AP News in Brief at 6:04 p.m. EDT
Republicans nominate Trump; he questions election integrity
CHARLOTTE, N.C. (AP) — President Donald Trump turned a surprise opening-day appearance at his party’s scaled-down national convention into an opportunity to question the integrity of the fall election, even as his aides promised a diverse and uplifting message once the evening program shifted back to Washington, D.C. for prime time.
Trump, who was not scheduled to deliver his keynote convention address until later in the week, nevertheless made multiple public appearances throughout the first day of the four-day convention. And while the evening programming was carefully scripted, Trump was not.
“The only way they can take this election away from us is if this is a rigged election,” Trump told hundreds of Republican delegates gathered in North Carolina, raising anew his unsupported concerns about Americans’ expected reliance on mail voting during the pandemic. Experts say mail voting has proven remarkably secure.
The GOP convention marks a crucial moment for Trump, a first-term Republican president tasked with reshaping a campaign he is losing by all accounts, at least for now.
A deep sense of pessimism has settled over the electorate 10 weeks before Election Day. Just 23% of Americans think the country is heading in the right direction, according to a new poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.
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DeJoy says Trump attacks on mail-in ballots 'not helpful'
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 mail-in ballots are “not helpful,” but denied that recent changes at the Postal Service are linked to the November elections.
DeJoy was testifying for a second day on Capitol Hill, facing tense questions from lawmakers over an uproar in mail delivery delays since he took the helm in mid-June.
“I am not engaged in sabotaging the election,” DeJoy said, adding that, like Trump, he personally plans to vote by mail.
The hearing quickly became a debate over delivery disruptions being reported nationwide. Democrats said the changes under DeJoy's watch are causing widespread delays, but Republicans dismissed the worries as unfounded and part of a Democratic “conspiracy” against Trump.
In questioning, Rep. Stephen Lynch, D-Mass., said the upheaval at one of the nation’s oldest and most popular institutions was either the result of “gross incompetence” or that DeJoy was "doing this on purpose.”
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National Guard called out after police shoot Black man
KENOSHA, Wis. (AP) — Wisconsin’s governor summoned the National Guard for fear of another round of violent protests Monday after the police shooting of a Black man under murky circumstances turned Kenosha into the nation’s latest flashpoint city in a summer of racial unrest.
Democratic Gov. Tony Evers said 125 members of the National Guard would be in Kenosha by night with responsibility for “guarding infrastructure and making sure our firefighters and others involved are protected.” County authorities also announced an 8 p.m. curfew.
The move 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 Jacob Blake, who was hospitalized in serious condition. In a widely seen cellphone video made by an onlooker, he was shot, apparently in the back, as he leaned into his SUV while his three children sat in the vehicle.
Tensions flared anew on Monday after a news conference with Kenosha Mayor John Antarmian, originally to be held in a park, was moved inside the city’s public safety building. Hundreds of protesters rushed to the building and a door was snapped off its hinges before police in riot gear pepper-sprayed the crowd, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported.
Police in the former auto manufacturing center of 100,000 people midway between Milwaukee and Chicago said they were responding to a call about a domestic dispute. They did not say whether Blake was armed or why police opened fire, they released no details on the domestic dispute, and they did not immediately disclose the race of the three officers at the scene.
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Scientists say Hong Kong man got coronavirus a second time
University of Hong Kong scientists claim to have the first evidence of someone being reinfected with the virus that causes COVID-19.
Genetic tests revealed that a 33-year-old man returning to Hong Kong from a trip to Spain in mid-August had a different strain of the coronavirus than the one he’d previously been infected with in March, said Dr. Kelvin Kai-Wang To, the microbiologist who led the work.
The man had mild symptoms the first time and none the second time; his more recent infection was detected through screening and testing at the Hong Kong airport.
“It shows that some people do not have lifelong immunity” to the virus if they've already had it, To said. “We don’t know how many people can get reinfected. There are probably more out there.”
The paper has been accepted by the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases but not yet published, and some independent experts urged caution until full results are available.
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AP-NORC poll: Trump faces pessimism as GOP convention opens
WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump is promising to outline an optimistic vision for America at this week's Republican convention. But he’ll be speaking to a public deeply pessimistic about the direction of the country and overwhelmingly dissatisfied with his and the federal government’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic.
Most Americans think there isn’t enough being done to help individual Americans, small businesses or public schools as the pandemic stretches on, according to a new poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. Overall, just 31% of Americans approve of Trump’s leadership on the pandemic, a significant drop from 44% approval in March, when the virus began sweeping through the United States.
The public’s negative assessment of how Trump is handling the crisis puts him on the defensive as his November face-off against Democrat Joe Biden nears. One of Trump’s challenges as his convention opens on Monday night is to convince Americans that anything about his response to the pandemic will change or improve if voters give him four more years in office.
Yet Trump has shown little willingness to acknowledge that a course correction of any kind is needed. He’s repeatedly cast the virus as all but defeated, even when cases were sharply increasing, including in states he needs to win in November. He’s also insisted the U.S. has vastly outperformed other countries in tackling the pandemic, despite the fact the U.S. has the most confirmed cases (more than 5.7 million) and most confirmed deaths (more than 176,000) of any country in the world.
