AP News in Brief at 6:04 p.m. EDT
A senior warning sign for Trump: 'Go Biden' cry at Villages
THE VILLAGES, Fla. (AP) — Sara Branscome’s golf cart whizzed down the smooth asphalt path that winds through The Villages, the nation’s largest retirement community, an expanse of beautiful homes, shops and entertainment venues that bills itself as “Florida’s Friendliest Hometown.”
Branscome’s cart was festooned with two American flags that flapped in the warm afternoon breeze. A line of oncoming carts bedecked with balloons and patriotic streamers chugged past while honking. Branscome jabbed her left foot on the horn pedal, then gave a thumbs-up.
“This gets you rejuvenated and ready for the next month or so, so we can do this and win. It gives you hope,” the 60-year-old retiree said.
Then she let out a whoop and two surprising words: “Go Biden!”
It’s not a cry that might be expected to resound in The Villages, and it’s certainly not one that is encouraging to President Donald Trump. Older voters helped propel him to the White House — the Pew Research Center estimates Trump led among voters 65 and older by 9 percentage points in 2016 — and his campaign hoped they would be a bulwark to cement a second term.
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Trump makes 1st public appearance since his hospital stay
WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump on Saturday made his first public appearance after being hospitalized for the coronavirus, defying public health guidelines to speak to a crowd of hundreds even as the White House refused to declare that he was not contagious.
Trump took off a mask moments after he emerged on the White House balcony to address the crowd on the lawn below, his first step back onto the public stage with just more than three weeks to go until Election Day. He flouted, once more, the safety recommendations of his own government just days after acknowledging that he was on the brink of “bad things" from the virus and claiming that his bout with the illness brought him a better understanding of it.
And five days after Trump returned from Walter Reed Medical Center, his health remained a mystery as White House officials refused to reveal if he had tested negative or if he was still at risk of spreading the virus.
His return was a brief one.
With bandages visible on his hands, likely from an intravenous injection, Trump spoke for 18 minutes, far less than at his normal hour-plus rallies. He appeared healthy, if perhaps a little hoarse, as he delivered what was, for all intents and purposes, a short version of his campaign speech despite the executive mansion setting.
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Biden hits Trump on economy in critical Pennsylvania county
ERIE, Pa. (AP) — With the backdrop of a union facility in a key battleground county of Pennsylvania, Joe Biden on Saturday blistered President Donald Trump as only pretending to care about the working-class voters who helped flip the Rust Belt to the Republican column four years ago.
“Anyone who actually does an honest day’s work sees him and his promises for what they are,” Biden told a masked, socially distanced crowd at a training facility for plumbers and other tradespeople.
The Democratic challenger has hammered Trump on the economy in recent weeks, from sweeping indictments of how the president has downplayed the novel coronavirus and its economic fallout to a withering personal contrast between Biden’s middle-class upbringing with that of the multimillionaire's son and self-proclaimed billionaire.
Nowhere could Biden’s arguments prove more decisive than in Erie County. Long a Democratic bastion, it was among the most populous counties in the nation to flip from the Democratic column to Republicans in 2016.
Trump outpaced Democrat Hillary Clinton by almost 12,000 votes, four years after President Barack Obama led Republican Mitt Romney by 19,000 votes. That accounted for a net 31,000-vote swing in a state that Trump won by about 44,000 votes. Trump was the first Republican presidential nominee to carry Erie since President Ronald Reagan's landslide reelection in 1984 and the first GOP standard-bearer to win Pennsylvania since George Bush's election in 1998.
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Delta adds insult to injury in hurricane-ravaged Louisiana
LAKE CHARLES, La. (AP) — The day after Hurricane Delta blew through besieged southern Louisiana, residents started the routine again: dodging overturned cars, trudging through knee-deep water to flooded homes with ruined floors and no power, and pledging to rebuild after the storm.
Delta made landfall Friday evening near the coastal Louisiana town of Creole with top winds of 100 mph (155 kph). It then moved over Lake Charles, a city where Hurricane Laura damaged nearly every home and building in late August. No deaths had been reported as of Saturday afternoon, but officials said people were not out of danger.
While Delta was a weaker storm than Category 4 Laura, it brought significantly more flooding, Lake Charles Mayor Nic Hunter said. He estimated that hundreds of already battered homes across the city took on water. The recovery from the double impact will be long, the mayor said.
“Add Laura and Delta together and it’s just absolutely unprecedented and catastrophic,” Hunter said. “We are very concerned that with everything going in the country right now that this incident may not be on the radar nationally like it should be.”
Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards said no fatalities had been reported as of Saturday, but a hurricane’s wake can be treacherous. Only seven of the 32 deaths in Louisiana and Texas attributed to Laura came the day that hurricane struck. A leading cause of the others was carbon monoxide poisoning from generators used in buildings without electricity.
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Specter of election chaos raises questions on military role
WASHINGTON (AP) — It's a question Americans are unaccustomed to considering in a presidential election campaign: Could voting, vote-counting or the post-vote reaction become so chaotic that the U.S. military would intervene?
The answer is yes, but only in an extreme case. There is normally no need for the military to play any role in an election. The Constitution keeps the military in a narrow lane — defending the United States from external enemies. Civil order is left largely to civilian police. But there is an obscure law, the Insurrection Act, that theoretically could thrust the active-duty military into a police-like role. And governors have the ability to use the National Guard in state emergencies if needed.
The potential use of troops, either active duty or National Guard, at the polls or in post-election unrest has been discussed by governors and military leaders. The possibilities arise as President Donald Trump asserts without evidence that mail-in balloting will create election fraud and suggests that he might not accept an election loss. Stationing troops at polling places on Election Day — even if just to protect citizens as they vote — raises worries about voter intimidation.
