Harris bringing energy, dollars and more to Biden's campaign

Wilmington, Del. (AP) — In her first two days as Joe Biden's running mate, Kamala Harris has fired off the campaign's sharpest criticism of President Donald Trump's shortcomings. She has vouched for Biden's character on race and more. And the enthusiasm surrounding her historic candidacy has brought in a record $36 million, including contributions from 150,000 new donors.

The campaign hopes it is just the beginning.

With less than three months before the election, Harris is rapidly embracing her new role. Democratic operatives and Harris allies believe she'll energize what has been a relatively quiet campaign that has often preferred to keep the attention on the turbulence of Trump's White House. She's already making a vigorous case for Trump's defeat, allowing Biden to focus more on his own policy prescriptions and less on direct attacks.

“We always look for surrogates and validators that help close the deal and can speak to voters who needed another reason to say, ‘Yes, I’m gonna support Joe Biden,’” said Donna Brazile, a former Democratic National Committee chair who also ran Al Gore's 2000 campaign. “She fills in the gap.”

Harris was known during the Democratic presidential primary for wearing Converse sneakers and dancing with staff and supporters in unscripted moments. Biden allies expect her to deliver enthusiasm among some Democrats who oppose Trump but aren’t yet energized to vote by a candidate they feel may be out of touch with their concerns.

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UAE and Israel to establish full diplomatic ties

JERUSALEM (AP) — Israel and the United Arab Emirates announced Thursday they are establishing full diplomatic relations in a U.S.-brokered deal that required Israel to halt its contentious plan to annex occupied West Bank land sought by the Palestinians.

The historic deal delivered a key foreign policy victory to President Donald Trump as he seeks re-election and reflected a changing Middle East in which shared concerns about archenemy Iran have largely overtaken traditional Arab support for the Palestinians.

A spokesman for Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas said the deal amounts to “treason,” and should be reversed.

The agreement makes the UAE the third Arab country, after Egypt and Jordan, to have full diplomatic ties with Israel. They announced it in a joint statement, saying deals between Israel and the UAE were expected in the coming weeks in such areas as tourism, direct flights and embassies.

Trump called the deal “a truly historic moment.”

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Trump admits he's blocking postal cash to stop mail-in votes

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump frankly acknowledged Thursday that he's starving the U.S. Postal Service of money in order to make it harder to process an expected surge of mail-in ballots, which he worries could cost him the election.

In an interview on Fox Business Network, Trump explicitly noted two funding provisions that Democrats are seeking in a relief package that has stalled on Capitol Hill. Without the additional money, he said, the Postal Service won't have the resources to handle a flood of ballots from voters who are seeking to avoid polling places during the coronavirus pandemic.

“If we don’t make a deal, that means they don’t get the money,” Trump told host Maria Bartiromo. “That means they can’t have universal mail-in voting; they just can’t have it.”

Trump's statements, including the false claim that Democrats are seeking universal mail-in voting, come as he is searching for a strategy to gain an advantage in his November matchup against Joe Biden. He's pairing the tough Postal Service stance in congressional negotiations with an increasingly robust mail-in -voting legal fight in states that could decide the election.

In Iowa, which Trump won handily in 2016 but is more competitive this year, his campaign joined a lawsuit Wednesday against two Democratic-leaning counties in an effort to invalidate tens of thousands of voters’ absentee ballot applications. That followed legal maneuvers in battleground Pennsylvania, where the campaign hopes to force changes to how the state collects and counts mail-in ballots. And in Nevada, Trump is challenging a law sending ballots to all active voters.

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Trump gives credence to false, racist Harris conspiracy

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump on Thursday gave credence to a false and racist conspiracy about Kamala Harris’ eligibility to be president, fueling an online misinformation campaign that parallels the one he used to power his rise into politics.

Speaking from the White House, Trump told reporters he had “heard” rumors that Harris, a Black woman and U.S.-born citizen whose parents were immigrants, does not meet the requirement to serve in the White House. The president said he considered the rumors “very serious.”

The conspiracy is false. Harris, who was tapped this week by Joe Biden to serve as his running mate on the Democratic ticket, was born in Oakland, California, and is eligible to be president under the constitutional requirements. The question is not even considered complex, according to lawyers who have reviewed her circumstances.

“Full stop, end of story, period, exclamation point,” said Jessica Levinson, a professor at Loyola Law School. “Let’s just be honest about what it is: It’s just a racist trope we trot out when we have a candidate of color whose parents were not citizens.”

Trump built his political career on questioning a political opponent’s legitimacy. He was a high-profile force behind the so-called “birther movement” — the lie that questioned whether President Barack Obama, the nation’s first Black president, was eligible to serve. Only after mounting pressure during his 2016 campaign did Trump disavow the claims.

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US seizes virtual currency alleged to fund militant groups

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Justice Department said Thursday that it has seized millions of dollars from cryptocurrency accounts that militant groups, including al-Qaida and the Islamic State, relied on to finance their organizations and violent plots.

Law enforcement officials said the groups used the accounts to solicit donations, including by trying to raise money from the sale of fraudulent personal protective equipment for the coronavirus pandemic.

Officials described it as the largest-ever seizure of virtual currency funds related to terrorism. It's also part of a broader Justice Department goal of disrupting the financing of extremist organizations, including those designated as foreign terror groups.

Cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin are favored for illicit transactions because they are perceived as hard to trace, and one of the groups singled out Thursday explicitly encouraged donations by telling potential contributors that the money trail would be difficult for law enforcement to untangle, the department said.

The legal action, which included undercover law enforcement work and a forfeiture complaint filed in Washington's federal court, is meant to deprive the organizations of funds needed to buy weapons and develop fighters, Assistant Attorney General John Demers said in a conference call with reporters announcing the case.

