AP News in Brief at 6:04 p.m. EDT

Takeaways: Pardon power, silent mics on Barrett's final day

WASHINGTON (AP) — Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett faced a second day of questions Wednesday from the Senate Judiciary Committee as Democrats kept up their focus on health care three weeks before the Nov. 3 presidential election.

Barrett again avoided taking positions on a variety of subjects and rulings, saying it would be inappropriate to comment on cases that may come before her as a justice. Republicans appear on track to push ahead with her confirmation before the election.

Takeaways from Day Three of the hearing:

HEALTH CARE PLAYS A STARRING ROLE — AGAIN

Democrats again pressed Barrett over her views on the Affordable Care Act, noting that President Donald Trump has made clear he wishes to undo the Obama-era health law. Democrats say Trump and Senate Republicans are rushing to confirm Barrett so she can be seated in time to hear a case next month challenging that law.

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Trump tries to shore up support from big business, Iowans

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump on Wednesday sought to shore up support from constituencies that not so long ago he thought he had in the bag: big business and voters in the red state of Iowa.

In a morning address to business leaders, he expressed puzzlement that they would even consider supporting his Democratic challenger, Joe Biden, arguing that his own leadership was a better bet for a strong economy. The president was set to campaign later in the day in Iowa, a state he won handily in 2016 but where Biden is making a late push.

Biden, for his part, held a virtual fundraiser from Wilmington, Delaware, and was delivering pretaped remarks to American Muslims in the evening. He did not have any public campaign events scheduled, unusual for just 20 days out from Election Day.

The Democratic nominee used his appearance at the fundraiser to say that Trump was trying to rush through Amy Coney Barrett, his nominee for the Supreme Court, to help his efforts to repeal the Obama health care law, calling that “an abuse of power.”

Biden was expected to spend much of the day preparing for a town-hall-style TV appearance in battleground Pennsylvania on Thursday, which was to have been the night of the second presidential debate.

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Extra safety scrutiny planned as virus vaccine worries grow

Facing public skepticism about rushed COVID-19 vaccines, U.S. health officials are planning extra scrutiny of the first people vaccinated when shots become available — an added safety layer experts call vital.

A new poll suggests those vaccine fears are growing. With this week's pause of a second major vaccine study because of an unexplained illness — and repeated tweets from President Donald Trump that raise the specter of politics overriding science — a quarter of Americans say they won't get vaccinated. That's a slight increase from 1 in 5 in May.

The poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research found only 46% of Americans want a COVID-19 vaccine and another 29% are unsure.

More striking, while Black Americans have been especially hard-hit by COVID-19, just 22% say they plan to get vaccinated compared with 48% of white Americans, the AP-NORC poll found.

“I am very concerned about hesitancy regarding COVID vaccine,” said Dr. William Schaffner, a vaccine specialist at Vanderbilt University who says even the primary care doctors who'll need to recommend vaccinations have questions.

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History, mistrust spurring Black early voters in Georgia

SAVANNAH, Ga. (AP) — They came by the thousands to vote early, descendants of slaves, children of the civil rights era and other Georgians standing in line for hours when all could have been somewhere else.

Yet in a year when issues including prejudice, racial justice and voter suppression are at the forefront, the Black voters saw giving up time to cast a ballot for the next U.S. president as worth the trade - even early in the voting process and during a pandemic that made merely going to a polling place a risky act.

Still waiting three hours after she showed up to vote in Savannah on Wednesday, Khani Morgan, 75, wasn't taking any chances with her health months after suffering a stroke: she wore a mask and a plastic shield that covered her entire face.

But Morgan said the importance of voting was drilled into her as a girl by great-grandmother Sally Williams, who was born a slave in 1850 and lived to be more than 100. Morgan felt compelled to vote early to register her support for Democrat Joe Biden over President Donald Trump.

“I won’t let anything get in the way of me and this opportunity,” said Morgan, who coordinates an adult literacy program.

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Pennsylvania becomes a battleground over election security

HARRISBURG, Pa. (AP) — For anxiety over voting and ballot counting in this year’s presidential election, it’s hard to top Pennsylvania.

Election officials in Philadelphia, home to one-fifth of the state's Democratic voters, have been sued by President Donald Trump’s campaign, blasted by the president as overseeing a place “where bad things happen” and forced to explain security measures after a theft from a warehouse full of election equipment.

Add to that an investigation into military ballots that were mistakenly discarded in one swing county, partisan sniping in the state Capitol over the processing of what is expected to be an avalanche of mailed-in ballots and an 11th hour attempt by Republican lawmakers to create an election integrity commission.

One of the most hotly contested presidential battleground states is trying to conduct a pandemic election in a hyper-partisan environment where every move related to the voting process faces unrelenting scrutiny from both sides. State and local election officials say they are doing all they can to make sure Pennsylvania doesn’t end up like Florida two decades ago, when the last drawn-out presidential tally ended before the U.S. Supreme Court.

“For years, we have trusted our election officials to be reliable and nonpartisan. Why should we suddenly not trust them?” said Eileen Olmsted with the League of Women Voters of Pennsylvania, a nonpartisan organization that advocates to expand access to voting. “A lot of this is based on the perception of voter fraud, which there is absolutely no evidence of.”

