Some hospitals in crisis as US nears high for COVID-19 cases

BOISE, Idaho (AP) — The United States is approaching a record for the number of new daily coronavirus cases in the latest ominous sign about the disease’s grip on the nation, as states from Connecticut to the Rocky Mountain West reel under the surge.

The impact is being felt in every section of the country — a lockdown starting Friday at the Oglala Sioux Tribe’s reservation in South Dakota, a plea by a Florida health official for a halt to children’s birthday parties, dire warnings from Utah’s governor, and an increasingly desperate situation at a hospital in northern Idaho, which is running out of space for patients and considering airlifts to Seattle or Portland, Oregon.

“We’ve essentially shut down an entire floor of our hospital. We’ve had to double rooms. We’ve bought more hospital beds,” said Dr. Robert Scoggins, a pulmonologist at the Kootenai Health hospital in Coeur d’Alene. “Our hospital is not built for a pandemic.”

In the southern Idaho city of Twin Falls, St. Luke's Magic Valley Medical Center said it would no longer accept children because it is overwhelmed with coronavirus patients. Except for newborns, all under age 18 will be sent 128 miles (206 kilometers) away in Boise.

Among those in northern Idaho joining Scoggins at a meeting of Idaho’s Panhandle Health District was board member Walk Kirby.

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Trump, Biden scrap on oil, virus with just over a week to go

PENSACOLA, Fla. (AP) — President Donald Trump and his allies fought for support in pivotal battleground states Friday after a debate performance that gave new hope to anxious Republicans. Democrat Joe Biden, campaigning close to home, tried to clean up a debate misstep while urging voters to stay focused on the president's inability to control the worsening pandemic.

The surge of activity with just 11 days remaining in the 2020 contest highlighted the candidates' divergent strategies, styles and policy prescriptions that are shaping the campaign's closing days. More than 52 million votes have already been cast, with an additional 100 million or so expected before a winner is declared.

The coronavirus debate has pushed Trump onto the defensive for much of the fall, but for the moment it is Biden's team that has been forced to explain itself. In the final minutes of Thursday night's debate, the former vice president said he supports a “transition” away from oil in the U.S. in favor of renewable energy. The campaign released a statement hours later declaring that he would phase out taxpayer subsidies for fossil fuel companies, not the industry altogether.

Trump, campaigning in Florida, repeatedly seized on the issue.

"That could be one of the biggest mistakes made in presidential debate history," he gloated at a rally at The Villages, a sprawling retirement community in Florida, where thousands of people gathered outdoors on a polo field. Most did not wear masks.

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Biden's warning on oil tests voter resolve on climate change

OKLAHOMA CITY (AP) — Joe Biden is confronting the harsh political realities of combating climate change.

The Democratic presidential nominee has spent months touting a $2 trillion plan to boost investment in clean energy and stop all climate-damaging emissions from the U.S. economy by 2050. The plan implied that he would wean the U.S. off oil and gas, but Biden wasn't so explicit about the industry's fate — until Thursday night.

During the final moments of the presidential debate, Biden said he would “transition away from the oil industry.”

President Donald Trump, trailing Biden in many national and battleground state polls, immediately sensed an opportunity to appeal to voters in competitive states like Texas and Pennsylvania that produce oil and gas.

“Basically what he is saying is he is going to destroy the oil industry,” Trump said. “Will you remember that, Texas? Will you remember that, Pennsylvania? Oklahoma? Ohio?”

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Fiasco over pope's cut civil union quote intensifies impact

ROME (AP) — The world premiere of a documentary on Pope Francis was supposed to have been a bright spot for a papacy locked down by a pandemic and besieged by a corruption scandal, recalling Francis’ glory days traveling the world to bless the oppressed.

But the red carpet rollout of “Francesco” has been anything but bright, with evidence that the Vatican censored the pope last year by deleting his endorsement of same-sex civil unions from an interview, only to have the footage resurface in the new film.

Aside from the firestorm the remarks created, the “Francesco" fiasco has highlighted the Vatican’s often self-inflicted communications wounds and Francis’ willingness to push his own agenda, even at the expense of fueling pushback from conservative Catholics.

That pushback was swift and came from predictable corners: Cardinal Raymond Burke, Francis’ frequent nemesis on matters of doctrine, said the pope’s comments were devoid of any “magisterial weight.” But in a statement, Burke expressed concern that such personal opinions coming from the pope “generate great bewilderment and cause confusion and error among Catholic faithful.”

The kerfuffle began Wednesday with the world premiere of “Francesco,” a feature-length film on Francis and the issues he cares most about: climate change, refugees and social inequality. Midway through, Francis delivers the bombshell quote that gays deserve to be part of the family and that he supported civil unions, or a “ley de convivencia civil” as he said in Spanish — to give them legal protections.

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Trump: Sudan to join UAE, Bahrain in recognizing Israel

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump announced Friday that Sudan will start to normalize ties with Israel, making it the third Arab state to do so as part of U.S.-brokered deals in the run-up to Election Day.

The announcement came after the North African nation agreed to put $335 million in an escrow account to be used to compensate American victims of terror attacks. The attacks include the 1998 bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania by the al-Qaida network while its leader, Osama bin Laden, was living in Sudan. In exchange, Trump notified Congress on Friday of his intent to remove Sudan from the U.S. list of state sponsors of terrorism.

It was foreign policy achievement for Trump just 11 days before Election Day. Previously, the Trump administration engineered diplomatic pacts between Israel and the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain — the first since Jordan recognized Israel in the 1990s and Egypt in the 1970s.