Here are some questions and answers about possible military involvement in the election:
WHY WOULDN'T THE MILITARY GET INVOLVED?
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Lesson not learned: Europe unprepared as 2nd virus wave hits
ROME (AP) — Europe’s second wave of coronavirus infections has struck well before flu season even started, with intensive care wards filling up again and bars shutting down. Making matters worse, authorities say, is a widespread case of “COVID-fatigue.”
Record high daily infections in several eastern European countries and sharp rebounds in the hard-hit west have made clear that Europe never really crushed the COVID-19 curve as hoped, after springtime lockdowns.
Spain this week declared a state of emergency for Madrid amid increasing tensions between local and national authorities over virus containment measures. Germany offered up soldiers to help with contact tracing in newly flaring hotspots. Italy mandated masks outdoors and warned that for the first time since the country became the European epicenter of the pandemic, the health system was facing “significant critical issues” as hospitals fill up.
The Czech Republic’s “Farewell Covid” party in June, when thousands of Prague residents dined outdoors at a 500-meter (yard) long table across the Charles Bridge to celebrate their victory over the virus, seems painfully naive now that the country has the highest per-capita infection rate on the continent, at 398 per 100,000 residents.
“I have to say clearly that the situation is not good," the Czech interior minister, Jan Hamacek, acknowledged this week.
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No 'dogma': Democrats walk tightrope on Barrett's faith
WASHINGTON (AP) — “The dogma lives loudly within you.”
It's that utterance from California Sen. Dianne Feinstein, the top Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, that's on the minds of Democrats and Republicans preparing for this coming week's hearings with Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett.
Feinstein’s 2017 remarks as she questioned Barrett — then a nominee for an appeals court — about the influence of Barrett's Catholic faith on her judicial views sparked bipartisan backlash, contributing to the former law professor’s quick rise as a conservative judicial star.
Three years later, Barrett is back before senators as President Donald Trump’s nominee to replace the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. The nomination poses a politically risky test for lawmakers as they try to probe Barrett's views on issues of abortion, health care access and gay marriage without running afoul of the Constitution’s prohibition against a religious test for public officials.
“Her religion is immaterial,” said Sen. Mazie Hirono, D-Hawaii, but it’s not out of bounds to question “the views themselves that she has articulated.”
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White House virus aid offer is panned by Pelosi, Senate GOP
WASHINGTON (AP) — A new White House coronavirus aid offer got bad reviews from both ends of the political spectrum on Saturday.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., rejected the most generous Trump administration plan to date as “one step forward, two steps back." The Republicans who control the Senate dismissed it as too expensive and a political loser for conservatives.
Pelosi said she is still hopeful that progress can be made toward a deal but it's as clear as ever that GOP conservatives don't want a deal on her terms.
The White House had boosted its offer before Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and Pelosi spoke on Friday afternoon. President Donald Trump is eager for an agreement before Election Day, even as his most powerful GOP ally in the Senate said Congress is unlikely to deliver relief by then.
“Covid Relief Negotiations are moving along. Go Big!” Trump said Friday on Twitter.
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Men accused in plot on Michigan governor attended protests
LANSING, Mich. (AP) — Among the armed protesters who rallied at the Michigan Capitol against Gov. Gretchen Whitmer's coronavirus lockdown this past spring were some of the men now accused in stunning plots to kidnap her, storm the Capitol and start a “civil war.”
The revelation has sparked scrutiny of rallies that were organized by conservative groups opposed to the Democratic governor's orders and egged on by President Donald Trump. It has also prompted renewed calls from Democrats for a gun ban in the building — an effort that so far has failed even after they reported feeling threatened by rifle-carrying protesters who entered the Statehouse.
At least one man accused of aiding in the surveillance of Whitmer's home as part of the alleged scheme to kidnap her stood in the Senate gallery on April 30 as majority Republicans refused to extend an emergency declaration that was the underpinning of Whitmer's stay-at-home and other restrictions aimed at slowing the spread of the COVID-19 virus. “Several” of the 13 men arrested in the plots against the state government were seen at Capitol protests this year, the state attorney general's office said.
A man whom the FBI identified in court papers as a leader in the alleged plot, Adam Fox, attended an “American Patriot” pro-gun rights rally at the Capitol on June 18 to recruit members of anti-government paramilitary groups to attack the Statehouse, according to a federal complaint that cites a recording from a confidential informant.
“I’m not surprised — and anyone who is just hasn’t been paying attention," Whitmer told The Associated Press by phone on Friday. There have been Republican lawmakers and at least one sheriff at the protests, she said, "who fraternize with these domestic terror groups, who egg them on, who encourage them, who use language that incites them. They too are complicit.”
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Armenia, Azerbaijan say Nagorno-Karabakh truce violated
MOSCOW (AP) — Armenia and Azerbaijan agreed to a Russia-brokered cease-fire in Nagorno-Karabakh starting Saturday, but immediately accused each other of derailing the deal intended to end the worst outbreak of hostilities in the separatist region in more than a quarter-century.
The two sides traded blame for breaking the truce that took effect at noon (0800 GMT) with new attacks, and Azerbaijan's top diplomat said the truce never entered force.
The cease-fire announcement came overnight after 10 hours of talks in Moscow sponsored by Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov. The deal stipulated that the cease-fire should pave the way for talks on settling the conflict.
If the truce holds, it would mark a major diplomatic coup for Russia, which has a security pact with Armenia but also cultivated warm ties with Azerbaijan. But the agreement was immediately challenged by mutual claims of violations.
Minutes after the truce took force, the Armenian military accused Azerbaijan of shelling the area near the town of Kapan in southeastern Armenia, killing one civilian. Azerbaijan’s Defense Ministry rejected the Armenian accusations as a “provocation.”