AP News in Brief at 6:04 a.m. EST
US allows emergency COVID-19 vaccine in bid to end pandemic
WASHINGTON (AP) — The U.S. gave the final go-ahead Friday to the nation’s first COVID-19 vaccine, marking what could be the beginning of the end of an outbreak that has killed nearly 300,000 Americans.
Shots for health workers and nursing home residents are expected to begin in the coming days after the Food and Drug Administration authorized an emergency rollout of what promises to be a strongly protective vaccine from Pfizer Inc. and its German partner BioNTech.
Initial doses are scarce and rationed as the U.S. joins Britain and several other countries in scrambling to vaccinate as many people as possible ahead of a long, grim winter. It will take months of work to tamp down the coronavirus that has surged to catastrophic levels in recent weeks and already claimed 1.5 million lives globally.
While the FDA decision came only after public review of data from a huge ongoing study, it has also been dogged by intense political pressure from the Trump administration, which has accused the agency of being too slow and even threatened to remove FDA chief Stephen Hahn if a ruling did not come Friday.
The move sets off what will be the largest vaccination campaign in U.S. history -- but it also has global ramifications because it’s a role model to many other countries facing the same decision.
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Supreme Court rejects Republican attack on Biden victory
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court has rejected a lawsuit backed by President Donald Trump to overturn Joe Biden’s election victory, ending a desperate attempt to get legal issues rejected by state and federal judges before the nation’s highest court and subvert the will of voters.
Trump bemoaned the decision late Friday, tweeting: “The Supreme Court really let us down. No Wisdom, No Courage!”
The high court's order earlier Friday was a stark repudiation of a legal claim that was widely regarded as dubious, yet embraced by the president, 19 Republican state attorneys general and 126 House Republicans.
Trump had insisted the court would find the “wisdom” and “courage” to adopt his baseless position that the election was the product of widespread fraud and should be overturned. But the nation's highest court emphatically disagreed.
Friday's order marked the second time this week that the court had rebuffed Republican requests that it get involved in the 2020 election outcome and reject the voters' choice, as expressed in an election regarded by both Republican and Democratic officials as free and fair. The justices turned away an appeal from Pennsylvania Republicans on Tuesday.
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Analysis: The election is over; Trump's attacks will linger
WASHINGTON (AP) — The 2020 presidential election is over. But President Donald Trump’s baseless efforts to undermine it, and the consequences of those undemocratic actions, will linger in America for far longer.
It is increasingly clear that there is no fact, no piece of evidence and no court ruling that will dissuade Trump from trying to mislead Americans about President-elect Joe Biden’s victory. And Trump has hardly been alone in that effort; numerous Republicans have stood with him or stood by silently, including 126 GOP members of the House who backed a bid to get the Supreme Court to invalidate Biden’s victory in four key states.
The court emphatically rejected the case Friday night.
Trump responded on Twitter late Friday, “The Supreme Court really let us down," but he vowed to “fight on!”
The actions of Trump and his allies have exposed a striking reality about America: Many lawmakers in one of the nation’s two major political parties are either willing to back efforts to overturn a free and fair election or unwilling to speak out against such a campaign.
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Analysis: Senate 'gangs' show Biden what's possible, and not
WASHINGTON (AP) — It was about more than providing virus aid.
Day after day, night after night, the dozen or so senators met over pizza and Zoom calls, hammering out a framework for a $900 billion-plus COVID-19 virus aid and economic relief package. Their goal was not only to break a stubborn impasse on the pandemic aid, but to show that the old ways of doing business in Washington — in good faith, across party lines, with give-and-take — could still succeed.
Their work interjected fresh momentum toward a year-end deal. The White House jumped in with a new proposal. Congressional leaders showed interest. The gridlock seemed to be breaking.
But problems quickly flared. Details proved vexing. And by week’s end, the lawmakers involved in the bipartisan talks were admitting that the thorniest problem of all — whether companies, schools and others should be protected from virus-related lawsuits — was something they simply couldn’t solve, at least not yet.
For President-elect Joe Biden, it’s a clear indication that there are willing partners in Congress for the kind of consensus building he campaigned on. Yet it’s also a cautionary tale just weeks before his inauguration, showing how difficult it will be to govern from the center at a time when members of Congress, and the country at large, find it hard to bridge the gulf between them.
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Shadowy Ethiopian massacre could be 'tip of the iceberg'
UMM RAKOUBA, Sudan (AP) — The only thing the survivors can agree on is that hundreds of people were slaughtered in a single Ethiopian town.
Witnesses say security forces and their allies attacked civilians in Mai-Kadra with machetes and knives or strangled them with ropes. The stench of bodies lingered for days during the early chaos of the Ethiopian government’s offensive in the defiant Tigray region last month. Several mass graves have been reported.
What happened beginning Nov. 9 in the agricultural town near the Sudanese border has become the most visible atrocity in a war largely conducted in the shadows. But even here, much remains unclear, including who killed whom.
Witnesses in Mai-Kadra told the Ethiopian Human Rights Commission and Amnesty International that ethnic Tigrayan forces and allies attacked Amhara — one of Ethiopia’s largest ethnic groups but a minority in Tigray. In Sudan, where nearly 50,000 people have fled, one ethnic Amhara refugee gave The Associated Press a similar account.
