AP News in Brief at 6:04 p.m. EDT
UAE and Israel to establish full diplomatic ties
JERUSALEM (AP) — Israel and the United Arab Emirates announced Thursday they are establishing full diplomatic relations in a U.S.-brokered deal that required Israel to halt its contentious plan to annex occupied West Bank land sought by the Palestinians.
The historic deal delivered a key foreign policy victory to President Donald Trump as he seeks re-election and reflected a changing Middle East in which shared concerns about archenemy Iran have largely overtaken traditional Arab support for the Palestinians.
A spokesman for Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas said the deal amounts to “treason,” and should be reversed.
The agreement makes the UAE the third Arab country, after Egypt and Jordan, to have full diplomatic ties with Israel. They announced it in a joint statement, saying deals between Israel and the UAE were expected in the coming weeks in such areas as tourism, direct flights and embassies.
Trump called the deal “a truly historic moment.”
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Biden calls for nationwide mask mandate
WILMINGTON, Del. (AP) —
Joe Biden is calling for a nationwide protective mask mandate, citing health experts’ predictions that it could save 40,000 lives from coronavirus over the next three months.
”Wearing the mask is less about you contracting the virus,” Biden said. “It’s about preventing other people from getting sick.”
The Democratic presidential candidate also responded to those who push back against such mandates.
“This is America. Be a patriot. Protect your fellow citizens. Step up, do the right thing.”
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Trump admits he's blocking postal cash to stop mail-in votes
WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump frankly acknowledged Thursday that he's starving the U.S. Postal Service of money in order to make it harder to process an expected surge of mail-in ballots, which he worries could cost him the election.
In an interview on Fox Business Network, Trump explicitly noted two funding provisions that Democrats are seeking in a relief package that has stalled on Capitol Hill. Without the additional money, he said, the Postal Service won't have the resources to handle a flood of ballots from voters who are seeking to avoid polling places during the coronavirus pandemic.
“If we don’t make a deal, that means they don’t get the money,” Trump told host Maria Bartiromo. “That means they can’t have universal mail-in voting; they just can’t have it.”
Trump's statements, including the false claim that Democrats are seeking universal mail-in voting, come as he is searching for a strategy to gain an advantage in his November matchup against Joe Biden. He's pairing the tough Postal Service stance in congressional negotiations with an increasingly robust mail-in -voting legal fight in states that could decide the election.
In Iowa, which Trump won handily in 2016 but is more competitive this year, his campaign joined a lawsuit Wednesday against two Democratic-leaning counties in an effort to invalidate tens of thousands of voters’ absentee ballot applications. That followed legal maneuvers in battleground Pennsylvania, where the campaign hopes to force changes to how the state collects and counts mail-in ballots. And in Nevada, Trump is challenging a law sending ballots to all active voters.
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For Americans waiting on virus aid, no new relief in sight
WASHINGTON (AP) — With talks on emergency coronavirus aid having stalled out, both sides played the blame game Thursday rather than make any serious moves to try to break their stalemate. Official Washington is emptying, national politics is consuming the airwaves and the chasm between the warring sides appears too great for now.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi pressed the case for funding for the U.S. Postal Service, rental assistance, food aid and rapid testing for the virus at her weekly press event, blasting Republicans as not giving a damn and declaring flatly that “people will die” if the delay grinds into September.
“Perhaps you mistook them for somebody who gave a damn,” Pelosi said when asked if she should accept a smaller COVID-19 rescue package rather than endure weeks of possible gridlock. “That isn't the case."
All of the chief combatants have exited Washington after a several-day display of staying put as to not get blamed for abandoning the talks. The political risk for President Donald Trump is continued pain in U.S. households and a struggling economy — both of which promise to hurt him in the September campaign. For Democrats, there is genuine disappointment at being unable to deliver a deal but apparent comfort in holding firm for a sweeping measure instead of the few pieces that Trump wants most.
A modest Trump administration overture on Wednesday generated nothing but stepped-up carping and accusations of bad faith.
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US jobless claims fall below 1 million but remain high
WASHINGTON (AP) — The number of Americans applying for unemployment dropped below 1 million last week for the first time since the coronavirus outbreak took hold in the U.S. five months ago, but layoffs are still running extraordinarily high.
The figures show that the crisis continues to throw people out of work just as the expiration of an extra $600 a week in federal jobless benefits has deepened the hardship for many — and posed another threat to the U.S. economy.
Applications for jobless benefits declined to 963,000, the second straight drop, from 1.2 million the previous week, the government said Thursday. That signals layoffs are slowing, though the weekly figure still far exceeds the pre-outbreak record of just under 700,000, set in 1982.
The virus is blamed for more than 166,000 deaths and 5.2 million confirmed infections in the U.S. — easily the highest totals in the world. The average number of new cases per day is on the rise in eight states, and deaths per day are climbing in 26, according to an Associated Press analysis.
Worldwide, the scourge has claimed more than 750,000 lives and caused over 20 million known infections.
