AP News in Brief at 6:04 p.m. EDT
Trump administration ends election security briefings
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Trump administration has ended all election security briefings to Congress just weeks before Americans cast their ballots for president, raising concern among lawmakers about the public's right to know about foreign interference in the election.
The nation's top intelligence official, National Intelligence Director John Ratcliffe, told the Senate and House intelligence committees on Friday that the committees would only be receiving written updates about election security to help ensure the information “is not misunderstood nor politicized."
An official with Ratcliffe's office said Ratcliffe remains committed to meeting statutory responsibilities and keeping Congress informed. The official said, however, that there are concerns about unauthorized disclosures of sensitive information following recent briefings on Capitol Hill. The official was not authorized to speak publicly about the matter and requested anonymity.
In his letter to the committees, Ratcliffe wrote: “I believe this approach helps ensure, to the maximum extent possible, that the information ODNI provides the Congress in support of your oversight responsibilities on elections security, foreign malign influence, and election interference is not misunderstood nor politicized."
Democrats expressed outrage at the decision by Ratcliffe, who directs the office overseeing the nation's intelligence agencies.
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'How dare we not vote?' Black voters organize after DC march
WASHINGTON (AP) — Tears streamed down Brooke Moreland’s face as she watched tens of thousands gather on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial to decry systemic racism and demand racial justice in the wake of several police killings of Black Americans.
But for the Indianapolis mother of three, the fiery speeches delivered Friday at the commemoration of the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom also gave way to one central message: Vote and demand change at the ballot box in November.
“As Black people, a lot of the people who look like us died for us to be able to sit in public, to vote, to go to school and to be able to walk around freely and live our lives,” the 31-year-old Moreland said. “Every election is an opportunity, so how dare we not vote after our ancestors fought for us to be here?”
That determination could prove critical in a presidential election where race is emerging as a flashpoint. President Donald Trump, at this past week’s Republican National Convention, emphasized a “law and order” message aimed at his largely white base of supporters. His Democratic rival, Joe Biden, has expressed empathy with Black victims of police brutality and is counting on strong turnout from African Americans to win critical states such as North Carolina, Florida, Pennsylvania and Michigan.
As the campaign enters its latter stages, there's an intensifying effort among African Americans to transform frustration over police brutality, systemic racism and the disproportionate toll of the coronavirus into political power. Organizers and participants said Friday's march delivered a much needed rallying cry to mobilize.
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Chadwick Boseman, who embodied Black icons, dies of cancer
LOS ANGELES (AP) — First Chadwick Boseman slipped on the cleats of Jackie Robinson, then the Godfather of Soul’s dancing shoes, portraying both Black American icons with a searing intensity that commanded respect. When the former playwright suited up as Black Panther, he brought cool intellectual gravitas to the Marvel superhero whose “Wakanda forever!” salute reverberated worldwide.
As his Hollywood career boomed, though, Boseman was privately undergoing “countless surgeries and chemotherapy” to battle colon cancer, his family said in a statement announcing his death at age 43 on Friday. He’d been diagnosed at stage 3 in 2016 but never spoke publicly about it.
The cancer was there when his character T’Challa visited the ancestors’ “astral plane” in poignant scenes from the Oscar-nominated “Black Panther,” there when he first became a producer on the action thriller “21 Bridges,” and there last summer when he shot an adaptation of a play by his hero August Wilson. It was there when he played a radical Black leader — seen only in flashbacks and visions — whose death is mourned by Vietnam War comrades-in-arms in Spike Lee’s “Da 5 Bloods.”
“A true fighter, Chadwick persevered through it all, and brought you many of the films you have come to love so much,” his family said. “It was the honor of his career to bring King T’Challa to life in Black Panther.” Boseman died at his home in the Los Angeles area with his wife and family by his side, his publicist Nicki Fioravante told The Associated Press.
Boseman is survived by his wife and a parent and had no children, Fioravante said.
