AP News in Brief at 6:04 p.m. EDT
'So frustrating': Grave missteps seen in US virus response
NEW YORK (AP) — A president who downplayed the coronavirus threat, scorned masks and undercut scientists at every turn. Governors who resisted or rolled back containment measures amid public backlash. State lawmakers who used federal COVID-19 aid to plug budget holes instead of beefing up testing and contact tracing.
As a powerful new wave of infections sweeps the U.S. just ahead of Election Day, the nation's handling of the nearly 8-month-old crisis has been marked by what health experts see as grave missteps, wasted time and squandered opportunities by leaders at all levels of government.
The result: The country could be looking at a terrible winter.
“The inconsistency of the response is what’s been so frustrating,” said Dr. Irwin Redlener of the National Center for Disaster Preparedness at Columbia University. “If we had just been disciplined about employing all these public health methods early and aggressively, we would not be in the situation we are in now.”
Though Redlener sees some of the new wave as inevitable, he estimates at least 130,000 of the nation's more than 227,000 deaths could have been avoided had the country more widely embraced masks and social distancing.
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As virus surges, Trump rallies keep packing in thousands
WASHINGTON (AP) — There are no crowds at Disneyland, still shut down by the coronavirus. Fewer fans attended the World Series this year than at any time in the past century. Big concerts are canceled.
But it's a different story in Trumpland. Thousands of President Donald Trump's supporters regularly cram together at campaign rallies around the country — masks optional and social distancing frowned upon.
Trump rallies are among the nation's biggest events being held in defiance of crowd restrictions designed to stop the virus from spreading. This at a time when public health experts are advising people to think twice even about inviting many guests for Thanksgiving dinner.
“It doesn’t matter who you are or where you are, when you have congregate settings where people are crowded together and virtually no one is wearing a mask, that’s a perfect setup to have an outbreak of acquisition and transmissibility,” Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation's top infectious disease expert, recently told Yahoo News. “It's a public health and scientific fact.”
The Trump campaign, which distributes masks and hand sanitizer at its rallies, says those who attend are peaceful protesters who, just like Black Lives Matter demonstrators, have a right to assemble. The president says he wants to get the country back to normal.
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Surge in virus threatens to reverse global economic rebounds
WASHINGTON (AP) — The resurgence of coronavirus cases engulfing the United States and Europe is imperiling economic recoveries on both sides of the Atlantic as millions of individuals and businesses face the prospect of having to hunker down once again.
Growing fear of an economic reversal coincided with a report Thursday that the U.S. economy grew at a record 33.1% annual rate in the July-September quarter. Even with that surge, the world’s largest economy has yet to fully rebound from its plunge in spring when the virus first erupted. And now the economy is slowing just as new confirmed viral cases accelerate and rescue aid from Washington has dried up.
If many consumers and companies choose — or are forced — to retrench again in response to the virus as they did in the spring, the pullback in spending and hiring could derail economic growth. Already, in the United and Europe, some governments are re-imposing restrictions to help stem the spread of the virus.
In Chicago, where Gov. J.B. Pritzker of Illinois has banned indoor dining and drinking, Grant DePorter, who runs Harry Caray’s Restaurant Group, worries that the blow to restaurants and their employees could be severe.
When indoor dining was first shut down in the spring, he noted, employees could get by thanks to a $600-a-week federal unemployment benefit. That benefit has expired.
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French prosecutor: Nice killer of 3 got to France from Italy
NICE, France (AP) — A man armed with a knife attacked people inside a French church and killed three Thursday, prompting the government to raise its security alert to the maximum level hours before a nationwide coronavirus lockdown.
The attack in Mediterranean city of Nice was the third in two months that French authorities have attributed to Muslim extremists, including the beheading of a teacher who had shown caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad in class after the images were republished by a satirical newspaper targeted in a 2015 attack.
The assailant in Thursday's attack was seriously wounded by police and hospitalized after the killings at the Notre Dame Basilica, which is located half-mile (less than a kilometer) from the site in 2016 where another attacker plowed a truck into a Bastille Day crowd, killing dozens of people.
France’s anti-terrorism prosecutor says the suspect is a Tunisian born in 1999 who arrived in Italy by reaching the Mediterranean island of Lanpedusa on Sept. 20 and traveled to Paris on Oct. 9. He was carrying a copy of Islam’s holy book, the Quran, and had a bag with two unused knives, prosecutor Jean-Francois Ricard told a press conference late Thursday.
A bag with his personal affairs also was found containing two unused knives. the prosecutor said. He said the attacker, was not the radar of intelligence agencies as a potential threat.
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Trump tests limits as Cabinet members fan out to key states
WASHINGTON (AP) — Education Secretary Betsy DeVos planned a “Moms for Trump” rally in her home state of Michigan. The Department of Homeland Security's top official was in Texas to celebrate completion of a section of the U.S.-Mexico border wall. The chief of the Environmental Protection Agency headed to North Carolina after visiting Georgia the day before.
That was just Thursday.
Members of President Donald Trump’s Cabinet are logging extra miles as mostly unofficial campaign surrogates in crucial states in the final days before Tuesday's election, blending politics and policy in ways that critics say skirt established norms and may even violate the law.
