Barrett unscathed by tough Democratic confirmation probing

WASHINGTON (AP) — Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett batted back Democrats' skeptical questions on abortion, health care and a possible disputed election in a lively Senate confirmation hearing Tuesday, insisting she would bring no personal agenda to the court but would decide cases “as they come.”

The 48-year-old appellate court judge declared her conservative views with often colloquial language, but refused many specifics. She declined to say whether she would recuse herself from any election-related cases involving President Donald Trump, who nominated her to fill the seat of the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and is pressing to have her confirmed before the the Nov. 3 election.

“Judges can’t just wake up one day and say I have an agenda — I like guns, I hate guns, I like abortion, I hate abortion — and walk in like a royal queen and impose their will on the world,” Barrett told the Senate Judiciary Committee during its second day of hearings.

“It’s not the law of Amy,” she said. “It’s the law of the American people.”

Barrett returned to a Capitol Hill mostly locked down with COVID-19 protocols, the mood quickly shifting to a more confrontational tone from opening day. She was grilled in 30-minute segments by Democrats strongly opposed to Trump’s nominee yet unable to stop her. Excited by the prospect of a conservative judge aligned with the late Antonin Scalia, Trump's Republican allies are rushing ahead to install a 6-3 conservative court majority for years to come.

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Takeaways: Barrett is reticent as Dems focus on health care

WASHINGTON (AP) — Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett faced her first day’s worth of questions Tuesday from the Senate Judiciary Committee, and it was a calmer affair than other recent confirmation hearings that featured Democratic procedural delays and interruptions from protesters.

With public attendance limited by the coronavirus pandemic and Democrats staying focused on a health care message just three weeks ahead of the Nov. 3 presidential election, the back and forth was serious, disciplined and mostly uninterrupted — save a few technical glitches from those participating virtually.

But similar to past hearings, Barrett avoided taking positions on a variety of subjects and rulings, saying it would be inappropriate to do so.

Takeaways from day two of the confirmation hearing:

DEMURRING ON HER VIEWS

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Trips by Trump, Biden illustrate calculations on voting map

PEMBROKE PINES, Fla. (AP) — With Election Day just three weeks away, President Donald Trump and Democratic challenger Joe Biden concentrated Tuesday on battleground states both see as critical to clinching an Electoral College victory, tailoring their travel to best motivate voters who could cast potentially decisive ballots.

Biden was in Florida courting seniors, betting that a voting bloc that buoyed Trump four years ago has become disenchanted with the White House's handling of the coronavirus pandemic. It was Biden's third visit to the state in a month, after making targeted appeals to other communities, including veterans and Latinos.

To Trump, "you’re expendable, you're forgettable, you’re virtually nobody,” Biden said at a senior center in Pembroke Pines, about 20 miles (32 kilometers) from Fort Lauderdale.

The “only senior Donald Trump seems to care about" is himself, Biden added.

Tim Murtaugh, a spokesperson for Trump’s campaign, said in a statement that “Biden is playing politics with people’s lives over the virus.”

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Supreme Court halts census in latest twist of 2020 count

The U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday stopped the once-a-decade head count of every U.S. resident from continuing through the end of October.

President Donald Trump’s administration had asked the nation’s high court to suspend a district court’s order permitting the 2020 census to continue through the end of the month. The Trump administration argued that the head count needed to end immediately so the U.S. Census Bureau had enough time to crunch the numbers before a congressionally mandated year-end deadline for turning in figures used for deciding how many congressional seats each state gets.

A coalition of local governments and civil rights groups had sued the Trump administration, arguing that minorities and others in hard-to-count communities would be missed if the count ended early. They said the census schedule was cut short to accommodate a July order from Trump that would exclude people in the country illegally from the numbers used to decide how many congressional seats each state gets.

Associate Justice Sonia Sotomayor dissented.

“Moreover, meeting the deadline at the expense of the accuracy of the census is not a cost worth paying, especially when the Government has failed to show why it could not bear the lesser cost of expending more resources to meet the deadline or continuing its prior efforts to seek an extension from Congress," Sotomayor wrote.

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More masks, less play: Europe tightens rules as virus surges

GENEVA (AP) — Governments across Europe are ratcheting up restrictions to try to beat back a resurgence of the coronavirus that has sent new confirmed infections on the continent to their highest weekly level since the start of the pandemic.

The World Health Organization said Tuesday there were more than 700,000 new COVID-19 cases reported in Europe last week, a jump of 34% from the previous week. Britain, France, Russia and Spain accounted for more than half of the new infections.

The increasing caseload is partly the result of more testing, but the U.N. health agency noted that deaths were also up 16% last week from the week before. Doctors are warning that while many of the new cases are in younger people, who tend to have milder symptoms, the virus could again start spreading widely among older people, resulting in more serious illnesses.

Italy and France are restricting parties and putting limits on restaurants and bars. The Netherlands went further and ordered the closing of all bars and restaurants, And to discourage partying at home, it banned the sale of alcohol after 8 p.m.

The Czech Republic is closing all schools until Nov. 2, while Latvia is ordering teenagers to switch to distance learning for a week. And Britain unveiled a three-tiered system for deciding what restrictions to impose, based on how severe the outbreak is in certain areas.

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Report: Social media influencers push voting misinformation

CHICAGO (AP) — Social media influencers, partisan news outlets and even President Donald Trump's son are driving the spread of online misinformation swirling around the U.S. vote, casting doubt on this year’s election and prematurely raising suspicions about the accuracy of its results.

