkol Sharif in Birmingham should be full of worshippers. But this year, the main arrivals are the dead.

While the mosque in the central England city has been closed in response to the coronavirus pandemic, its parking lot has been transformed into a temporary morgue with room for 150 bodies.

The volunteer-run mortuary, with its white tents, industrial refrigerators and neat stacks of coffins, is evidence of the toll the virus is taking on Britain’s Muslim and ethnic-minority communities. The two most diverse regions of the U.K. — London and the Midlands area centered in Birmingham — have seen the largest number of deaths in the outbreak.

Mohammed Zahid, a mosque trustee who helped set up the mortuary with a firm of Muslim funeral directors, said the mosque in Birmingham’s predominantly South Asian Small Heath district normally holds one or two funerals a week.

In the last few weeks, “we were doing five to six a day," he said.

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Trump's focus on his base complicates path to reelection

WASHINGTON (AP) — During times of war and strife, national leaders often aim to unite a broken country and, in the process, broaden their appeal beyond their most loyal supporters. Not President Donald Trump.

Confronting a pandemic that has upended his presidency and threatened his reelection prospects, Trump has focused almost exclusively on tending to his base.

While the coronavirus has claimed the lives of more than 54,000 Americans, eliminated more than 20 million jobs and dashed the routines of daily life for nearly everyone, Trump has leveled attacks on Democrats. He's blamed former President Barack Obama's team for his own administration's failures, picked fights with reporters and thrown rhetorical bombs meant to thrill his hardcore supporters.

During a particularly rough stretch last week, Trump pledged to bar foreigners from entering the country. The executive order Trump ultimately signed was less severe than he suggested, but still gave him a chance to highlight action on an issue that's central to his political brand.

Four years after Trump captured the White House by perfectly threading narrow victories in critical battleground states, he is betting that a relentless focus on his base will yield a repeat performance. It's a risky strategy because Trump's standing in some of those states shows signs of weakening. And there's little evidence to suggest he has significantly broadened his appeal in other places to offset those vulnerabilities.

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Mideast economies take massive hit with oil price crash

BAGHDAD (AP) — Iraq is planning painful cuts in social benefits relied on by millions of government workers. Saudi Arabia will likely have to delay mega-projects. Egypt and Lebanon face a blow as their workers in the Gulf send back less of the much-needed dollars that help keep their fragile economies afloat.

The historic crash in oil prices in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic is reverberating across the Middle East as crude-dependent countries scramble to offset losses from a key source of state revenue — and all this at a time when several of them already face explosive social unrest.

The economies of all the Arab Gulf oil exporters are expected to contract this year, as much as 5% in Iraq, according to the International Monetary Fund.

While some Gulf countries can rely on a cushion of foreign currency reserves, nowhere in the region are the circumstances more dire than in Iraq, where oil sales fund 90% of the state budget.

Iraq saw massive protests in the past months by a populace angry over the weak economy and rampant corruption — and the turmoil could erupt again. Cutbacks in spending will only add to the pain for a population struggling to get by under coronavirus restrictions. In the capital’s Tahrir Square, protesters are still camped out, determined not to let their movement die.

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Military chaplains pivot to serve soldiers in virus outbreak

FORT BRAGG, N.C. (AP) —

Maj. Brian Minietta's eyes are locked down the barrel of a camera lens. He sways gently back and forth in silence, then his gruff voice belts out, in singsong: "A little patience ... yeah, yeah!"

He finishes the chorus — it's the 1989 Guns N’ Roses hit “Patience.” And he tells the Green Berets he counsels as an Army chaplain: “Yeah. Patience. That's the word we're going to talk about today.”

For two years, Minietta, 46, has served the 3rd Special Forces Group, based at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, though many of the soldiers have spent more time bouncing from deployments to conflict zones in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria than at home. As Green Berets — the better-known moniker for the elite soldiers of the Special Forces — these operators specialize in unconventional warfare, foreign internal defense and counterinsurgency.

Now, the coronavirus outbreak has upended the norm on base and beyond. Some training and deployments continue, but many have been sidelined. Only essential workers are reporting on post, ushered through gates patrolled by military police officers wearing masks.

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Tokyo Olympics: Questions, few answers in face of pandemic

TOKYO (AP) — The Tokyo Olympics were postponed a month ago. But there are still more questions than answers about the new opening on July 23, 2021, and what form those games will take.

In the face of the coronavirus pandemic, will the Olympics really start in 15 months? If so, in what form? With fans? Without fans? Can they open without a vaccine? TV broadcasters and sponsors provide 91% of the income for the International Olympic Committee. How much pressure will they exert on the form these Olympics take? What about the Beijing Winter Olympics, opening in February 2022. China is where the coronavirus was first discovered, and the authoritarian government has been draconian in terms of lockdowns and travel restrictions.

IOC President Thomas Bach has already said there is “no blueprint" in assembling what he called this “huge jigsaw puzzle.”

“I cannot promise ideal solutions,” he said. “But I can promise that we'll do everything to have the best possible games for everybody.”

Q: Some scientists are skeptical the delayed Tokyo Olympics can open in 15 months. What are the prospects?