AP News in Brief at 6:04 a.m. EST
Trump challenges vote results while urging turnout in Ga.
VALDOSTA, Georgia (AP) — President Donald Trump is pressing his grievances over losing the presidential election, using a weekend rally to spread baseless allegations of misconduct in last month’s voting in Georgia and beyond even as he pushed supporters to turn out for a pair of Republican Senate candidates in a runoff election in January.
“Let them steal Georgia again, you’ll never be able to look yourself in the mirror,” Trump told rallygoers.
Trump's 100-minute rally before thousands of largely maskless supporters came not long after he was rebuffed by Georgia’s Republican governor in his astounding call for a special legislative session to give him the state’s electoral votes, even though President-elect Joe Biden won the majority of the vote.
The Jan. 5 Senate runoffs in Georgia will determine the balance of power in Washington after Biden takes office. Republicans in the state are worried that Trump is stoking so much suspicion about Georgia elections that voters will think the system is rigged and decide to sit out the two races.
The latest futile attempt to subvert the presidential election results continued Trump's unprecedented campaign to undermine confidence in the democratic process, but overshadowed his stated purpose in traveling to Georgia — boosting Sens. David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler.
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AP FACT CHECK: Trump floods rally with audacious falsehoods
WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump flooded his first postelection political rally with debunked conspiracy theories and audacious falsehoods Saturday as he claimed victory in an election he decisively lost.
A sampling from his remarks in Valdosta, Georgia:
TRUMP: “If I lost, I’d be a very gracious loser.”
THE FACTS: There's no “if.” He lost, refuses to concede, hasn’t congratulated the winner and persists in allegations of election malfeasance that courts and officials across the breadth of battleground states and in Washington have found meritless.
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Most of California to enter sweeping new virus lockdown
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — The vast region of Southern California, much of the San Francisco Bay area and a large swath of the Central Valley are about to be placed under a sweeping new lockdown in an urgent attempt to slow the rapid rise of coronavirus cases.
The California Department of Public Health said Saturday the intensive care unit capacity in Southern California and Central Valley hospitals had fallen below a 15% threshold that triggers the new measures, which include strict closures for businesses and a ban on gathering with anyone outside of your own household. The new measures will take effect Sunday evening and remain in place for at least three weeks, meaning the lockdown will cover the Christmas holiday.
Much of the state is on the brink of the same restrictions. Some counties have opted to impose them even before the mandate kicks in, including five San Francisco Bay Area counties where the measures also take effect starting Sunday.
With a new lockdown looming, many rushed out to supermarkets Saturday and lined up outside salons to squeeze in a haircut before the orders kicked in.
San Francisco resident Michael Duranceau rushed to a market to load up on supplies.
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Report finds microwave energy likely made US diplomats ill
WASHINGTON (AP) — A new report by a National Academy of Sciences committee has found that “directed” microwave radiation is the likely cause of illnesses among American diplomats in Cuba and China.
The study commissioned by the State Department and released Saturday is the latest attempt to find a cause for the mysterious illnesses that started to emerge in late 2016 among U.S. personnel in Havana.
The study found that “directed, pulsed radio frequency energy appears to be the most plausible” explanation for symptoms that included intense head pressure, dizziness and cognitive difficulties. It found this explanation was more likely than other previously considered causes such as tropical disease or psychological issues. The study did not name a source for the energy and did not say it came as the result of an attack, though it did note that previous research on this type of injury was done in the former Soviet Union.
In its report, the 19-member committee noted that it faced significant challenges in trying to get to the bottom of the medical mystery. Among them, not everyone reported the same symptoms and the National Academy of Sciences research did not have access to all the previous studies on the illnesses, some of which are classified.
“The committee found these cases quite concerning, in part because of the plausible role of directed, pulsed radiofrequency energy as a mechanism, but also because of the significant suffering and debility that has occurred in some of these individuals,” said committee chairman David Relman, a professor of medicine at Stanford University. “We as a nation need to address these specific cases as well as the possibility of future cases with a concerted, coordinated, and comprehensive approach.”
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Europe battles surge in coronavirus deaths in nursing homes
MADRID (AP) — As the two mortuary workers pushed a stretcher with a bagged corpse out of the room, the elderly man in the adjacent bed briefly awakened from his dementia. “Is he dead?” he muttered, extending his arm, trying to touch his roommate for the last time.
Reflecting on a scene repeated too many times, one of the workers, Manel Rivera, despaired at the growing number of elderly people dying as the coronavirus resurges.
“The sad thing is,” he said of the surviving man in the Barcelona nursing home, “in a few days we'll probably come back for him.”
Mortuary workers are again busy around-the-clock in nursing homes and hospices across Europe, amid outbreaks that this time are causing havoc mostly in facilities spared during the spring. In the U.S., patients in nursing homes and long-term care facilities and those who care for them have accounted for a staggering 39% of the country's 281,000 coronavirus deaths.
The surge in Europe is happening despite the retaining wall of measures erected since the spring, including facilities tailored only for residents with coronavirus. It's also pitching authorities and elder care professionals into a race against the clock before mass vaccinations can begin.
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China prepares large-scale rollout of coronavirus vaccines
TAIPEI, Taiwan (AP) — Provincial governments across China are placing orders for experimental, domestically made coronavirus vaccines, though health officials have yet to say how well they work or how they may reach the country's 1.4 billion people.
