AP News in Brief at 6:04 a.m. EDT
Scarce medical oxygen worldwide leaves many gasping for life
CONAKRY, Guinea (AP) — Guinea’s best hope for coronavirus patients lies inside a neglected yellow shed on the grounds of its main hospital: an oxygen plant that has never been turned on.
The plant was part of a hospital renovation funded by international donors responding to the Ebola crisis in West Africa a few years ago. But the foreign technicians and supplies needed to complete the job can’t get in under Guinea’s coronavirus lockdowns — even though dozens of Chinese technicians came in on a charter flight last month to work at the country’s lucrative mines. Unlike many of Guinea’s public hospitals, the mines have a steady supply of oxygen.
As the coronavirus spreads, soaring demand for oxygen is bringing out a stark global truth: Even the right to breathe depends on money. In much of the world, oxygen is expensive and hard to get — a basic marker of inequality both between and within countries.
In wealthy Europe and North America, hospitals treat oxygen as a fundamental need, much like water or electricity. It is delivered in liquid form by tanker truck and piped directly to the beds of coronavirus patients. Running short is all but unthinkable for a resource that literally can be pulled from the air.
In Spain, as coronavirus deaths climbed, engineers laid 7 kilometers (4 miles) of tubing in less than a week to give 1,500 beds in an impromptu hospital a direct supply of pure oxygen. Oxygen is also plentiful and brings the most profits in industrial use such as mining, aerospace, electronics and construction.
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Fauci: Next few weeks critical to tamping down virus spikes
WASHINGTON (AP) — The next few weeks are critical to tamping down a disturbing coronavirus surge, Dr. Anthony Fauci told Congress on Tuesday — issuing a plea for people to avoid crowds and wear masks just hours before mask-shunning President Donald Trump was set to address a crowd of his young supporters in one hot spot.
Fauci and other top health officials also said they have not been asked to slow down virus testing, in contrast to Trump’s claim last weekend that he had ordered fewer tests be performed because they were uncovering too many infections. Trump said earlier Tuesday that he wasn't kidding when he made that remark.
“We will be doing more testing,” Fauci, infectious disease chief at the National Institutes of Health, pledged to a House committee conducting oversight of the Trump administration's response to the pandemic.
The leading public health officials spent more than five hours testifying before the committee at a fraught moment, with coronavirus cases rising in about half the states and political polarization competing for attention with public health recommendations.
Fauci told lawmakers he understands the pent-up desire to get back to normal as the U.S. begins emerging from months of stay-at-home orders and business shutdowns. But that has “to be a gradual step-by-step process and not throwing caution to the wind,” he said.
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US virus cases surge to highest level in 2 months
BEIJING (AP) — New coronavirus cases in the U.S. have surged to their highest level in two months and are now back to where they were at the peak of the outbreak.
The U.S. on Tuesday reported 34,700 new cases of the virus, according to a tally compiled by Johns Hopkins University that was published Wednesday. There have been only two previous days that the U.S. has reported more cases: April 9 and April 24, when a record 36,400 cases were logged.
New cases in the U.S. have been surging for more than a week after trending down for more than six weeks. While early hot spots like New York and New Jersey have seen cases steadily decrease, the virus has been hitting the south and west. Several states on Tuesday set single-day records, including Arizona, California, Mississippi, Nevada and Texas.
Cases were also surging in other parts of the world. India reported a record daily increase of nearly 16,000 new cases. Mexico, where testing rates have been low, also set a record with more than 6,200 new cases.
But China appears to have tamed a new outbreak of the virus in Beijing, once again demonstrating its ability to quickly mobilize vast resources by testing nearly 2.5 million people in 11 days.
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2 Republicans opposed by Trump win in Kentucky, N. Carolina
LOUISVILLE, Ky. (AP) — Voters rebuffed President Donald Trump and nominated two Republicans he opposed to House seats from North Carolina and Kentucky on Tuesday. Calls in higher-profile races in Kentucky and New York faced days of delay as swamped officials count mountains of mail-in ballots.
