AP News in Brief at 6:04 p.m. EDT
Trump signs order on police reform, doesn't mention racism
WASHINGTON (AP) — Following weeks of national protests since the death of George Floyd, President Donald Trump signed an executive order Tuesday that he said would encourage better police practices. But he made no mention of the roiling national debate over racism spawned by police killings of black men and women.
Trump met privately with the families of several black Americans killed in interactions with police before his Rose Garden signing ceremony, and said he grieved for the lives lost and families devastated. But then he quickly shifted his tone and devoted most of his public remarks to a need to respect and support “the brave men and women in blue who police our streets and keep us safe.”
He characterized the officers who have used excessive force as a “tiny” number of outliers among “trustworthy” police ranks.
“Reducing crime and raising standards are not opposite goals," he said before signing the order, flanked by police officials.
Trump and Republicans in Congress have been rushing to respond to the mass demonstrations against police brutality and racial prejudice that have raged for weeks across the country in response to the deaths of Floyd and other black Americans. It's a sudden shift that underscores how quickly the protests have changed the political conversation and pressured Washington to act.
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A drug offers hope amid spikes in coronavirus infections
ATLANTA (AP) — As nations grapple with new outbreaks and spiking death tolls from the coronavirus, a commonly available drug appeared Tuesday to offer hope that the most seriously ill could have a better chance of survival.
The pandemic has forced countries to impose lockdowns and tough restrictions on daily life and travel, but infections have surged as they eased these rules and reopened their economies. With no vaccine available and much still unknown about the virus, researchers in England announced the first drug shown to save lives.
The drug, called dexamethasone, reduced deaths by 35% in patients who needed treatment with breathing machines and by 20% in those only needing supplemental oxygen, researchers in England said. It did not appear to help less ill patients.
British Prime Minister Boris Johnson said the drug was the “biggest breakthrough yet” in treating the coronavirus, and top U.S. infectious disease expert Dr. Anthony Fauci called it "a significant improvement in the available therapeutic options that we have.”
Britain is making dexamethasone available to patients on the country’s National Health Service. The U.K. Department of Health said the drug had been approved to treat all hospitalized COVID-19 patients requiring oxygen, effective immediately. It said the U.K. had stockpiled enough to treat 200,000 patients.
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Calls for de-escalation training grow after Atlanta shooting
ATLANTA (AP) — The deaths of George Floyd in Minneapolis and Rayshard Brooks in Atlanta in the span of less than three weeks have led to a push in the U.S. for more training of police officers in how to “de-escalate” tense situations before they explode in violence.
“You’ve got to get cops to understand that it’s not a cowardly act, that backing off could save this person’s life,” said Tom Manger, a retired police chief in Virginia and Maryland and former president of the Major Cities Chiefs Association.
Officers undergoing de-escalation training are taught how to keep their cool, talk to people in such a way as to calm them down, and use the least amount of force required. Typically the instruction includes exercises in which actors playing members of the public try to provoke officers.
“It’s very clear that our police officers are to be guardians and not warriors within our communities,” Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms said Monday in announcing she will require city officers to continuously undergo such training in the wake of Brooks’ fatal shooting Friday night.
Calls for increased de-escalation training have also come from politicians on Capitol Hill as well as from California’s attorney general, Michigan lawmakers and Houston’s police chief.
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India: 20 troops killed in Himalayas clash with Chinese army
SRINAGAR, India (AP) — A clash high in the Himalayas between the world’s two most populated countries claimed the lives of 20 Indian soldiers in a border region that the two nuclear armed neighbors have disputed for decades, Indian officials said Tuesday.
The clash in the Ladakh region Monday — during which Indian officials said neither side fired any shots — was the first deadly confrontation between India and China since 1975. Experts said it would be difficult for the two nations to ease heightened tensions.
The Indian and Chinese troops fought each other with fists and rocks, Indian officials said on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to disclose the information.
The Indian Army initially said in a statement that three Indian soldiers had died, but later updated the number to 20 and said 17 "were critically injured in the line of duty at the standoff location and exposed to sub-zero temperatures in the high altitude terrain.” The statement did not disclose the nature of the soldiers' injuries.
China accused Indian forces of carrying out “provocative attacks” on its troops without offering more details and did not disclose if any of its soldiers died.
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Near Trump's rally site, black Tulsa lives with fiery legacy
TULSA, Okla. (AP) — In the real world, 74-year-old Donald Shaw is walking on the empty, parched grass slope by Tulsa’s noisy crosstown expressway. He's on the other side of the city’s historical white-black dividing line from where President Donald Trump will hold a rally Saturday with his overwhelmingly white supporters.
But Shaw can conjure stories and images of so much more — the once-thriving black community that stood on this same ground, destroyed nearly a century ago by white violence and ensuing decades of repression.
“Just imagine, in your mind, all these homes,” Shaw said one morning this week, remembering the black-built, black-owned houses and churches that covered dozens of blocks where he's walking, the site of Tulsa's 1921 race massacre. “Just picture that.”
“Hotels, movie theater, roller rink,” said Shaw, a retired man who spends his mornings sitting in the shade of an engraved stone memorial to the Home Style Café, A.S. Newkirk photography studio, and literally hundreds of other African American-owned bakeries, barber shops, attorney offices and businesses razed in the massacre.
Burned bricks and a fragment of a church basement are about all that survive today of the more than 30-block historically black district. On May 31 and June 1 in 1921, white residents and civil society leaders looted and burned Tulsa's black Greenwood district to the ground, and used planes to drop projectiles on it.