Developers are speeding up final testing, the Chinese foreign minister said during a U.N. meeting last week, as Britain approved emergency use of Pfizer Inc.'s vaccine candidate and providers scrambled to set up distribution.
Even without final approval, more than 1 million health care workers and others in China who are deemed at high risk of infection have received experimental vaccines under emergency use permission. There has been no word on possible side effects.
China's fledgling pharmaceutical industry has at least five vaccines from four producers being tested in more than a dozen countries including Russia, Egypt and Mexico. Health experts say even if they are successful, the certification process for the United States, Europe, Japan and other developed countries might be too complex for them to be used there. However, China said it will ensure the products are affordable for developing countries.
One developer, China National Pharmaceutical Group, known as Sinopharm, said in November it applied for final market approval for use of its vaccine in China. Others have been approved for emergency use on people deemed at high risk of infection.
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Ethiopia's conflict stokes humanitarian and virus crisis
HAMDAYET, Sudan (AP) — Ethiopia’s month-long war in its northern Tigray region has severely hampered efforts to fight one of Africa’s worst coronavirus outbreaks, as the fighting has displaced almost 1 million people and strained local humanitarian services to the breaking point.
Tens of thousands of those fleeing the conflict between Tigrayan and Ethiopian federal forces have crossed into neighboring Sudan, where countrywide virus numbers are also rising rapidly.
More than 45,000 refugees from the Tigray conflict are now living in remote parts of Sudan, where they have taken shelter in crowded camps that have no coronavirus testing or treatment capabilities.
“With COVID-19, it’s not comfortable in these buses,” said one refugee, Hailem, who said over 60 people were crammed onto the transport that took them from Hamdayet, on the Sudanese side of a main border crossing, to the camps.
Many staying in the camps are forced to share shelters and crowd together in lines for food, cash and registration with different aid agencies. There are few face masks to be seen — or available for distribution.
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Lights go out, roads dicey as wintry storm batters Northeast
WARREN, Mass. (AP) — The first big wintry storm of the season began dropping what forecasters say could be more than a foot of wet, heavy snow Saturday on parts of the Northeast, making travel treacherous and cutting off power to tens of thousands.
Morning rain gave over to snow in the afternoon in New England. Accidents littered the Massachusetts Turnpike, where speed limits were reduced to 40 mph (64 kph).
As of late Saturday night, about 200,000 customers were without power in Maine, according to the utility tracking poweroutage.us. Another 53,000 customers didn’t have power in New Hampshire and about 22,000 were without power in Massachusetts.
Forecasters warned the windy nor'easter could result in near-blizzard conditions and could dump a foot (30 centimeters) of snow on suburban Boston. In Canada, southern Quebec and New Brunswick also expected a wallop.
Authorities in Connecticut urged drivers to be careful.
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US star soprano misses La Scala gala season-open debut
MILAN (AP) — Soprano Lisette Oropesa was to be the first American to sing a title role in the gala season opener at La Scala since Maria Callas in the 1950s. Then Italy’s virus cases surged.
An outbreak in both La Scala’s chorus and its orchestra forced the country’s premier opera house to cancel for the first time one of the top events on Europe's cultural calendar.
Oropesa is now set to be one of more than 20 opera stars, among them Placido Domingo, Roberto Alagna and Piotr Beczała, recording arias and duets from the tiered theater for a broadcast gala event marking the traditional Dec. 7 opening. But there will be no glittering crowds, and no celebratory dinner. In fact, on Monday night the theater in Milan will be mostly empty.
By then, Oropesa will be in Barcelona, where she is performing next week. That comes after a whirlwind 2½ days in Milan that include a COVID-19 test, a gown fitting at Giorgio Armani for her part in the show, a dress rehearsal and, finally, performing for a TV camera an aria she had prepared for her opening night as “Lucia di Lammermoor.”
Despite the disappointment of missing her La Scala season-opener debut, Oropesa, 37, still hopes to reprise the title role in Donizetti’s opera in Milan once performances can return to Italy’s theaters.
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David Lander, 'Squiggy' on 'Laverne & Shirley,' dies at 73
LOS ANGELES (AP) — Actor David L. Lander, who played the character of Squiggy on the popular ABC comedy “Laverne & Shirley,” has died after a decades-long battle with multiple sclerosis, his wife said. He was 73.
Lander died Friday in Los Angeles, surrounded by his wife, daughter and son-in-law, Kathy Fields Lander said in an email Saturday to the Associated Press.
“It was very peaceful,” Lander said. “He had a tough battle with MS for 37 years and he persevered like no one I have ever seen, and it taught me a great deal about the important things of life.”
Lander had a longtime comedic partnership with Michael McKean, whom he met at Carnegie Mellon University. Together they created the characters of Lenny and Squiggy that they would play on the show, which ran from 1976 to 1983. Lenny and Squiggy — or Lenny Kosnowski and Andrew “Squiggy” Squiggman — were friends and upstairs neighbors of Laverne DeFazio (Penny Marshall) and Shirley Feeney (Cindy Williams), bottle-cappers in 1950s Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
McKean tweeted a photo in tribute to Lander on Saturday of the two actors in the early days.