Campaign draws to a close with US facing a crossroads

PHILADEPHIA (AP) — President Donald Trump and Democratic challenger Joe Biden have one last chance to make their case to voters in critical battleground states on Monday, the final full day of a campaign that has laid bare their dramatically different visions for tackling the nation’s pressing problems and for the office of the presidency itself.

The candidates are seeking to lead a nation at a crossroads, gripped by a historic pandemic that is raging anew in nearly every corner of the country and a reckoning over race. More than 93 million people have already voted and each campaign insists it has a pathway to victory, though Biden's options for picking up the 270 Electoral College votes needed to win are more plentiful. Trump is banking on a surge of enthusiasm from his most loyal supporters.

The Republican president's final day has him sprinting through five rallies, from North Carolina to Wisconsin. Biden, meanwhile, was devoting most of his time to Pennsylvania, where a win would leave Trump with an exceedingly narrow path. Biden was also dipping into Ohio, a show of confidence in a state where Trump won by 8 percentage points four years ago.

Heading into the closing 24 hours, Trump and Biden each painted the other as unfit for office and described the next four years in near apocalyptic terms if the other were to win.

“The Biden plan will turn America into a prison state locking you down while letting the far-left rioters roam free to loot and burn,” Trump thundered Sunday at a rally in Iowa, one of the five he held in battleground states.

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Bruised and haunted, US holds tight as 2020 campaigns close

CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va. (AP) — Just over her mask, Patra Okelo's eyes brimmed with tears when she recalled the instant that a truth about America dawned and her innocence burned away.

One moment on Aug. 11, 2017, she thought the tiki torches blazing in the distance at the University of Virginia were “the most beautiful thing I'd ever seen, lighting up the darkness.” Later, on television, she could see the fire more clearly. Hundreds of white supremacists carried those torches, sparking 24 hours of fury and death that transformed Charlottesville into an enduring battle cry of the 2020 presidential election.

“My heart broke that night,” Okelo, now 29, said on Saturday, as President Donald Trump and Democrat Joe Biden blitzed across the country to make the closing arguments of their bitter contest to lead the divided nation.

Presidential elections are traditionally moments when Americans get a high-definition look in the mirror. But by the final, frenetic sprint of the 2020 race, the world had long peered into the country's darkest corners and seen a battered and haunted image staring back.

The presidency and control of the Senate are in the balance, but for many, there was something even more urgent. Survival was the immediate goal, both as human beings and as a country whose very name seems aspirational at a time of such division and angst.

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6 questions going into the presidential election

Election Day is finally upon us.

Or at least what we still call Election Day, since more than 92 million Americans have already cast ballots in an election that has been reshaped by the worst pandemic in more than a century, its economic fallout and a long-simmering reckoning with systemic racism.

Here are some key questions we are considering as the final votes are cast and counted:

WHAT DO AMERICANS WANT FROM A PRESIDENT?

Elections are always about where Americans want to steer the country. That's especially true this year as the U.S. confronts multiple crises and is choosing between two candidates with very different visions for the future.

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Trump threatens to fire Fauci in rift with disease expert

OPA-LOCKA, Fla. (AP) — President Donald Trump is suggesting that he will fire Dr. Anthony Fauci after Tuesday’s election, as his rift with the nation’s top infectious disease expert widens while the nation sees its most alarming outbreak of the coronavirus since the spring.

Speaking at a campaign rally in Opa-locka, Florida, Trump expressed frustration that the surging cases of the virus that has killed more than 230,000 Americans so far this year remains prominent in the news, sparking chants of “Fire Fauci” from his supporters.

“Don’t tell anybody but let me wait until a little bit after the election,” Trump replied to thousands of supporters just after midnight Monday, adding he appreciated their “advice.”

Trump’s comments on Fauci less than 48 hours before polls close all but assure that his handling of the pandemic will remain front and center heading into Election Day.

It’s the most direct Trump has been in suggesting he was serious about trying to remove Fauci from his position. He has previously expressed that he was concerned about the political blowback of removing the popular and respected doctor before Election Day.

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Trump admin funds plasma company based in owner's condo

WASHINGTON (AP) — When the Trump administration gave a well-connected Republican donor seed money to test a possible COVID-19-fighting blood plasma technology, it noted the company’s “manufacturing facilities” in Charleston, South Carolina.

Plasma Technologies LLC is indeed based in the stately waterfront city. But there are no manufacturing facilities. Instead, the company exists within the luxury condo of its majority owner, Eugene Zurlo.

Zurlo's company may be in line for as much as $65 million in taxpayer dollars; enough to start building an actual production plant, according to internal government records and other documents obtained by The Associated Press.