“To be persuasive, there needs to be a strategy and not just rhetoric,” Whit Ayres, a Republican pollster, said of Trump's challenge this week.
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Big California wildfires burn on as death toll reaches 7
SCOTTS VALLEY, Calif. (AP) — Firefighters battling three massive wildfires in Northern California got a break from the weather early Monday as humidity rose and there was no return of the onslaught of lightning strikes that ignited the infernos a week earlier.
A warning about dry lighting and gusty winds that could spark more fires was lifted for the San Francisco Bay Area and relieved fire commanders said the weather was aiding their efforts.
“Mother Nature's helped us quite a bit," said Billy See, the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection incident commander for a complex of fires burning south of San Francisco.
California has had more than 13,000 lightning strikes since mid-August and more than 600 wildfires statewide have burned more than 1.2 million acres, or 1,875 square miles (4,856 square kilometers), said Daniel Berlant, assistant deputy director with California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, known as Cal Fire.
More than 1,200 buildings have been destroyed and 14,000 firefighters have been deployed, he said.
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Zoom glitches, briefly grinding US schools to a halt
NEW YORK (AP) — Teachers and parents got a brief glimpse of a new kind of pandemic-era nightmare Monday when Zoom — the video-conferencing service that powers everything from distance learning to business meetings to casual, socially distant get-togethers — abruptly went dead.
For roughly two-and-a-half hours Monday morning, many users were unable to load the Zoom website; others could neither host nor join scheduled meetings. Zoom fixed the problem by 11:30 a.m. ET, the company reported on its status page.
The timing was less than ideal, since many schools across the U.S. were just starting online instruction after a summer surge in the coronavirus pandemic scotched many plans to reopen classes with students present in the flesh.
“Today was horrible," said Jacqueline Donovan, a professor at Broward College in Broward County, Florida. Her 12-year-old daughter Michaela and 14-year-old son Jayden were trying to log onto Zoom classes, but unable to.
“They were both panic stricken and anxious," she said. Meanwhile, Donovan herself was trying to hold her first class, an introduction to business, and getting frantic emails from her own students. Her class was eventually canceled.
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AP Top 25: Clemson No. 1, followed by Ohio State, Alabama
Clemson is the preseason No. 1 in The Associated Press Top 25, a poll featuring nine Big Ten and Pac-12 teams that gives a glimpse at what has already been taken by the pandemic from an uncertain college football season.
Ohio State (1,504 points) was a close No. 2 behind Trevor Lawrence and Clemson (1,520), which starts atop the rankings for the second straight season. The Tigers beat the Buckeyes in a thrilling College Football Playoff semifinal last season.
Alabama is No. 3, Southeastern Conference rival Georgia is No. 4 and defending Big 12 champion Oklahoma is No. 5. Defending national champion LSU is No. 6.
The 85th edition of the AP rankings will be like none before.
When the season starts — if the season starts — the Buckeyes and 53 other Bowl Subdivision teams will no longer be eligible for inclusion in the Top 25 because they have postponed their seasons to the spring.
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Marco collapses, sets stage for Laura to hit US as hurricane
NEW ORLEANS (AP) — Tropical Storm Marco began falling apart Monday, easing one threat to the Gulf Coast but setting the stage for the arrival of Laura as a potentially supercharged Category 3 hurricane with winds topping 110 mph (177 kph) and a storm surge that could swamp entire towns.
The two-storm combination could bring a history-making onslaught of wind and coastal flooding from Texas to Alabama, all complicated by the coronavirus pandemic, forecasters said.
Still a tropical storm for now, Laura churned just south of Cuba after killing at least 11 people in the Dominican Republic and Haiti, where it knocked out power and caused flooding in the two nations that share the island of Hispaniola. The deaths reportedly included a 10-year-old girl whose home was hit by a tree and a mother and young son who were crushed by a collapsing wall.
Laura was not expected to weaken over land before moving into warm, deep Gulf waters that forecasters said could bring rapid intensification.
“We’re only going to dodge the bullet so many times. And the current forecast for Laura has it focused intently on Louisiana,” Gov. John Bel Edwards told a news briefing.
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Police in Belarus detain opposition activists amid protests
MINSK, Belarus (AP) — Police in Belarus on Monday detained several leading opposition activists as well as a handful of protesters taking part in a wave of demonstrations challenging the reelection of authoritarian President Alexander Lukashenko in balloting that they say was rigged.
The Coordination Council, which was set up by the opposition to negotiate a transfer of power, said members Sergei Dylevsky and Olga Kovalkova were detained in the capital of Minsk. Later in the day, the opposition also reported the detention of Alexander Lavrinovich, a strike leader at a major industrial plant.
Police also detained at least five of several hundred people who had gathered in Minsk's Independence Square on Monday, the 16th straight day of protests, and another five in other cities, activists said.
The actions signaled Lukashenko’s determination to stifle massive post-election demonstrations that have entered their third week. The 65-year-old Belarusian leader, who has been in power since 1994, toted an assault rifle in a show of force as he arrived at his residence by helicopter on Sunday while protesters rallied nearby.
Last week, Lukashenko warned that the opposition council's members could face charges for creating what he described as a parallel government. Prosecutors then opened a criminal inquiry on charges of undermining national security, an allegation rejected by the council.