Legitimate U.S. social media accounts are sharing false claims of voter fraud, misleading photos of ballots being dumped in the trash and stoking fears of violence at the polls on Election Day, according to new research from the Election Integrity Partnership, a group of some of the world’s top misinformation researchers.

In some cases, those social media accounts are using isolated or old stories and photos about voting mishaps to create widespread concern about the election system, said Kate Starbird, an associate professor of Human-Centered Design and Engineering at the University of Washington who is part of the research group.

“What’s happening right now is these incidents are being framed in misleading ways that exaggerate their impact on the election,” Starbird said.

In one example, a photo purporting to show stacks of ballots sitting in a dumpster made its way to social media from conservative news outlets before being retweeted on the Twitter account of Donald Trump Jr., the president’s eldest son.

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3 denied bond in alleged plot to kidnap Michigan governor

GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. (AP) — Members of anti-government paramilitary groups implicated in an alleged plot to kidnap Michigan’s governor over measures to slow the spread of the coronavirus during a fraught election year also discussed abducting Virginia’s governor during a June meeting, an FBI agent testified Tuesday.

During a hearing in a Grand Rapids federal court to review the evidence against the five Michigan defendants, Magistrate Judge Sally Berens ordered Kaleb Franks, Daniel Harris and Brandon Caserta to be held without bond until the trial. She said she would rule at a later date on the bond status of the other two Michigan men, Adam Fox and Ty Garbin. A sixth defendant from Delaware, Barry Croft, was ordered Tuesday to be transferred to Michigan to face the charges.

Berens' ruling came after a day-long hearing in which FBI agent Richard Trask revealed new details about investigators’ use of confidential informants, undercover agents and encrypted communication in the alleged plot to kidnap Michigan's Democratic governor, Gretchen Whitmer, before Election Day.

“They discussed possible targets, taking a sitting governor, specifically issues with the governor of Michigan and Virginia based on the lockdown orders,” Trask said, noting that the roughly 15 people at the June 6 meeting in Dublin, Ohio, were unhappy with the governors’ responses to the coronavirus pandemic.

Trask said Fox, who authorities say was one of the ringleaders and who was the only defendant without a mask at the hearing, said during a post-arrest interview that he considered taking Whitmer from her vacation home out onto Lake Michigan and stranding her there on a disabled boat.

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Despite virus fears, Texas sends most voters to the polls

HOUSTON (AP) — Early voting began Tuesday with long lines in Texas, one of the few places in the U.S. not allowing widespread mail balloting during the pandemic, and Jill Biden rallied supporters across the red state that Democrats are no longer writing off.

Texas is one of just five states that did not dramatically expand mail-in voting this year because of COVID-19. And hours before polls opened, Republican Gov. Greg Abbott's order limiting counties to one mail ballot drop-off box was upheld by a federal appeals court, stopping dozens of shuttered sites around Texas from reopening.

Both the virus and Texas' high stakes in November were front-of-mind in Jill Biden's first stop, the border city of El Paso, where Abbott has deployed more nurses and medical equipment as cases and hospitalizations climb. Campaigning for her husband, former Vice President Joe Biden, she was due to end her 800-mile (1,300-kilometer) swing across Texas in Houston.

Regina Cuchapin, a registered Democrat and Houston resident, said she still didn't feel safe eating in restaurants because of the coronavirus but that she was willing be among crowds to exercise her right to vote.

“I think that now that people know how serious it is and what precautions to take, I think those who are ready to come out are taking those precautions,” said Cuchapin, a healthcare worker.

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AP FACT CHECK: Trump’s distortions on WHO and lockdowns

President Donald Trump is claiming the World Health Organization shifted its stance on lockdown measures to control COVID-19 and has now acknowledged he was right to say such restrictions are harmful.

That's a distortion.

TRUMP: “The World Health Organization just admitted that I was right. Lockdowns are killing countries all over the world. The cure cannot be worse than the problem itself. Open up your states, Democrat governors. Open up New York. A long battle, but they finally did the right thing!” — tweet Monday.

WHITE HOUSE: “Over the weekend, the World Health Organization officially changed their policy and strongly stated that prolonged lockdowns must end because of their significant harms.” — White House official in call Monday with reporters, speaking on condition of anonymity.

THE FACTS: They're twisting words out of context. WHO has not shifted its position that national stay-at-home orders or “lockdowns” should be considered a measure of last resort to contain the virus. Nor did it ever declare that Trump “was right" on his COVID-19 response.

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NASA's new moonshot rules: No fighting or littering, please

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) — NASA’s new moonshot rules: No fighting and littering. And no trespassing at historic lunar landmarks like Apollo 11′s Tranquility Base.

The space agency released a set of guidelines Tuesday for its Artemis moon-landing program, based on the 1967 Outer Space Treaty and other agreements. So far, eight countries have signed these so-called Artemis Accords.

Founding members include the U.S., Australia, Canada, Italy, Japan, Luxembourg, United Arab Emirates and the United Kingdom. NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine said he expects more countries to join the effort to put astronauts back on the moon by 2024.

It promises to be the largest coalition for a human spaceflight program in history, according to Bridenstine, and is expected to pave the way for eventual Mars expeditions.

It's important not only to travel to the moon “with our astronauts, but that we bring with us our values," noted NASA's acting chief for international and interagency relations, Mike Gold.