AP News in Brief at 12:04 a.m. EDT
GOP convention showcases rising stars, dark warnings
WASHINGTON (AP) — Two of the Republican Party’s rising stars, both people of color, offered an optimistic view of President Donald Trump’s leadership on Monday night, closing the opening night of the GOP’s scaled-back convention with a positive message at odds with the dark warnings that dominated much of the night.
While other Republicans predicted a national “horror movie” should Trump lose in November, Sen. Tim Scott and former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley tried to welcome new voters to the party to help broaden Trump's appeal beyond his hard-core base.
“I was a brown girl in a black and white world,” Haley said, noting that she faced discrimination but rejecting the idea that “America is a racist country.” She also gave a nod to the Black Lives Matter movement, saying “of course we know that every single Black life is valuable.”
Scrambling to find a message that sticks, Trump’s team tried out multiple themes and tactics over the course of the night: There were humanizing stories about the president along with the optimistic message about America's future with him at the helm — and plenty of dire talk about the threat posed by a Joe Biden presidency.
Scott, the Republican Party’s only Black senator, leveled the kind of personal attack against Biden that Trump and his white allies could not.
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AP FACT CHECK: Trump, GOP distort on health care, vote fraud
WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump made a dizzying array of misleading claims about voting fraud and health care Monday as fellow Republicans opened their convention with speeches distorting the agenda of his Democratic rival, Joe Biden.
Trump falsely asserted that he was the one who ensured that people with preexisting medical problems will be covered by health insurance; actually that was Democratic President Barack Obama. Several speakers accused Biden of proposing to defund police, ban fracking, take over health care and open borders — none of that true.
A look at statements at the Republican National Convention:
HEALTH CARE
TRUMP: “We protected your preexisting conditions. Very strongly protected preexisting ... and you don’t hear that.”
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Republican Convention takeaways: All Trump, all the time
WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump aggressively asserted control over the Republican National Convention on Monday, overshadowing the prime-time speakers, as he made clear he wants voters to focus on him.
Here are key takeaways from the first night of the convention:
AN OMNIPRESENT CONVENTION PRESENCE
Trump. Trump. And more Trump.
Never one to shy away from the spotlight, Trump showed he will be omnipresent at the convention, appearing every night and sure to dominate the proceedings.
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Liberty: Falwell agreed to resign, then reversed course
RICHMOND, Va. (AP) — Jerry Falwell Jr.’s future at evangelical Liberty University amid a sex scandal was uncertain Monday, after the school said he had offered his resignation but then reversed course.
Falwell agreed to “resign immediately as President of Liberty University today but then instructed his attorneys to not tender the letter for immediate resignation,” according to a university news release distributed late Monday night.
The news of Falwell's possible departure followed the publication of news stories about his wife’s sexual encounters with a much younger business partner. They marked the latest in a series of controversies related to the couple to roil the school founded by Falwell's late father, the Rev. Jerry Falwell Sr.
"I call upon the University community and supporters to be in prayer for the University and for all its leadership, past, present and future, as we walk with the Lord through this stormy time of transition," Acting Liberty President Jerry Prevo said in the news release.
Falwell had already been on an indefinite leave of absence since Aug. 7, following an uproar over a photo he posted on social media, and then deleted, showing him with his pants unzipped, stomach exposed and arm high around the waist of his wife’s pregnant assistant.
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Kenosha protesters, police clash again after Black man shot
KENOSHA, Wis. (AP) — Anger over the shooting of a Black man by police in a southeastern Wisconsin city spilled into the streets of Kenosha for a second night Monday, with police once again firing tear gas at hundreds of protesters who defied a curfew, threw bottles and shot fireworks at law enforcement officials guarding the courthouse.
Kenosha became the nation's latest flashpoint in a summer of racial unrest after cellphone footage of police shooting Jacob Blake on Sunday around 5 p.m. in broad daylight circulated on social media. The shooting drew condemnation from Democratic Gov. Tony Evers, who called out 125 members of the National Guard to quell protests.
Protesters chanted, “No justice, no peace” as they confronted a line of law enforcement officers who wore protective gear and stood shoulder-to-shoulder in front of the courthouse entrance.
Police first fired the tear gas about 30 minutes after the 8 p.m. curfew took effect and protesters refused to disperse. But hundreds of people stuck around, lighting fires and screaming at police.
The latest confrontation came after protesters set cars on fire, smashed windows and clashed with officers in riot gear Sunday night over the wounding of 29-year-old Blake, who was hospitalized in serious condition. In a widely seen cellphone video made by an onlooker, Blake was shot, apparently in the back, as he leaned into his SUV while his three children sat in the vehicle.
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Kenosha delayed body cameras for years before Blake shooting
IOWA CITY, Iowa (AP) — City and law enforcement leaders in Kenosha, Wisconsin, unanimously endorsed the use of body cameras in 2017 as a way to increase police accountability and collect evidence at scenes of domestic violence, among other benefits.
But since then, they have balked at the price tag, raised policy concerns and put off implementation. The delays meant that officers who were on the scene of Sunday's shooting of Jacob Blake while responding to a domestic call were not equipped with technology that could give their perspective on an incident that has roiled the nation.
