AP News in Brief at 6:04 p.m. EDT
Dueling versions of reality define 1st week of fall campaign
NEW YORK (AP) — On the campaign trail with President Donald Trump, the pandemic is largely over, the economy is roaring back, and murderous mobs are infiltrating America's suburbs.
With Democrat Joe Biden, the pandemic is raging, the economy isn't lifting the working class, and systemic racism threatens Black lives across America.
The first week of the fall sprint to Election Day crystallized dizzyingly different versions of reality as the Republican incumbent and his Democratic challenger trekked from Washington and Delaware to Wisconsin and Pennsylvania and back, each man on an urgent mission to sell his particular message to anxious voters.
All the conflicting messages carry at least a sliver of truth, some much more than others, as the candidates fight to navigate one of the most turbulent election seasons in modern history. And beyond legitimate crises threatening public health, the economy and public safety, a new divide erupted Friday over the military.
Trump aggressively denied allegations reported late Thursday that in 2018, he described U.S. service members killed in World War I and buried at an American military cemetery in France as “losers” and “suckers." The report, sourced anonymously by The Atlantic and largely confirmed by The Associated Press, comes as Trump tries to win support from military members and their families by highlighting a commitment to veterans' health care and military spending.
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Biden slams Trump over alleged comments mocking US war dead
WASHINGTON (AP) — Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden declared President Donald Trump “unfit” for the presidency on Friday, delivering an impassioned reaction to a report that Trump — who never served in uniform — allegedly mocked American war dead.
The president and his allies have dismissed the report in The Atlantic as false.
The allegations, sourced anonymously, describe multiple offensive comments by the president toward fallen and captured U.S. service-members, including calling World War I dead at an American military cemetery in France as “losers” and “suckers” in 2018.
The reported comments, many of which were confirmed independently by the AP, are shining a fresh light on Trump’s previous public disparagement of American troops and military families. That opens a new political vulnerability for the president less than two months from Election Day.
Voice cracking, Biden told reporters that “you know in your gut” Trump’s comments, if true, are “deplorable.”
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Suspect in Portland protest killing dies in hail of gunfire
LACEY, Wash. (AP) — A man who said he believed a civil war was coming to America and was suspected of killing a right-wing protester in Portland, Oregon, died in a hail of police gunfire in neighboring Washington state, officials and witnesses said.
The killing of Michael Forest Reinoehl shook a quiet suburb of Olympia, Washington Thursday evening, with bystanders ducking for cover behind automobiles from dozens of gunshots as four agents serving on a U.S. Marshals Service task force opened fire at Reinoehl.
Reinoehl, 48, was armed with a semi-automatic handgun but authorities have not determined if he fired any shots, said Lt. Ray Brady of the Thurston County Sheriff’s Department.
A video shot during the immediate aftermath showed a man lying motionless on a street next to a row of mailboxes with law enforcement officers in tactical gear and automatic rifles milling around. After a couple of minutes, one man performed chest compressions on Reinoehl.
“Yeah, I don't think he's going to make it,” Jashon Spencer narrated on the video that he posted on Facebook showing the scene that unfolded in front of a small apartment complex.
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US unemployment rate falls to 8.4% even as hiring slows
WASHINGTON (AP) — U.S. unemployment dropped sharply in August from 10.2% to a still-high 8.4%, with about half the 22 million jobs lost to the coronavirus outbreak recovered so far, the government said Friday in one of the last major economic reports before Election Day.
Employers added 1.4 million jobs last month, down from 1.7 million in July and the fewest since hiring resumed in May. And an increasingly large share of Americans reported that their jobs are gone for good, according to the Labor Department report.
Altogether, that was seen by economists as evidence that further improvement is going to be sluggish and uneven.
“The fact that employment is settling into a trend of slower, grinding growth is worrisome for the broader recovery,” said Lydia Boussour, an economist at Oxford Economics.
Still, President Donald Trump, who is seeking reelection in less than two months amid the worst economic downturn since the Depression in the 1930s, exulted over the latest unemployment figure, saying, "That is many, many months ahead of schedule.”
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In Barr, Trump has powerful ally for challenging mail voting
WASHINGTON (AP) — As President Donald Trump sows doubt about the legitimacy of the 2020 election, he’s found a powerful partner in Attorney General William Barr.
Like Trump, Barr has repeatedly sounded alarms about the November vote despite a lack of evidence pointing to pervasive problems with the process.
That’s important — and worrisome to Democrats — because Barr is no ordinary Cabinet member. As head of the Justice Department, he can shape investigations into election interference and voting fraud. Though the department doesn't oversee elections, it could inject itself into court fights over disputed contests. And any statements from America’s top law enforcement officer questioning election results could further shake public confidence in the vote at a time of widespread disinformation and rumors.
“Those who think that Barr is watching over the interests of Trump rather than the interests of the country have reason to be concerned that he would weaponize the Justice Department’s investigative authority to help Trump at least politically, if not legally, in any post-election challenge,” said Richard Hasen, an election law expert at the University of California, Irvine.
Concerns about Barr among Democrats and election experts outside the department are heightened because he is seen as a loyalist to the president, as well as an ardent defender of broad executive power and a passionate critic of the FBI’s Russia probe.
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US wildlife agency seeks to carve out areas from protections
BILLINGS, Mont. (AP) — A Trump administration proposal released Friday would allow the government to deny habitat protections for endangered animals and plants in areas that would see greater economic benefits from being developed — a change critics said could open lands to more energy development and other activities.
U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service officials described the proposal as giving more deference to local governments when they want to build things like schools and hospitals.