The story of how a tiny business that exists only on paper has managed to snare attention from the highest reaches of the U.S. military and government is emblematic of the Trump administration’s frenetic response to the coronavirus pandemic.

It's also another in a series of contracts awarded to people with close political ties to key officials despite concerns voiced by government scientists. Among the others: an ill-conceived $21 million study of Pepcid as a COVID therapy and more than a half billion dollars to ApiJect Systems America, a startup with an unapproved medicine injection technology and no factory to manufacture the devices.

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Germany launches 4-week partial shutdown to curb virus

BERLIN (AP) — A four-week partial shutdown has started in Germany, with restaurants, bars, theaters, cinemas and other leisure facilities closing down until the end of the month in a drive to flatten a rapid rise in coronavirus infections.

The restrictions that took effect Monday are milder than the ones Germany imposed in the first phase of the pandemic in March and April. This time around, schools, kindergartens, non-essential shops and hairdressers are to remain open.

But leading officials decided last week that a “lockdown light” was necessary in light of a sharp rise in cases that has prompted many other European countries to impose more or less drastic restrictions.

On Saturday, the national disease control center reported the highest number of infections in one day -- 19,059 -- since the pandemic began. Figures at the beginning of the week tend to be lower, and the center reported 12,097 cases Monday. But that compared with 8,685 a week earlier, underlining the upward trend.

Germany has reported over 100 new cases per 100,000 residents over the past week. That is fewer than in many other European countries, but far above the 50 mark that officials set earlier this year as an alarm signal that requires action by local authorities.

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Turkey pulls 2 girls out of rubble three days after quake

IZMIR, Turkey (AP) — In what one rescue worker called “a miracle,” extraction teams brought two girls out alive Monday from the wreckage of their collapsed apartment buildings in the Turkish city of Izmir, three days after a strong earthquake hit Turkey and Greece.

Onlookers applauded in joy and wept with relief as ambulances carrying the girls rushed to hospitals immediately after their rescues.

The overall death toll in Friday's quake reached 85 on Monday after teams found more bodies overnight amid toppled buildings in Izmir, Turkey’s third-largest city.

Close to 1,000 people were injured, mostly in Turkey, by the quake that was centered in the Aegean Sea northeast of the Greek island of Samos. It killed two teenagers on Samos and injured at least 19 other people on the island.

There was some debate over the quake's magnitude. The U.S. Geological Survey rated it 7.0, while Istanbul’s Kandilli Institute put it at 6.9 and Turkey’s emergency management agency said it measured 6.6.

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Video altered to make it look like Biden greeted wrong state

It's an awkward moment when a presidential candidate greets the audience at a rally and names the wrong state.

Fortunately for Democratic nominee Joe Biden, that didn't happen to him this week, despite a widely shared video that appears to show him saying “Hello, Minnesota” to a crowd in Florida.

It turns out he was, indeed, in Minnesota. The video that was shared had been altered to change the text on a sign and the podium to refer to Tampa, Florida, instead of Minnesota.

What you need to know about this edited video and the falsehoods spreading around it:

CLAIM: Video shows Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden mistakenly saying “Hello, Minnesota” at a campaign event in Tampa, Florida.

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AP Explains: The election result may be delayed. That's OK.

Patience, America.

We may not know who won the presidential election on Tuesday night. And if so, it does not necessarily mean anything is broken, fraudulent, corrupted or wrong.

President Donald Trump has repeatedly suggested a slower-than-typical result is a sign of trouble.

“I think it’s terrible that we can’t know the results of an election the night of the election,” he said on Sunday. “I think it’s a terrible thing when states are allowed to tabulate ballots for a long period of time after the election is over."

It's unclear what the president thinks is a long period. But it's standard practice to continue tabulating votes after Election Day.

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UK court rules against Johnny Depp in libel action

LONDON (AP) — A British court ruled Monday against Johnny Depp in his libel case against the owner of the Sun tabloid newspaper, which labelled him a “wife beater.”

In a ruling, Justice Andrew Nicol said Depp has “not succeeded in his action for libel.” He added that the defendants had shown what they published was "substantially true.”

Depp sued News Group Newspapers, publisher of The Sun, and the newspaper’s executive editor, Dan Wootton, over an April 2018 article that accused him of assaulting his wife Amber Heard.

Elaine Charlson Bredehoft, Heard’s U.S. counsel, said in a statement that the verdict is “not a surprise” for anyone who followed the trial in the summer.

“Very soon, we will be presenting even more voluminous evidence in the U.S.,” she said.