Instead, the public has only seen video captured by a neighbor that shows an officer shooting an unarmed Blake, 29, in the back several times as the Black man tried to get into a vehicle with his three children. It doesn’t show what happened before or after the shooting like body camera footage would.
The shooting has prompted civil unrest in Kenosha, a city of 100,000 people between Milwaukee and Chicago. But it also shined a light on Kenosha’s delays in equipping its roughly 200 police officers with body-worn cameras, which has made the city fall behind many of its neighbors and similar-sized peers.
“This is a tragedy. But at least some good could come from this if this is finally the incident where Kenosha says, ‘we’ve got to get body cameras on these cops right away’,” said Kevin Mathewson, a former member of the common council.
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Revved by Sturgis Rally, COVID-19 infections move fast, far
SIOUX FALLS, S.D. (AP) — The hundreds of thousands of bikers who attended the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally may have departed western South Dakota, but public health departments in multiple states are trying to measure how much and how quickly the coronavirus spread in bars, tattoo shops and gatherings before people traveled home to nearly every state in the country.
From the city of Sturgis, which is conducting mass testing for its roughly 7,000 residents, to health departments in at least six states, health officials are trying to track outbreaks from the 10-day rally which ended on Aug. 16. They face the task of tracking an invisible virus that spread among bar-hoppers and rallygoers, who then traveled to over half of the counties in the United States.
An analysis of anonymous cell phone data from Camber Systems, a firm that aggregates cell phone activity for health researchers, found that 61% of all the counties in the U.S. have been visited by someone who attended Sturgis, creating a travel hub that was comparable to a major U.S. city.
“Imagine trying to do contact tracing for the entire city of (Washington), D.C., but you also know that you don't have any distancing, or the distancing is very, very limited, the masking is limited,” said Navin Vembar, who co-founded Camber Systems. “It all adds up to a very dangerous situation for people all over the place. Contact tracing becomes dramatically difficult."
Health departments in four states, including South Dakota, Minnesota, Nebraska and Wyoming, have reported a total of 81 cases among people who attended the rally. South Dakota health officials said Monday they had received reports of infections from residents of two other states — North Dakota and Washington. The Department of Health also issued public warnings of possible COVID-19 exposure at five businesses popular with bikers, saying it didn't know how many people could have been exposed.
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Postal leader defends changes, denies 'sabotaging' election
WASHINGTON (AP) — Postmaster General Louis DeJoy told lawmakers Monday that he has warned allies of President Donald Trump that the president’s repeated attacks on the legitimacy of mail-in ballots are “not helpful,” but denied that recent changes at the Postal Service are linked to the November elections.
DeJoy, who has come under intense scrutiny over sweeping policy changes at the U.S. Postal Service, faced new questions on mounting problems at the agency as it prepares to deliver record numbers of ballots this fall as a result of the coronavirus pandemic.
During an exchange with Rep. Gerald Connolly, D-Va., DeJoy first denied having contacted the president’s campaign team, but later backtracked, saying he has “spoken to people that are friends of mine that are associated with the campaign” over Trump’s baseless claims that mail voting will lead to fraud.
“I have put word around to different people that this is not helpful,” DeJoy said during a six-hour House Oversight Committee hearing.
DeJoy faced tense questions from lawmakers over mail delivery delays seen since he took the helm in mid-June. It was his second appearance before Congress in four days.
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New Zealand mass shooting survivors describe ongoing pain
CHRISTCHURCH, New Zealand (AP) — Relatives and survivors from a mass shooting at two New Zealand mosques described in court on Tuesday how more than a year later, they are still having trouble sleeping, enjoying life and providing for their families.
It was the second day of a four-day sentencing hearing for white supremacist Brenton Harrison Tarrant, who slaughtered 51 worshippers and injured dozens more during the March 2019 attacks.
The 29-year-old Australian gunman in March pleaded guilty to murder, attempted murder, and terrorism, reversing an earlier not guilty plea. He could become the first person in New Zealand to be sentenced to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole, the toughest sentence available.
The hearing has given many a chance to confront Tarrant, who has shown little emotion throughout as he sits in the dock surrounded by five officers. He is noticeably thinner than after he was first arrested.
Rashid Omar, whose 24-year-old son Tariq was killed at the Al Noor mosque, said he'd desperately held out hope his son had survived until police and Muslim leaders read out a list of those who'd died.
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As world grapples with pandemic, schools are the epicenter
JACKSON, Miss. (AP) — The world is settling into a new normal for everyday life amid the coronavirus pandemic: online school classes, intermittent Zoom outages, museums that will only allow about a quarter of their usual visitors.
More than 800,000 people worldwide have perished from the virus and more than 23.5 million have contracted it, according to a tally by Johns Hopkins University — figures experts say understate the true toll due to limited testing, missed mild cases and other factors.
Older people and those with underlying health conditions appear to be the most vulnerable. However, there's uncertainty about long-term effects and what impact millions of school children around the globe returning to classrooms might have on the virus' spread.
A significant red flag emerged in Hong Kong, where scientists say they have the first evidence of someone being reinfected with the virus that causes COVID-19. The case raises alarm bells, suggesting that surviving an infection does not provide lifelong immunity.
WORLD HEALTH ORGANIZATION