AP News in Brief at 12:04 a.m. EDT

Absent details, police shooting narratives seek to distract

CHICAGO (AP) — A familiar narrative emerged in the days that followed Jacob Blake’s shooting by a police officer in Kenosha, Wisconsin, one seen many times after a Black man or woman is killed or grievously wounded by police: That somehow Blake's actions or his past can explain why an officer fired seven bullets into his back.

Despite shocking bystander video and impassioned pleas from community and family members, authorities have offered few details about the shooting or the white officer who carried it out, instead highlighting scant information about Blake without elaborating or explaining its relevance to the shooting.

So, the sexual assault charge levied against Blake in July in connection with domestic abuse allegations quickly became part of the story, though authorities have refused to discuss its bearing on the police use of force on Aug. 23.

“This is what they do. They are trying to distract us from what we saw on the video,” said Blake family attorney Ben Crump, who has represented the families of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown and dozens of other victims of police brutality and vigilante violence.

“They are trying to leave him with any kind of criminal history (so) it’s OK not to care about his life," said Crump, who called it a “playbook" for when police maim or kill Black people.

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New focus for campaign: Will Biden or Trump keep you safer?

PITTSBURGH (AP) — The battle over who can keep Americans safe after recent deadly protests has emerged as the sharpest dividing line for the presidential campaign’s final weeks, with Joe Biden on Monday condemning the violence and President Donald Trump defending a supporter accused of fatally shooting two men.

While the president blamed Biden, his Democratic foe, for siding with “anarchists,” Biden, in his most direct attacks yet, accused Trump of causing the divisions that have ignited the violence. He delivered an uncharacteristically blistering speech and distanced himself from radical forces involved in altercations.

Biden said of Trump: "He doesn’t want to shed light, he wants to generate heat, and he’s stoking violence in our cities. He can’t stop the violence because for years he’s fomented it.”

Trump blames radical troublemakers whom he says are stirred up and backed by Biden. But when he was asked about one of his own supporters who was charged with killing two men during the mayhem in Kenosha, Wisconsin, he declined to denounce the killings and suggested that 17-year-old Kyle Rittenhouse was acting in self-defense.

After a confrontation in which he fatally shot one man, police say, Rittenhouse fell while being chased by people trying to disarm him.

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Sheriffs reject governor's plan to curb Portland violence

PORTLAND, Ore. (AP) — Sheriffs from two counties in the suburbs of Portland, Oregon, on Monday emphatically rejected a plan by the state’s governor for their deputies to help patrol the city following last weekend's deadly shooting of a right-wing supporter of President Donald Trump.

Their decision threw into doubt a plan announced a day earlier by Gov. Kate Brown to keep the peace in Portland by adding nearby sheriffs deputies and Oregon State Police troopers as the liberal city struggles to regain its footing in the glare of the national spotlight.

Brown, a Democrat, announced the security plan for Portland after the fatal shooting of Aaron Danielson, 39, on Saturday as Black Lives Matter protesters clashed with Trump supporters who drove in a caravan through the city. No one has been arrested in the case.

The rejection by the two sheriffs, elected as nonpartisans, increases uncertainty about Portland's future just as Trump puts the chaos in Portland in his campaign crosshairs as part of his law and order re-election campaign theme.

Clackamas County Sheriff Craig Roberts said inundating the city with more law enforcement would not work because Portland's newly elected district attorney has dismissed charges against hundreds of protesters arrested for non-violent, low-level crimes.

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Pandemic brings hard times for farmers, worsening hunger

The coronavirus pandemic has brought hard times for many farmers and has imperiled food security for many millions both in the cities and the countryside.

United Nations experts are holding an online conference beginning Tuesday to brainstorm ways to help alleviate hunger and prevent the problems from worsening in the Asia-Pacific region — a challenge made doubly difficult by the loss of many millions of jobs due to the crisis.

The U.N. Food and Agricultural Organization forecasts that the number of undernourished people will increase by up to 132 million in this year, while the number of acutely malnourished children will rise by 6.7 billion worldwide due to the pandemic.

“We are facing two pandemics. COVID-19, which beyond its health toll is crushing livelihoods, and hunger, a scourge the international community pledged to eradicate by the end of this decade," Qu Dongyu, the FAO's director-general said in a commentary ahead of the virtual meeting.

Disruptions due to outbreaks of the illness and restrictions on businesses and travel to control them run the gamut, from crops going unharvested by migrant workers unable to reach their jobs to transport problems to farm families selling livestock and equipment to survive. the FAO said in a report prepared ahead of the meeting.

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Appeals court keeps Flynn case alive, won't order dismissal

WASHINGTON (AP) — A federal appeals court in Washington declined Monday to order the dismissal of the Michael Flynn prosecution, permitting a judge to scrutinize the Justice Department's request to dismiss its case against President Donald Trump's former national security adviser.

The decision keeps the case at least temporarily alive and rebuffs efforts by both Flynn's lawyers and the Justice Department to force the prosecution to be dropped without further inquiry from the judge, who has for months declined to dismiss it. The ruling is the latest development in a criminal case that has taken unusual twists and turns over the last year and prompted a separation of powers tussle involving a veteran federal judge and the Trump administration.

In a separate ruling Monday, a three-judge panel of the same appeals court again threw out a lawsuit by House Democrats to compel former White House counsel Don McGahn to appear before a congressional committee.

The Flynn conflict arose in May when the Justice Department moved to dismiss the prosecution despite Flynn's own guilty plea to lying to the FBI about his contacts with the Russian ambassador during the presidential transition period.