In western North Carolina, GOP voters picked 24-year-old investor Madison Cawthorn, who uses a wheelchair following an accident, over Trump-backed real estate agent Lynda Bennett. The runoff was for the seat vacated by GOP Rep. Mark Meadows, who resigned to become Trump's chief of staff and joined his new boss in backing Bennett.
Kentucky Republican Rep. Thomas Massie, a libertarian-minded maverick who often clashes with GOP leaders, was renominated for a sixth House term. Trump savaged Massie in March as a “disaster for America” who should be ejected from the party after he forced lawmakers to return to Washington during a pandemic to vote on a huge economic relief package.
Cawthorn, who will meet the constitutionally mandated minimum age of 25 when the next Congress convenes, has said he's a Trump supporter, and Massie is strongly conservative. Still, their victories were an embarrassment to a president whose own reelection campaign has teetered recently.
As states ease voting by mail because of the coronavirus pandemic, a deluge of mail-in ballots and glacially slow counting procedures made delays inevitable. That torturous wait seemed a preview of November, when more states will embrace mail-in voting and officials warn that uncertainty over who is the next president could linger for days.
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Police officer involved in Breonna Taylor shooting fired
LOUISVILLE, Ky. (AP) — The Louisville Metro police department has fired one of the police officers involved in the fatal shooting of Breonna Taylor, more than three months after the 26-year-old Black woman was killed in her home.
A termination letter sent to Officer Brett Hankison released by the city’s police department Tuesday said Hankinson violated procedures by showing “extreme indifference to the value of human life” when he “wantonly and blindly” shot 10 rounds of gunfire into Taylor’s apartment in March. The letter also said Hankison, who is white, violated the rule against using deadly force.
Taylor was shot eight times by officers who burst into her Louisville home using a no-knock warrant during a March 13 narcotics investigation. The warrant to search her home was in connection with a suspect who did not live there, and no drugs were found inside.
The no-knock search warrant that allows police to enter without first announcing their presence was recently banned by Louisville’s Metro Council.
The letter said Hankison fired the rounds “without supporting facts” that the deadly force was directed at a person posing an immediate threat.
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Icons of 1960s civil rights movement voice cautious optimism
CINCINNATI (AP) — Bob Moses says America is at “a lurching moment" for racial change, potentially as transforming as the Civil War era and as the 1960s civil rights movement that he helped lead.
“What we are experiencing now as a nation has only happened a couple times in our history,” said Moses, a main organizer of the 1964 “Freedom Summer” project in Mississippi. “These are moments when the whole nation is lurching, and it's not quite sure which way it's going to lurch.”
Moses, now 85 and still active with The Algebra Project he founded, was among the many people, Black and white, who risked jail time, assaults and even assassination in the battles against racial segregation and for voting rights in the South. Associated Press reporters asked some of the leaders their thoughts on the current protests across the country sparked by police slayings of Black men in Minneapolis and Atlanta.
“We have kind of the perfect storm,” said the Rev. Jesse L. Jackson, a close aide to the slain Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and leader of the Chicago-based Rainbow PUSH Coalition, an organization that fights for social change. “You've got COVID-19, you've got ‘Code Blue’ — police brutality — you have poverty, and you have Trump.”
Studies show that Black people have suffered disproportionately from the coronavirus, the resulting economic downturn and at the hands of police, and polls show most are opposed to President Donald Trump, a Republican. Jackson noted, though, it's not just Black people taking to the streets in large numbers.
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North: Kim suspended action against South for Korean impasse
SEOUL, South Korea (AP) — North Korea said Wednesday leader Kim Jong Un suspended a planned military retaliation against South Korea, in an apparent slowing of the pressure campaign it has waged against its rival amid stalled nuclear negotiations with the Trump administration.