But the proposal indicates that exemptions from habitat protections would be considered for a much broader array of developments, including at the request of private companies that lease federal lands or have permits to use them. Government-issued leases and permits can allow energy development, grazing, recreation, logging and other commercial uses of public lands.
It’s the latest move by the Trump administration in a years-long effort to repeal regulations across government that has broadly changed how the Endangered Species Act gets used. Other steps under Trump to scale back species rules included lifting blanket protections for animals newly listed as threatened, setting cost estimates for saving species and a pending proposal to restrict what areas fit under the definition of “habitat".
Governors from 22 Western states and Pacific territories in a Thursday letter to the wildlife service demanded more say in how habitat gets defined, since that decision could further restrict what land and waterways can be protected.
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Undercover drug detective, informant killed; 3 are arrested
CLEVELAND (AP) — A Cleveland police detective who had just joined a federal violence task force was shot and killed in his unmarked car along with a police informant during a drug operation, officials said Friday.
Three people have been arrested in the shooting that killed Detective James Skernivitz, 53, and another man on Thursday night. Cleveland Safety Director Karrie Howard said at a news briefing Friday afternoon that two juveniles and an adult taken into custody for unrelated arrest warrants are being questioned. Their names have not been released.
Scott Dingess, 50, has been identified by the Cuyahoga County Medical Examiner's Office as the other man killed inside Skernivitz's car.
An emotional Police Chief Calvin Williams did not provide details about the shootings during the briefing.
“It could have been random, it could have been targeted,” Williams said. “We don't know. We're still investigating.”
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Pentagon reaffirms Microsoft as winner of disputed JEDI deal
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Pentagon on Friday reaffirmed Microsoft as winner of a cloud computing contract potentially worth $10 billion, although the start of work is delayed by a legal battle over rival Amazon's claim that the bidding process was flawed.
“The department has completed its comprehensive re-evaluation of the JEDI cloud proposals and determined that Microsoft’s proposal continues to represent the best value to the government,” the Pentagon said.
The Pentagon had requested time to review how it evaluated certain technical aspects of the bids after the judge who is presiding over Amazon's bid protest in the U.S. Court of Federal Claims issued a preliminary injunction on Feb. 13. The judge said that Amazon’s challenge likely had merit in some respects.
The contract was awarded to Microsoft last October, prompting Amazon to cry foul.
Amazon Web Services, a market leader in providing cloud computing services, had long been considered a leading candidate to run the Pentagon’s Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure project, known as JEDI. The project will store and process vast amounts of classified data, allowing the U.S. military to improve communications with soldiers on the battlefield and use artificial intelligence to speed up its war planning and fighting capabilities.
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NOT REAL NEWS: A look at what didn't happen this week
A roundup of some of the most popular but completely untrue stories and visuals of the week. None of these are legit, even though they were shared widely on social media. The Associated Press checked them out. Here are the facts:
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CLAIM: A Black woman speaking at a community event with Joe Biden in Kenosha, Wisconsin, exposed the Democratic presidential candidate by saying she would not “go off” a paper she was provided by his campaign.
THE FACTS: Porsche Bennett, the woman speaking, was given the paper to read by her organization, not by Biden’s campaign. On Thursday when Biden visited Kenosha social media users circulated a video clip of Bennett speaking at Grace Lutheran Church in Kenosha. In the video, Bennett appears to go off script during a question and answer period, saying: “I’m just going to be honest, Mr. Biden, I was told to go off this paper, but I can’t. We need the truth and I am a part of the truth.” Bennett told reporters after speaking that she was given the paper by Black Lives Activists Kenosha (BLAK), where she is an organizer. Biden’s campaign told the AP that when Bennett said she was going off script, she was referring to prewritten questions given to her by her organization. The campaign said it did not provide any scripts or written material for participants to read. The Trump War Room, an official Twitter account for the president’s campaign, tweeted the video of Bennett on Thursday, stating: “Woman at Biden event in Kenosha says she was given a “paper” telling her what to say.” The tweet was retweeted thousands of times and the clip of Bennett making the comment was widely shared across Facebook and Twitter . “AMERICA EXPOSES BIDEN‼️ @JoeBiden & his Dem handlers give out questions to constituents to ask ONLY what THEY wrote down. Porsche Bennett was not having that!,” said one tweet. Biden visited Kenosha in response to protests and unrest that followed the shooting of Jacob Blake, a Black man, by a white Kenosha police officer on Aug. 23 . At the event, Bennett said her community was angry over the shooting of Blake, and demanded change.
— Associated Press writer Beatrice Dupuy reported this item from New York.
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Russia publishes virus vaccine results, weeks after approval
MOSCOW (AP) — Russian scientists have belatedly published first results from early trials into the experimental Sputnik V vaccine, which received government approval last month but drew considerable criticism from experts, as the shots had only been tested on several dozen people before being more widely administered.
In a report published in the journal Lancet on Friday, developers of the vaccine said it appeared to be safe and to prompt an antibody response in all 40 people tested in the second phase of the study within three weeks. However, the authors noted that participants were only followed for 42 days, the study sample was small and there was no placebo or control vaccine used.
One part of the safety trial included only men and the study mostly involved people in their 20s and 30s, so it is unclear how the vaccine might work in older populations most at risk of the more severe complications of COVID-19.
International experts remained cautious over the vaccine's effectiveness and safety. Nevertheless, its Russian developers made some bold claims Friday after presenting the findings to reporters.
Professor Alexander Gintsburg, director of the Moscow-based Gamaleya Institute that developed the vaccine with assistance from Russia’s Defense Ministry, told reporters that the vaccine triggers “sufficient” immune response “to counteract any imaginable dose infecting (a person) with COVID-19.”