But U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan, who had upbraided Flynn for his behavior at a 2018 court appearance, signaled his skepticism at the government's unusual motion. He refused to dismiss the case and instead scheduled a hearing and appointed a retired federal judge to argue against the Justice Department's position. That former judge, John Gleeson, challenged the motives behind the department's dismissal request and called it a “gross abuse” of prosecutorial power.

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75 years later, Japanese man recalls bitter internment in US

TOKYO (AP) — When Japan bombed Pearl Harbor in 1941, the first thing Hidekazu Tamura, a Japanese American living in California, thought was, “I’ll be killed at the hands of my fellow Americans.” It wouldn't be the last time he felt that way.

At 99, amid commemorations of Wednesday's 75th anniversary of the formal Sept. 2, 1945, surrender ceremony that ended World War II, Tamura has vivid memories of his time locked up with thousands of other Japanese Americans in U.S. internment camps. Torn between two warring nationalities, the experience led him to refuse a loyalty pledge to the United States, renounce his American citizenship and return to Japan.

“I have too many stories to tell,” he chuckles in an interview with The Associated Press.

Born in Los Angeles to Japanese farmers, his parents earned enough money to return to Japan in just a few years, buying a farm near Osaka.

Against his family’s wishes, Tamura moved back to the United States alone in 1938 when he was 17, after his dream of becoming an aircraft pilot was crushed when he failed an eye exam. The United States, he hoped, would provide him the same opportunities his parents received.

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Liberty announces investigation into Falwell's tenure

RICHMOND, Va. (AP) — Liberty University is opening an independent investigation into Jerry Falwell Jr.'s tenure as president, a wide-ranging inquiry that will include financial, real estate and legal matters, the evangelical school's board announced Monday.

In a statement, the board said it had retained an outside firm to investigate “all facets” of the school's operations under Falwell, and that it was “committed to learning the consequences that have flowed from a lack of spiritual stewardship by our former president.”

Calls for such an investigation had been mounting since Falwell's departure last week from the post he had held since 2007.

He officially resigned on Tuesday, after a confusing day of back-and-forths about whether he would be leaving. His departure came after a news outlet published an interview with Giancarlo Granda, a much younger business partner of the Falwell family. Granda said that he had a yearslong sexual relationship with Becki Falwell and that Jerry Falwell participated in some of the liaisons as a voyeur.

Although the Falwells have acknowledged that Granda and Becki Falwell had an affair, Jerry Falwell has denied any participation. The couple allege that Granda sought to extort them by threatening to reveal the relationship unless he was paid substantial monies.

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A Zoom Thanksgiving? Summer could give way to a bleaker fall

As the Summer of COVID draws to a close, many experts fear an even bleaker fall and suggest that American families should start planning for Thanksgiving by Zoom.

Because of the many uncertainties, public health scientists say it’s easier to forecast the weather on Thanksgiving Day than to predict how the U.S. coronavirus crisis will play out this autumn. But school reopenings, holiday travel and more indoor activity because of colder weather could all separately increase transmission of the virus and combine in ways that could multiply the threat, they say.

Here's one way it could go: As more schools open for in-person instruction and more college students return to campuses, small clusters of cases could widen into outbreaks in late September. Public fatigue over mask rules and other restrictions could stymie efforts to slow these infections.

A few weeks later, widening outbreaks could start to strain hospitals. If a bad flu season peaks in October, as happened in 2009, the pressure on the health care system could result in higher daily death tolls from the coronavirus. Dr. Robert Redfield, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, has said that scenario is his biggest fear.

One certainty is that the virus will still be around, said Jarad Niemi, a disease-modeling expert at Iowa State University.

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Detroit turns island park into COVID-19 memorial garden

DETROIT (AP) — A Detroit island park was transformed Monday into a drive-thru COVID-19 victims memorial as policy makers across the U.S. moved forward with plans to reopen schools and public spaces.

Hearses led processions around Belle Isle Park in the Detroit River, where more than 900 large photos of local coronavirus victims provided by relatives were turned into posters and staked into the ground.

As the death toll continued to rise around the world, officials announced plans to bring children back to school in Rhode Island, allow diners back inside New Jersey restaurants and let fans watch football inside an Iowa college stadium.

New COVID-19 cases were linked to travelers on vacation in Europe and the head of the World Health Organization cautioned against opening societies too quickly. Nearly 1,000 inmates at a Tennessee prison tested positive.

More than 847,000 people worldwide have perished from the virus and more than 25.3 million have contracted it, according to Johns Hopkins University — figures experts say understate the true toll due to limited testing, missed mild cases and other factors.

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AP FACT CHECK: Trump tweets distort truth on National Guard

WASHINGTON (AP) — It's become a pattern when unrest flares in a city: President Donald Trump suggests he has National Guard troops ready to send to the scene and takes credit for dispatching them and restoring calm while he accuses Democrats of being squishy on law and order.

That's a distortion.

Trump omits the fact that he is largely a bystander in National Guard deployments. While presidents can tap rarely used powers to use federal officers for local law enforcement, there is no National Guard with national reach for Trump to send around the country.

And when violence broke out in Kenosha, Wisconsin, a week ago, Trump's demand that National Guard troops be used came a day after the Democratic governor had already activated them.

National Guard units in each state answer to the governor and sometimes state legislatures, not to the president. When National Guard forces from outside Wisconsin came in to help, it was because the governor has asked for that help from fellow governors, not the White House.