It's long been one of the benefits of incumbency that a president can enlist his Cabinet to promote administration accomplishments. But only to a point, with a law on the books since 1939 requiring a division between political and official activities for all federal employees except the president and vice president.
“The Trump administration has completely obliterated that line," said Austin Evers, executive director of American Oversight, which describes itself as a nonpartisan watchdog organization. "The White House is now the seat of government, where the president lives, and one of his chief campaign props. And that erosion of norms has spread throughout the entire administration.”
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Harris target of more misinformation than Pence, data shows
CHICAGO (AP) — Long before Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden announced her as his running mate, Kamala Harris was the target of widespread online misinformation.
Social media posts included racist claims that she was ineligible to serve in the White House or that she was lying about her Black and Indian heritage. Her mother is from India and her father from Jamaica.
Since being named to the presidential ticket, Harris has been at the center of online misinformation campaigns far more often — four times as much — than the white men who campaigned for the same job, according to a report from media intelligence firm Zignal Labs shared exclusively with The Associated Press.
“The narratives related to Kamala Harris zeroed in much more on her personal identity, especially as a woman of color,” said Jennifer Granston, head of insights at Zignal Labs.
The firm identified more than 1 million mentions since June on Twitter of Harris with hashtags or terms associated with misinformation about her. The mentions include fact checks that rebuffed the falsehoods, but those made up only a small portion of that conversation.
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Zeta buffets Southeast after swamping Gulf Coast; 6 dead
ATLANTA (AP) — Millions of people were without power and at least six were dead Thursday after Hurricane Zeta slammed into Louisiana and made a beeline across the South, leaving shattered buildings, thousands of downed trees and fresh anguish over a record-setting hurricane season.
From the bayous of the Gulf Coast to Atlanta and beyond, Southerners used to dealing with dangerous weather were left to pick up the pieces once again just days ahead of an election in which early voting continued despite the storm.
In Atlanta and New Orleans, drivers dodged trees in roads and navigated intersections without traffic signals. In Lakeshore, Mississippi, Ray Garcia returned home to find a shrimp boat washed up and resting against its pilings
"I don’t even know if insurance is going to pay for this,” Garcia said. “I don’t know what this boat has done.”
As many as 2.6 million homes and businesses lost power across seven states, but the lights were coming back on slowly. The sun came out and temperatures cooled, but trees were still swaying as the storm's remnants blew through.
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Report: US knew of problems family separation would cause
HOUSTON (AP) — Months before the Trump administration separated thousands of families at the U.S.-Mexico border, a “pilot program” in Texas left child-welfare officials scrambling to find empty beds for babies taken from their parents in a preview of bigger problems to come, according to a report released Thursday by congressional Democrats.
Documents in the report suggest Health and Human Services officials weren't told by the Department of Homeland Security why shelters were receiving more children taken from their parents in late 2017. It has since been revealed that DHS was operating a pilot program in El Paso, Texas, that prosecuted parents for crossing the border illegally and took their children away to HHS shelters.
“We had a shortage last night of beds for babies,” Jonathan White, a top HHS official, wrote in a Nov. 11, 2017, email. He added: “Overall, infant placements seem to be climbing over recent weeks, and we think that’s due to more separations from mothers by CBP.”
The problems revealed by the pilot program presaged what would happen months later: government employees caring for babies and young children in so-called tender age shelters and many parents being deported without their kids. The consequences linger today: Lawyers working to reunite immigrant families have said they can’t reach the deported parents of 545 children who were separated as early as July 2017.
Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee released the report Thursday with emails obtained from government agencies. It comes shortly before Election Day as Democrats campaign against the Trump administration's family separations, which stirred widespread outcry as part of its “zero tolerance" crackdown on illegal border crossings.
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Road trip: In Mississippi, love in the time of coronavirus
JACKSON, Miss. (AP) — Her voice cracked as she spoke from her hospital bed. “I want to go home,” she pleaded.
More than 40 miles away, her husband sat in their living room, looking intently into his phone as they spoke on a video call, trying to soothe her. Bonnie Bishop had been in the hospital since early July. She’d been on a ventilator. She’d had surgery to put a tube down her throat. She’d been in a coma for six weeks. Sometimes, it was just too much, and on this October evening, she started to weep silently.
“You are coming home,” Mike Bishop, 63, said firmly. He seemed to be speaking as much to himself as to his wife. “You know you are.”
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This is a love story.
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San Francisco curbs virus but once-vibrant downtown is empty
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Before the pandemic, Señor Sisig food trucks were a common sight in downtown San Francisco, dishing out Filipino fusion tacos and burritos to long lines of workers who spilled out of office towers at lunch.
The trucks now are gone, forced into the suburbs because there’s practically no one around to feed in the city's center.
As the coronavirus pandemic transforms San Francisco's workplace, legions of tech workers have left, able to work remotely from anywhere. Families have fled for roomy suburban homes with backyards. The exodus has pushed rents in the prohibitively expensive city to their lowest in years. Tourists are scarce, and the famed cable cars sit idle.
The food trucks, like many other businesses, are wondering when things will bounce back.
“Is it ever going to get back to normal, is it ever going to be as busy as it was — and will that be next year, or in 10 years?” said Evan Kidera, CEO of Señor Sisig.