But more than a dozen Tigrayan refugees told the AP it was the other way around: In strikingly similar stories, they said they and others were targeted by Ethiopian federal forces and allied Amhara regional troops.
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Italy's staggering virus toll poses uncomfortable questions
ROME (AP) — Italy could soon reclaim a record that nobody wants — the most coronavirus deaths in Europe — after the health care system again failed to protect the elderly and the government delayed imposing new restrictions.
This wasn't supposed to happen. Italy was the first country in the West to be slammed by COVID-19 and, after suffering a huge wave of death in spring, brought infections under control.
Italy then had the benefit of time and experience heading into the fall resurgence because it trailed Spain, France and Germany in recording big new clusters of infections. Yet the virus spread fast and wide, and Italy has added 28,000 dead since Sept. 1.
“Obviously there needs to be some reflection,” Guido Rasi, former executive director of the European Pharmaceutical Agency, told state TV after Italy reported a pandemic-high record of 993 deaths in one day. “This number of nearly 1,000 dead in 24 hours is much higher than the European average.”
Italy added another 761 victims Friday, bringing its official total to 63,387, just shy of Britain’s Europe-leading 63,603 dead, according to Johns Hopkins University. Both numbers are believed to greatly underestimate the real toll, due to missed infections, limited testing and different counting criteria.
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Pandemic threatens India's children with child labor rising
LUCKNOW, India (AP) — A boy who cried out when he was beaten for complaining of stomach pains drew attention from a passerby, who alerted police in the central Indian city of Agra.
Officers broke a padlock on the gate of the illegal shoe factory where the boy was working and found a dozen children, aged 10-17.
With classrooms shut and parents losing their jobs in the pandemic, thousands of families are putting their children to work to get by, undoing decades of progress in curbing child labor and threatening the future of a generation of India’s children.
In rural India, a nationwide lockdown imposed in March pushed millions of people into poverty, encouraging trafficking of children from villages into cities for cheap labor. The pandemic is hampering enforcement of anti-child labor laws, with fewer workplace inspections and less vigorous pursuit of human traffickers.
“The situation is unprecedented,” said Dhananjay Tingal, executive director of the Bachpan Bachao Andolan, a children’s rights group whose founder, Kailash Satyarthi, won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2014.
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US executes Louisiana truck driver who killed daughter, 2
TERRE HAUTE, Ind. (AP) — The Trump administration continued its unprecedented series of post-election federal executions Friday by putting to death a Louisiana truck driver who severely abused his 2-year-old daughter for weeks in 2002, then killed her by slamming her head repeatedly against a truck’s windows and dashboard.
Alfred Bourgeois, 56, was pronounced dead at 8:21 p.m. Eastern time at a federal prison in Terre Haute, Indiana. His lawyers had argued he had an IQ that put him in the intellectually disabled category, saying that should have made him ineligible for the death penalty.
In his last words, Bourgeois, strapped to a gurney, offered no apology and instead struck a deeply defiant tone, insisting that he neither killed nor sexually abused his baby girl.
“I ask God to forgive all those who plotted and schemed against me, and planted false evidence,” he said. He added: “I did not commit this crime.”
Later, the girl's relatives of released a joint statement calling Bourgeois “a monster.”
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Iran executes journalist who encouraged 2017 protests
TEHRAN, Iran (AP) — Iran on Saturday executed a once-exiled journalist over his online work that helped inspire nationwide economic protests in 2017, authorities said, just months after he returned to Tehran under mysterious circumstances.
Iranian state television and the state-run IRNA news agency said that Ruhollah Zam, 47, was hanged early Saturday morning. The reports did not elaborate.
In June, a court sentenced Zam to death, saying he had been convicted of “corruption on Earth,” a charge often used in cases involving espionage or attempts to overthrow Iran’s government.
Zam’s website AmadNews and a channel he created on the popular messaging app Telegram had spread the timings of the protests and embarrassing information about officials that directly challenged Iran’s Shiite theocracy.
Those demonstrations, which began at the end of 2017, represented the biggest challenge to Iran since the 2009 Green Movement protests and set the stage for similar mass unrest in November of last year.
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John Wall back on floor, NBA opens preseason in empty arenas
John Wall was back on the floor for the first time in nearly two years. DeMarcus Cousins played for the first time since the 2019 NBA Finals.
And the NBA champion Los Angeles Lakers were home, with nobody there to watch.
The NBA preseason — a truncated 49-game, nine-day sprint — opened Friday with a five-game slate, action returning to NBA arenas for the first time in exactly nine months. Coaches debuted with their new teams: Stephen Silas with Houston, Tom Thibodeau with New York, Billy Donovan with Chicago and Tyronn Lue with the Los Angeles Clippers. Rookies, such as No. 4 pick Patrick Williams of the Bulls and No. 8 pick Obi Toppin of the Knicks, got their first NBA minutes.
As will be the case in most buildings, at least to start the season, almost nobody was at any of these games. With the coronavirus pandemic ongoing and case numbers still rising, the era that started for the NBA with the suspension of last season on March 11 — the night that Utah’s Rudy Gobert tested positive — resumed with the league and its teams erring on the sides of caution and safety.
“It’s different, for sure,” Lakers coach Frank Vogel said before his team faced the Clippers inside a very empty Staples Center.