Trump said at least five other countries want to come into the deal, which is collectively called the Abraham Accords.

The new recognitions of Israel unify Arab nations around their common enemy, Iran. They also upend the traditional Arab strategy of refusing to normalize relations with Israel before an independent Palestinian state is created.

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Asteroid samples escaping from jammed NASA spacecraft

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) — A NASA spacecraft is stuffed with so much asteroid rubble from this week’s grab that it’s jammed open and precious particles are drifting away in space, scientists said Friday.

Scientists announced the news three days after the spacecraft named Osiris-Rex briefly touched asteroid Bennu, NASA's first attempt at such a mission.

The mission’s lead scientist, Dante Lauretta of the University of Arizona, said Tuesday's operation 200 million miles away collected far more material than expected for return to Earth — in the hundreds of grams. The sample container on the end of the robot arm penetrated so deeply into the asteroid and with such force, however, that rocks got sucked in and became wedged around the rim of the lid.

Scientists estimate the sampler pressed as much as 19 inches (48 centimeters) into the rough, crumbly, black terrain.

“We're almost a victim of our own success here,” Lauretta said at a hastily arranged news conference.

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California prosecutors again seek death for Scott Peterson

SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP) — California prosecutors said Friday they again will seek the death penalty for Scott Peterson even as a county judge considers throwing out his conviction for murdering his pregnant wife because of juror misconduct during a 2005 trial that riveted the nation.

Stanislaus County Assistant District Attorney Dave Harris announced that it is prosecutors' intention to retry the penalty phase of the case, spokesman John Goold said after a court hearing. He said prosecutors otherwise won't comment or discuss the decision.

Peterson, 47, wearing a buzz haircut and a mask designed to prevent the spread of the coronavirus, appeared remotely in the Modesto courtroom from San Quentin State Prison north of San Francisco, home to the state's death row.

District Attorney Birgit Fladager acted after the California Supreme Court in August overturned Peterson's 2005 death sentence in a case that attracted worldwide attention.

The state's high court upheld his conviction in that ruling. But the same justices in October ordered a new hearing in San Mateo Superior Court to determine whether his underlying murder conviction must also be tossed out if a juror committed "prejudicial misconduct.”

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Viewership for 2nd Trump-Biden debate drops to 63 million

LOS ANGELES (AP) — The final presidential debate between President Donald Trump and his Democratic opponent Joe Biden drew 10 million fewer viewers than their first meeting.

An estimated 63 million viewers tuned into the debate featuring Trump and Biden Thursday night, the Nielsen company said Friday. The debate was hosted at Belmont University in Nashville, Tennessee.

The numbers were tallied between 15 networks that aired the debate.

Fox News scored the most viewers compared to other networks with 14.7 million, according to Nielsen. The network topped ABC and NBC, which both pulled in more than 10 million viewers.

CNN attracted 7.2 million, MSNBC drew 6.7 million and CBS had 5.5 million.

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Trump, Biden lawyer up, brace for White House legal battle

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump's and Democratic rival Joe Biden's campaigns are assembling armies of powerful lawyers for the possibility that the race for the White House is decided not at the ballot box but in court.

They have been engaging in a lawyer's version of tabletop war games, churning out draft pleadings, briefs and memos to cover scenarios that read like the stuff of a law school hypothetical more than a real-life case in a democracy.

Attorneys for the Republicans and the Democrats are already clashing in courts across the U.S. over mailed-in ballot deadlines and other issues brought on by the coronavirus pandemic. And as Trump tries to sow doubt in the legitimacy of the Nov. 3 election, both sides have built massive legal operations readying for a bitterly disputed race that lands at the Supreme Court

“We’ve been preparing for this for well over a year," Republican National Committee Chief Counsel Justin Riemer told The Associated Press. "We’ve been working with the campaign on our strategy for recount preparation, for Election Day operations and our litigation strategy.”

On the Democratic side, the Biden campaign's election protection program includes a special national litigation team involving hundreds of lawyers led by Walter Dellinger, acting solicitor general in the Clinton administration, and Donald Verrilli, a solicitor general under President Barack Obama, among others. Bob Bauer, a former White House counsel to Obama, and Biden campaign general counsel Dana Remus are focused on protecting the rights of voters, who have been enduring long lines at polling places around the country on the belief that the presidential election will be decided by their ballots.

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Hospitalization data flawed in Missouri, perhaps elsewhere

O'FALLON, Mo. (AP) — With the number of coronavirus patients requiring hospitalization rising at alarming levels, Missouri and perhaps a handful of other states are unable to post accurate data on COVID-19 dashboards because of a flaw in the federal reporting system.

Since Tuesday, the Missouri Department of Health and Senior Service’s coronavirus dashboard has posted a message that the total number of patients hospitalized for COVID-19 has been underreported since Oct. 17. The note blamed “challenges entering data” to the portal used by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services for collecting daily hospitalizations around the country.

It wasn't immediately clear on Friday how many states are impacted since some states rely on their own hospitalization counts, not HHS data collection. HHS did not immediately respond to phone and email messages seeking comment.

But The COVID Tracking Project said in a blog post that it has “identified five other states with anomalies in their hospitalization figures" that could be tied to the HHS reporting problem.

The project noted that the number of reported intensive care unit patients in Kansas had decreased from 80 to one without explanation. It said Wisconsin’s hospitalization figures stayed unexpectedly flat while other indicators worsened. And it said Georgia, Alabama, and Florida reported only partial updates to hospitalization data.