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'A time to pick up:' Hurricane-hurt Louisiana begins cleanup
CAMERON PARISH, La. (AP) — Residents in southwestern Louisiana embarked Saturday on the epic task of clearing away felled trees, ripped-off roofs and downed power lines after Hurricane Laura tore through parts of the state.
The U.S. toll from the Category 4 hurricane rose to 16 deaths, with more than half of those killed by carbon monoxide poisoning from the unsafe operation of generators. The latest deaths included an 80-year-old woman and an 84-year-old man who died from just such a poisoning.
President Donald Trump toured the damage from Laura in Louisiana and Texas on Saturday. He and Gov. John Bel Edwards made their way down a street blocked by trees and where houses were battered by the storm, which the governor said was the most powerful hurricane to strike the state. That means it surpassed even Katrina, which was a Category 3 storm when it hit 15 years ago on Saturday, to the day.
Although the storm was not as bad as once feared, authorities were still warning it could leave people with out running water or power for weeks in the stifling late summer heat. It made roads impassable, tore roofs and walls off buildings and strew debris about.
It also led to fires at a chlorine plant in Westlake in the hard-hit Lake Charles area. On Saturday, crews were battling a new blaze, leading authorities to broaden a shelter-in-place order to 1 mile (1.6 kilometers) around the plant, state Department of Environmental Quality spokesman Greg Langley said.
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'7 bullets, 7 days': Protesters march for Blake in Kenosha
KENOSHA, Wis. (AP) — Roughly a thousand people gathered Saturday in Kenosha for a march and rally against police violence, about a week after an officer shot Jacob Blake in the back and left the 29-year-old Black man paralyzed.
Marchers chanted “No justice, no peace!” and “Seven bullets, seven days” — a reference to the number of times Blake was shot on Sunday. Those leading the march carried a banner reading “Justice for Jacob” as they made their way toward the Kenosha County Courthouse, where several speakers encouraged demonstrators to vote for change in November.
“There were seven bullets put in my son’s back. ... Hell yeah, I’m mad," said Blake's father, Jacob Blake, Sr. He said he wants to ask the police "what gave them the right to attempted murder on my child? What gave them the right to think that my son was an animal? What gave them the right to take something that was not theirs? I’m tired of this. I’m tired of this.”
Blake Sr. asked members of the crowd to raise their fists in the air with him.
“We are not going to stop going in the right direction. We’re going to the top ... we’re gonna make legislation happen because that’s the only thing that they recognize," he said.
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Biden, aiming at Trump, says he won't use military as 'prop'
WASHINGTON (AP) — Joe Biden said on Saturday that as president, he would never use the military “as a prop or private militia” and accused President Donald Trump of employing U.S. forces to settle “personal vendettas" and violate citizens' rights.
The Democratic presidential nominee, in a virtual address to the National Guard Association of the United States' general conference, said Trump recommended "that you should be deployed to quote, ‘dominate,’ your fellow citizens for exercising their right to peacefully protest.”
“We’re so much better than this," Biden said. "You deserve so much better.”
His comments came a day after Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told Congress that the armed forces will have no role in carrying out the election process or resolving a disputed vote.
It was a sign of rising tensions on both sides as the president has declared without evidence that the expected surge in mail-in ballots during the coronavirus pandemic will make the vote “inaccurate and fraudulent." Trump has also suggested he might not accept the election results if he loses.
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Belarus cracks down on journalists, 2 AP staff deported
MOSCOW (AP) — Belarus, shaken by three weeks of massive protests against its authoritarian president, on Saturday cracked down hard on the news media, deporting some foreign journalists reporting in the country and revoking the accreditation of many Belarusian journalists.
Two Moscow-based Associated Press journalists who were covering the recent protests in Belarus were deported to Russia on Saturday. In addition, the AP’s Belarusian journalists were told by the government that their press credentials had been revoked.