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Census whiplashed by changing deadlines, accuracy concerns

Shortly after the Supreme Court ruled that the Trump administration can end the 2020 census, a text message went out to field supervisors in Northern California telling them to start collecting the iPhones their census takers use for gathering household information during their door-knocking.

It was the fifth time in two months that they were given a new end date — this one Thursday — for the head count of everyone living in the U.S.

The Supreme Court decision Tuesday was just the latest case of whiplash for the census, which has faced starts and stops from the pandemic, natural disasters and court rulings, as well as confusion over when it was going to end and questions over whether minorities, immigrants, poor people and others would be counted accurately.

Minority groups have historically been undercounted in the once-a-decade census that determines how many congressional seats each state gets, as well as how $1.5 trillion in federal spending is distributed each year, and advocates said the two-week-shorter schedule will make that even worse.

“The Trump administration is acting out of fear. They fear a future America where we are majority minority. They don’t want to see the power shift,” Meeta Anand, a fellow at the New York Immigration Coalition, said Wednesday. “They will ignore the rules. They will do everything they can to make sure the true nature of our society is not reflected.”

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Month after mass shooting, Rochester seeks answers, suspects

ROCHESTER, N.Y. (AP) — It's the big question looming over one of this year's bloodiest mass shootings: Who opened fire at a crowded house party in Rochester, New York, on the last weekend of summer, killing two teenagers and wounding 14 other people?

Nearly a month a fter gunshots rang out just after midnight on Sept. 19, there have been no arrests, no rewards offered and little word from authorities on where the investigation stands. If the police have suspects in mind, they haven't said so publicly. Nor have they told people who lost loved ones or were wounded themselves.

“I’m sure they’ll figure something out, but I don’t really know what information they have or anything else — what evidence they found on the scene," said Emar Bouie, a 23-year-old recent college graduate who still struggles with movement in the arm where he was shot.

Rochester, a post-industrial city of about 206,000 people on the shores of Lake Erie, is still reeling from the revelation last month that police officers killed a Black man, Daniel Prude, in March by pressing him into the ground until he stopped breathing. City officials stoked outrage by staying quiet about the death for months.

Prude's death exacerbated residents' mistrust of the police department. The shooting — which ended the lives of Jaquayla Young and Jarvis Alexander, both 19 — has only added to the city's collective pain.

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AP Road Trip: Racial tensions in America's 'sundown towns'

VIENNA, Ill. (AP) — Ask around this time-battered Midwestern town, with its empty storefronts, dusty antique shops and businesses that have migrated toward the interstate, and nearly everyone will tell you that Black and white residents get along really well.

“Race isn’t a big problem around here,” said Bill Stevens, a white retired prison guard with a gentle smile, drinking beer with friends on a summer afternoon. “Never has been, really.”

“We don’t have any trouble with racism,” said a twice-widowed woman, also white, with a meticulously-kept yard and a white picket fence.

But in Vienna, as in hundreds of mostly white towns with similar histories across America, much is left unspoken. Around here, almost no one talks openly about the violence that drove out Black residents nearly 70 years ago, or even whispers the name these places were given: “sundown towns.”

Unless they’re among the handful of Black residents.

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Earth breaks September heat record, may reach warmest year

Earth sweltered to a record hot September last month, with U.S. climate officials saying there’s nearly a two-to-one chance that 2020 will end up as the globe’s hottest year on record.

Boosted by human-caused climate change, global temperatures averaged 60.75 degrees (15.97 Celsius) last month, edging out 2015 and 2016 for the hottest September in 141 years of recordkeeping, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said Wednesday. That’s 1.75 degrees (0.97 degrees Celsius) above the 20th century average.

This record was driven by high heat in Europe, Northern Asia, Russia and much of the Southern Hemisphere, said NOAA climatologist Ahira Sanchez-Lugo. California and Oregon had their hottest Septembers on record.

Earth has had 44 straight Septembers where it has been warmer than the 20th century average and 429 straight months without a cooler than normal month, according to NOAA. The hottest seven Septembers on record have been the last seven.

That means “that no millennial or even parts of Gen-X has lived through a cooler than normal September,” said North Carolina state climatologist Kathie Dello, herself a millennial.

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Vision 2020: Will mailed-in ballots be delivered on time?

Can you trust the U.S. Postal Service to deliver your ballot on time?

If you plan on voting by mail, election officials say it's best to do it as early as possible so your ballot gets to its destination well before Election Day, which is Nov. 3.

Postal officials have repeatedly said the agency has more than enough capacity to handle the surge of ballots this fall, and its leaders have committed to prioritizing election mail. But on-time delivery rates vary widely depending on where you live, and the service has been falling short of its internal goals to deliver all first-class mail within five days.

On top of that, each state has different rules on whether it accepts mail ballots that arrive after Election Day. Some policies are the subject of court cases and could change before Nov. 3, so voters should check with their local election officials if they're unsure.

All that is to say, the earlier you mail your ballot, the better.