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Simple math suggests complex back story at Supreme Court
WASHINGTON (AP) — Supreme Court watchers were left scratching their heads when they learned Justice Neil Gorsuch was the author of Monday’s landmark LGBT rights ruling, but not because the appointee of President Donald Trump might have been expected to side with his conservative colleagues in dissent.
Rather, it was a matter of math.
Each of the nine Supreme Court justices usually writes at least one opinion for each month the court hears arguments. Gorsuch’s opinion was his second for October while three of his colleagues wrote nothing. That highly unusual lineup suggests something going on behind the scenes.
Gorsuch became the only justice other than retired Justice Anthony Kennedy to author a major high court ruling in favor of LGBT rights when he wrote the decision declaring workplace discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity illegal under federal civil rights law. The 52-year-old justice earlier wrote the ruling requiring unanimous jury verdicts in state criminal cases.
The answer is obvious in one sense. He wrote opinions in both cases that attracted a majority of the court. But how he came to write them is a mystery.
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Watchdogs say Trump admin limiting oversight of virus aid
WASHINGTON (AP) — Government watchdogs are warning that a legal determination by the Trump administration could severely limit their ability to oversee more than $1 trillion in spending related to the coronavirus pandemic.
In a letter to four congressional committees, a panel of inspectors general overseeing a sweeping economic rescue law said an “ambiguity” in the law could block the watchdogs from conducting independent oversight.
The letter from Michael Horowitz and Robert Westbrooks, the officials leading the Pandemic Response Accountability Committee, cites a May 7 memo by the Treasury Department’s legal counsel concluding that disclosure requirements in the rescue law do not extend to more than $1 trillion in spending — nearly half of the $2.4 trillion committed to the rescue law by Congress.
“If this interpretation of the CARES Act were correct, it would raise questions about PRAC’s authority to conduct oversight" of spending that includes federal loans for small businesses, aid to cities, states and tribes and other programs, the letter says. The CARES Act is the rescue law's formal name.
“This would present potentially significant transparency and oversight issues because (the spending in question) includes over $1 trillion in funding,” the letter says.
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Value of police body cameras limited by lack of transparency
In the fatal shooting of a black man by police in Atlanta last week, officers' body cameras captured about 40 minutes of footage, but not the critical moments that end with one of them opening fire.
In Oklahoma City, it took police more than a year to release video from the arrest of a man who died in custody. It came out months after the officers involved were cleared of any wrongdoing, and shows them struggling with the man as he says “I can’t breathe.” One officer replies: “I don’t care.”
Nationwide, police departments have rushed to ramp up the use of body cameras, which have been hailed as a potential equalizer that would show the unvarnished truth of an encounter with officers.
But the cases in Georgia and Oklahoma highlight why the technology's benefit has come into question amid protests sparked by the killing of George Floyd and calls for sweeping changes to American law enforcement. With budget crises looming and cries to “defund the police,” some are asking whether the tens of millions of taxpayer dollars spent to outfit officers with cameras has provided the accountability and transparency expected.
Advocates and officers agree the technology’s broad adoption has been helpful, but its value is dictated by the policies and practices around its use: Cameras improve transparency when departments care about transparency.
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Stocks rally worldwide on hopes for coming economic recovery
NEW YORK (AP) — Stocks rose again Tuesday, part of a strong and worldwide rally for markets, after a big rebound in buying at U.S. stores and online raised hopes that the economy can escape its recession relatively quickly.
The S&P 500 climbed 1.9% for its third straight gain, bringing it back within 8% of its record set in February. Gains have built in recent weeks as reports bolster investor expectations that the worst of the downturn may have already passed.
Continuing, immense aid from the Federal Reserve is also supporting markets, and its chair said Tuesday that the central bank will continue to use all its tools to cushion the blow of the worst recession in decades. But trading remains very skittish across markets as worsening coronavirus trends in several global hotspots raise the possibility that all the improvements could unravel.
The S&P 500 shot to an early 2.8% gain, lost nearly all of it at one point and then rallied back. By the end of Tuesday, the index was up 58.15 points at 3,124.74.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average rose 526.82, or 2%, to 26,289.98, and the Nasdaq composite climbed 169.84, or 1.7%, to 9,895.87.
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Virginia governor to propose Juneteenth as state holiday
RICHMOND, Va. (AP) — Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam announced Tuesday that he's making Juneteenth — a day that commemorates the end of slavery in the U.S. — an official holiday in a state that was once home to the capital of the Confederacy.
Juneteenth, which is also called Emancipation Day and Freedom Day, is celebrated annually on June 19. Texas first made it a state holiday in 1980. The holiday would be a paid day off for all state employees. Northam said he thinks Virginia would be only the second state to do so.
“It’s time we elevate this,” Northam said of the June 19 commemoration. “Not just a celebration by and for some Virginians but one acknowledged and celebrated by all of us.”
The Democratic governor is giving every executive branch employee this Friday off as a paid holiday and will work with the legislature later this year to pass a law codifying Juneteenth as a permanent state holiday. The legislation is likely to pass the Democratic-controlled legislature with little trouble.
The holiday commemorates June 19, 1865, when news finally reached African Americans in Texas that President Abraham Lincoln had issued the Emancipation Proclamation freeing slaves living in Confederate states two years earlier. When Union soldiers arrived in Galveston to bring the news that slavery had been abolished, former slaves celebrated.