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US seizes digital currency accounts used by militant groups
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Justice Department said Thursday it has seized millions of dollars from cryptocurrency accounts that militant organization abroad, including al-Qaida and the Islamic State group, relied on to raise money for violent operations.
The Trump administration said the groups used the accounts to solicit donations for their causes, including through a bogus scam that officials say purported to sell protective gear for the coronavirus pandemic.
Officials described it as the largest-ever seizure of digital currency funds related to terrorism.
Cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin are favored for illicit transactions because they are perceived as hard to trace, and one of the groups explicitly encouraged donations by telling potential contributors that the money trail would be difficult for law enforcement to untangle, the department said.
The legal move, which included undercover law enforcement work and )forfeiture complaints filed in Washington's federal court, is meant to deprive the organizations of fund needed to buy weapons and equipment and develop fighters and plots, Assistant Attorney General John Demers, the department's top national security official, said in a conference call announcing the case.
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Feds say Yale discriminates against Asian, white applicants
WASHINGTON (AP) — A Justice Department investigation has found Yale University is illegally discriminating against Asian American and white applicants, in violation of federal civil rights law, officials said Thursday.
Yale denied the allegation, calling it “meritless” and “hasty.”
The findings detailed in a letter to the college’s attorneys Thursday mark the latest action by the Trump administration aimed at rooting out discrimination in the college application process, following complaints from students about the application process at some Ivy League colleges. The Justice Department had previously filed court papers siding with Asian American groups who had levied similar allegations against Harvard University.
The two-year investigation concluded that Yale “rejects scores of Asian American and white applicants each year based on their race, whom it otherwise would admit,” the Justice Department said. The investigation stemmed from a 2016 complaint against Yale, Brown and Dartmouth.
“Yale’s race discrimination imposes undue and unlawful penalties on racially-disfavored applicants, including in particular Asian American and White applicants,” Assistant Attorney General Eric Dreiband, who heads the department’s civil rights division, wrote in a letter to the college’s attorneys.
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Bolivia's political crisis threatens hospitals and patients
LA PAZ, Bolivia (AP) — Hooked up to ventilators, 11 prematurely born infants struggled for survival Thursday in the intensive care ward of a Bolivian maternity hospital.
The babies' supply of oxygen is in peril, doctors say, because of nationwide blockades by supporters of the party of former President Evo Morales who object to the recent postponement of elections. Bolivia's political crisis adds to the burden on its health care system, which was already grappling with the coronavirus as it continues to spread across one of Latin America's poorest countries.
Street unrest erupted after the Supreme Electoral Tribunal moved the planned vote from Sept. 6 to Oct. 18 following warnings from medical experts that it would be unsafe to hold the election while the pandemic was not yet under control. It was the third time the vote has been delayed, angering protesters who accuse the government of interim President Jeanine Áñez of simply trying to hang on to power.
Now, after about 10 days of blockades, supplies are threatened in some hospitals that are also dealing with an escalating number of COVID-19 patients, according to officials.
U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres appealed to Bolivian institutions to negotiate solutions to the country’s multiple problems, spokesperson Stephane Dujarric said.
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War's end meant years of pain for Japanese girl in China
TOKYO (AP) — The last day of the Pacific War was also supposed to be Fumie Sato's last.
After hearing Emperor Hirohito's Aug. 15, 1945, radio broadcast declaring Japan would soon be "enduring the unendurable” in defeat, her father, an Imperial Army officer in Manchuria, announced his family would die by suicide together because the Soviets would soon invade their neighborhood.
She was 13.
Now 88, as the 75th anniversary of the Pacific War's end approaches, Sato told her story publicly for the first time to The Associated Press. Not even her children had heard it until she recently showed them a letter detailing her ordeal in Manchuria. Sato is the mother of AP journalist Kiichiro Sato.
Somehow, when she learned that she was to die, she remained calm, even as she watched her father help bury the neighboring family in their yard after they killed themselves.
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'Impossible': School boards are at heart of reopening debate
ROCK HILL, S.C. (AP) — Helena Miller listened to teachers, terrified to reenter classrooms, and parents, exhausted from trying to make virtual learning work at home. She heard from school officials who spent hundreds of hours on thousands of details — buses, classrooms, football, arts, special education. She spent countless nights, eyes wide open, her mind wrestling over the safety and education of the 17,000 children she swore to protect.
She thought of her own kids, two in high school and one middle-schooler — the reasons she ran for Rock Hill's school board six years ago.
And she made the hardest decision of her life: a vote to reopen schools amid the coronavirus pandemic, splitting students into two groups that would each spend two days a week in classrooms, with virtual learning the other school days.
“We have an impossible decision to make. And we still have to make it," Miller said from a tiny box on Zoom at the board's July meeting.
This Board of Trustees in suburban South Carolina is like thousands of school boards nationwide, where members are tackling a simple but hefty question — do we return to school amid a pandemic? — with no right or even good answers, in the face of inconsistent testing and a near-constant increase in confirmed coronavirus cases.