Last week, the North had declared relations with the South as fully ruptured, destroyed an inter-Korean liaison office in its territory and threatened unspecified military action to censure Seoul for a lack of progress in bilateral cooperation and for activists floating anti-Pyongyang leaflets across the border.
Analysts say North Korea, after weeks deliberately raising tensions, may be pulling away just enough to make room for South Korean concessions.
If Kim does eventually opt for military action, he may resume artillery drills and other exercises in frontline areas or have vessels deliberately cross the disputed western maritime border between the Koreas, which has been the scene of bloody skirmishes in past years. However, any action is likely to be measured to prevent full-scale retaliation from South Korean and U.S. militaries.
Pyongyang’s official Korean Central News Agency said Kim presided by video conference over a meeting Tuesday of the ruling Workers’ Party’s Central Military Commission, which decided to postpone plans for military action against the South brought up by the North’s military leaders.
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Israeli annexation plan draws apartheid comparisons
JERUSALEM (AP) — Benjamin Pogrund spent decades battling apartheid as a journalist in South Africa. Since moving to Israel two decades ago, he has passionately defended the country against charges that it too is an apartheid state.
But at the age of 87, Pogrund is having second thoughts. He says that if Israel moves ahead with plans to annex parts of the West Bank, he will have no choice but to declare that his adopted homeland has become a modern-day version of apartheid-era South Africa.
“There will be Israeli overlords in an occupied area. And the people over whom they will be ruling will not have basic rights,” Pogrund said in an interview in his leafy backyard garden. "That will be apartheid. And we will merit the charge. And that is something that worries me gravely because it exposes us to huge dangers.”
Pogrund, a prolific author who is working on a new book about South African political history, says he feels so despondent he's been unable to write about looming annexation.
"I couldn’t bring myself to do it. Quite frankly, I just feel so bleak about it, that it is so stupid and ill-advised and arrogant,” he said.
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Plastic keeps virus, not love away from Spain nursing home
BARCELONA, Spain (AP) — Even when it comes wrapped in plastic, a hug can convey tenderness, relief, love and devotion.
The fear that gripped Agustina Cañamero during the 102 days she and her 84-year-old husband spent physically separated during Spain's coronavirus outbreak dissolved the moment the couple embraced through a screen of plastic film.
Pascual Pérez, her husband, lives at a nursing home in Barcelona, one of the many that locked out visitors to try to shield their residents as the coronavirus killed so many elderly Spaniards.
Cañamero, 81, stayed during the country's nationwide lockdown at the home she and Pérez used to share. During their 59 years of marriage, the couple had never spent so many days apart.
So when the Ballesol Puig i Fabra nursing home allowed visits to resume with the addition of protective screens, Cañamero was among the first to arrive. The husband and wife kissed for minutes through the thin layer of plastic — and their face masks.
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The Arctic is on fire: Siberian heat wave alarms scientists
MOSCOW (AP) — The Arctic is feverish and on fire — at least parts of it are. And that’s got scientists worried about what it means for the rest of the world.
The thermometer hit a likely record of 38 degrees Celsius (100.4 degrees Fahrenheit) in the Russian Arctic town of Verkhoyansk on Saturday, a temperature that would be a fever for a person — but this is Siberia, known for being frozen. The World Meteorological Organization said Tuesday that it’s looking to verify the temperature reading, which would be unprecedented for the region north of the Arctic Circle.
“The Arctic is figuratively and literally on fire — it’s warming much faster than we thought it would in response to rising levels of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, and this warming is leading to a rapid meltdown and increase in wildfires,” University of Michigan environmental school dean Jonathan Overpeck, a climate scientist, said in an email.
“The record warming in Siberia is a warning sign of major proportions,” Overpeck wrote.
Much of Siberia had high temperatures this year that were beyond unseasonably warm. From January through May, the average temperature in north-central Siberia has been about 8 degrees Celsius (14 degrees Fahrenheit) above average, according to the climate science non-profit Berkeley Earth.