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Trump's suggestion to eliminate payroll tax doesn't add up

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump’s push to cut Social Security payroll taxes for the rest of the year — and even arguing for a permanent cut — would do little to bolster the coronavirus-battered economy in the short term and could destabilize long-term funding for benefits that millions of Americans depend on.

Trump this week said that he could eliminate the tax if he is reelected without undercutting the retirement program or greatly adding to the deficit, arguing that economic growth would offset the revenue losses.

“At the end of the year, the assumption that I win, I’m going to terminate the payroll tax, which is another thing that some of the great economists would like to see done,” Trump told reporters on Wednesday, adding that “tremendous growth” in the U.S. will cover the costs of Social Security. “We’ll be paying into Social Security through the general fund.”

But aides to the president on Thursday sought to walk back Trump’s comments. White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany said Trump meant to say he would seek forgiveness of employee payroll tax payments that he had already ordered deferred for the rest of the year.

Employers are pressing the Trump administration to walk back even more parts of the plan. They want Treasury to make it voluntary, letting companies decide if they want to offer their workers the option of deferring payroll taxes. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce says it has “serious concerns” whether the tax deferral would be workable.

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Trump's EPA dumps methane emissions rule for oil, gas fields

HARRISBURG, Pa. (AP) — President Donald Trump's administration is undoing Obama-era rules designed to limit potent greenhouse gas emissions from oil and gas fields and pipelines, formalizing the changes Thursday in the heart of the nation's most prolific natural gas reservoir and in the premier presidential battleground state of Pennsylvania.

Andrew Wheeler, the Environmental Protection Agency administrator, signed the rollback of the 2016 methane emissions rule in Pittsburgh as the agency touted the Trump administration's efforts to "strengthen and promote American energy.”

The EPA first proposed the rollback last year, accusing the Obama administration of enacting a legally flawed rule, and agency officials said it would save companies tens of millions of dollars a year in compliance requirements without changing the trajectory of methane emissions.

But states, including California, and a coalition of environmental advocacy groups warned that the changes are illegal — not to mention a setback in the fight against climate change — and expect to quickly sue to block it.

“It’s not only negligent, it’s unlawful," California Attorney General Xavier Becerra said in a statement. “We won’t sit silently while the EPA allows this super pollutant to rapidly warm our atmosphere."

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Feds say Yale discriminates against Asian, white applicants

WASHINGTON (AP) — A Justice Department investigation has found Yale University is illegally discriminating against Asian American and white applicants, in violation of federal civil rights law, officials said Thursday.

Yale denied the allegation, calling it “meritless” and “hasty.”

The findings detailed in a letter to the college’s attorneys Thursday mark the latest action by the Trump administration aimed at rooting out discrimination in the college application process, following complaints from students about the application process at some Ivy League colleges. The Justice Department had previously filed court papers siding with Asian American groups who had levied similar allegations against Harvard University.

The two-year investigation concluded that Yale “rejects scores of Asian American and white applicants each year based on their race, whom it otherwise would admit,” the Justice Department said. The investigation stemmed from a 2016 complaint against Yale, Brown and Dartmouth.

“Yale’s race discrimination imposes undue and unlawful penalties on racially-disfavored applicants, including in particular Asian American and White applicants,” Assistant Attorney General Eric Dreiband, who heads the department’s civil rights division, wrote in a letter to the college’s attorneys.

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Bolivia's political crisis threatens hospitals and patients

LA PAZ, Bolivia (AP) — Hooked up to ventilators, 11 prematurely born infants struggled for survival Thursday in the intensive care ward of a Bolivian maternity hospital.

The babies' supply of oxygen is in peril, doctors say, because of nationwide blockades by supporters of the party of former President Evo Morales who object to the recent postponement of elections. Bolivia's political crisis adds to the burden on its health care system, which was already grappling with the coronavirus as it continues to spread across one of Latin America's poorest countries.

Street unrest erupted after the Supreme Electoral Tribunal moved the planned vote from Sept. 6 to Oct. 18 following warnings from medical experts that it would be unsafe to hold the election while the pandemic was not yet under control. It was the third time the vote has been delayed, angering protesters who accuse the government of interim President Jeanine Áñez of simply trying to hang on to power.

Now, after about 10 days of blockades, supplies are threatened in some hospitals that are also dealing with an escalating number of COVID-19 patients, according to officials.

U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres appealed to Bolivian institutions to negotiate solutions to the country’s multiple problems, spokesperson Stephane Dujarric said.

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'Impossible': School boards are at heart of reopening debate

ROCK HILL, S.C. (AP) — Helena Miller listened to teachers, terrified to reenter classrooms, and parents, exhausted from trying to make virtual learning work at home. She heard from school officials who spent hundreds of hours on thousands of details — buses, classrooms, football, arts, special education. She spent countless nights, eyes wide open, her mind wrestling over the safety and education of the 17,000 children she swore to protect.

She thought of her own kids, two in high school and one middle-schooler — the reasons she ran for Rock Hill's school board six years ago.

And she made the hardest decision of her life: a vote to reopen schools amid the coronavirus pandemic, splitting students into two groups that would each spend two days a week in classrooms, with virtual learning the other school days.

“We have an impossible decision to make. And we still have to make it," Miller said from a tiny box on Zoom at the board's July meeting.

This Board of Trustees in suburban South Carolina is like thousands of school boards nationwide, where members are tackling a simple but hefty question — do we return to school amid a pandemic? — with no right or even good answers, in the face of inconsistent testing and a near-constant increase in confirmed coronavirus cases.