“The Associated Press decries in the strongest terms this blatant attack on press freedom in Belarus. AP calls on the Belarusian government to reinstate the credentials of independent journalists and allow them to continue reporting the facts of what is happening in Belarus to the world,” said Lauren Easton, the AP’s director of media relations.
The Belarusian Association of Journalists said accreditation rights were also taken away from 17 Belarusians working for several other media. Germany’s ARD television said two of its Moscow-based journalists also were deported to Russia, a Belarusian producer faces trial on Monday and their accreditation to work in Belarus was revoked. The BBC said two of its journalists working for the BBC Russian service in Minsk also had their accreditation revoked and U.S.-funded radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty said five of its journalists lost their accreditation.
Criticism over the crackdown came from both media outlets and governments.
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France's horses killed in mysterious ritual-like mutilations
PARIS (AP) — Armed with knives, some knowledge of their prey and a large dose of cruelty, attackers are going after horses and ponies in pastures across France in what may be ritual mutilations.
Police are stymied by the macabre attacks that include slashings and worse. Most often, an ear — usually the right one — has been cut off, recalling the matador’s trophy in a bullring.
Up to 30 attacks have been reported in France, from the mountainous Jura region in the east to the Atlantic coast, many this summer, the agriculture minister said Friday. One attack was registered in February, according to the newsmagazine Le Point. With each attack, the mystery only seems to grow.
“We are excluding nothing,” Agriculture Minister Julien Denormandie said Friday on France-Info, before heading to a riding club in the Saone-et-Loire region, in east central France, where a horse was attacked a day earlier.
“Ears are cut off, eyes removed, an animal is emptied of its blood ...,” he said, spelling out the morbid fates befalling one of France's most beloved animals.
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Shiite Muslims mark holy day of mourning in virus' shadow
Shiite Muslims are observing the solemn holy day of Ashoura that they typically mark with large, mournful gatherings, in the shadow of the coronavirus pandemic.
Ashoura commemorates the seventh-century killing of Imam Hussein, the grandson of the Prophet Muhammad, in the Battle of Karbala in present-day Iraq with the army of then Caliph Yazid, to whom Hussein had refused to pledge allegiance.
“At its heart, It’s the story of the sacrifice of an extraordinary religious figure,” said Noor Zaidi, who teaches history at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County and researches Shiite Islam. “It’s (also) the story of familial love between Hussein and those who were with him in Karbala. ...It also has this real, sort of revolutionary component to it," she said.
“What has made it endure so powerfully ... is the fact that it has at its core the ability to meld itself to what, I think, people need to get from it."
The Day of Ashoura falls on the 10th of the Islamic month of Muharram and is preceded by days of commemorations and remembrance. The public expressions of communal mourning are generally associated with Shiites. For many Sunnis, Ashoura is a remembrance of more than one event, including the Moses-led exodus from Egypt.
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Fans hope Marvel comic book improves Native representation
Past portrayals of Native American or Indigenous comic book superheroes would often follow the same checklist — mystical powers, an ability to talk to animals and a costume of either a headdress or a loincloth.
“Poor research was done. They were just going off of TV and film,” said artist Jeffrey Veregge of the Port Gamble S’Klallam Tribe in Washington state. One of his biggest complaints is that mainstream “heroes from every place else had actual costumes" while Native characters weren't represented well.
Growing up reading comic books on his tribe's land outside Seattle, Veregge related more with non-Native heroes like Iron Man or Spider-Man. Now, he's “living a dream,” overseeing a Marvel comic book about Native stories told by Native people.
Marvel Comics announced this month that it's assembled Native artists and writers for “Marvel Voices: Indigenous Voices #1,” an anthology that will revisit some of its Native characters. It's timed for release during Native American History Month in November.
Native comic book fans hope it's a new start for authentic representation in mainstream superhero fare. Marvel says the project was planned long before the nation's reckoning over racial injustice, which has prompted changes including the Washington NFL team dropping its decades-old Redskins mascot.