AP News in Brief at 6:04 a.m. EDT

Biden, Obama make a final appeal to Michigan's Black voters

WATERFORD TOWNSHIP, Mich. (AP) — Joe Biden enters the final weekend of the presidential campaign with an intense focus on appealing to Black voters whose support will be critical in his bid to defeat President Donald Trump.

The Democratic presidential nominee is teaming up with his former boss, Barack Obama, for a swing through Michigan on Saturday. They'll hold drive-in rallies in Flint and Detroit, predominantly Black cities where strong turnout will be essential to return this longtime Democratic state to Biden's column after Trump won here in 2016.

The memories of Trump's upset win in Michigan and the rest of the upper Midwest are still searing in the minds of many Democrats during this closing stretch. That leaves Biden in the position of holding a consistent lead in the national polls and an advantage in most battlegrounds, including Michigan, yet still facing anxiety that it could all slip away.

Rep. Dan Kildee, a Democrat who represents the Flint area, said he had been pressing for a couple of months for Biden or Obama to visit Flint, a city bedeviled by a water crisis that began in 2014 and sickened the city’s residents, exposing stark racial inequities.

“Showing up matters,” Kildee said. “The message is important, no question about it. But there’s a message implicit in showing up, especially in Flint. This is a community that has felt left behind many, many times and overlooked many, many times.”

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Show your work: AP plans to explain vote calling to public

NEW YORK (AP) — The Associated Press, one of several news organizations whose declarations of winners drive election coverage, is pulling back the curtain this year to explain how it is reaching those conclusions.

The AP plans to write stories explaining how its experts make decisions or why, in tight contests, they are holding back. If necessary, top news executives will speak publicly in interviews about the process, said Sally Buzbee, senior vice president and executive editor.

Given high interest in the presidential race, the complicating factor of strong early voting and President Donald Trump's warnings about potential fraud, television executives are making similar promises of transparency.

“The general public has a more intense desire to understand it at a nitty-gritty level,” Buzbee said. “We don't want to be a dark, mysterious black box of ‘We’re going to declare a winner, and we're not going to tell you how we do it.' I don't think that benefits us, and I don't think it benefits democracy.”

The AP's decision desk expects to call some 7,000 races next week, from the presidency to state ballot initiatives and legislative races.

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Who is voting? Who is winning? Early vote only offers clues

As early voting breaks records across the U.S., political analysts and campaigns are reviewing reams of data on the voters, looking for clues to key questions: Who is voting? And who is winning?

On one level, the answers can be simple. Registered Democrats are outpacing registered Republicans significantly — by 14 percentage points — in states that are reporting voters' party affiliation, according to an Associated Press analysis of the early vote.

But that doesn't tell the whole story. Many Americans’ choices don’t align with their party registration. Meanwhile, polls show Republicans have heeded President Donald Trump's baseless warnings about mail voting, and large numbers intend to vote on Election Day. That means the early Democratic surge could give way to a Republican surge on Tuesday.

The picture is further clouded by the unprecedented nature of how Americans are voting. While Democrats are hungry for signs that key parts of their coalition — young voters, Black voters, new voters — are engaged, comparisons to 2016 are difficult.

Here's a closer look at what we know — and don't know — about early voters:

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Race for Texas intensifies amid surging turnout, COVID cases

McALLEN, Texas (AP) — Texas’ surprising status as a battleground came into clearer focus on Friday as Democratic vice presidential nominee Kamala Harris devoted one of the race's final days to campaigning across America's largest red state and early voter turnout zoomed past 9 million — already more than the total number of ballots cast during the entire 2016 election.

Harris visited three cities, including McAllen in the Rio Grande Valley along the Mexican border, which has been ravaged this summer by the coronavirus. Part of the California senator's mission was to energize Latino voters, whose lower turnout rates have for years helped sink her party's hopes of making Texas more competitive.

“Texas has been turning it out,” Harris told a McAllen drive-in rally. “You’ve been standing in line. You’ve been organizing. You’ve been making a huge difference.”

By showing up closer to Election Day than anyone on a Democratic presidential ticket has in years, Harris in some ways fulfilled weeks of pleas by Texas Democrats for Joe Biden's presidential campaign to take their chances here more seriously. But Biden himself hasn't come, and the campaign has made relatively little investment in advertising and staff.

Texas’ heavily Latino border routinely ranks among the nation's lowest in turnout, meanwhile, and although early voting numbers were up sharply, residents here haven’t stampeded to the polls like voters have elsewhere.

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Italian nurse on coronavirus duty sees the nightmare return

MILAN (AP) — A 54-year-old nurse became convinced the coronavirus “hated” her during the first seven months of Italy’s outbreaks. Those are Cristina Settembrese's words for it.

Settembrese, who specializes in treating patients with infectious diseases, faced huge risks during the long hours she spent in close contact with sick and dying COVID-19 patients. She was careful to scale her precautions to match and always tested negative despite getting exposed multiple times.

The nurse's encounters with the coronavirus started Feb. 21, the day Italy’s first domestic cases were confirmed in the country's north. Nurses and doctors were among the newly infected, so Settembrese immediately volunteered to care for people in Codogno, home to Italy's patient zero and just an hour’s drive away from where she worked at Milan’s San Paolo Hospital.

Soon, her own hospital was under siege as the virus spread in the Lombardy region, its first foothold beyond Asia. Settembrese, a single mother, immediately sent her 24-year-old daughter to live with her parents. Alone at home, the nurse slept on the couch, partly to be ready in case she was called in to work, partly as a response to a trauma that took her by surprise.

When case numbers finally decreased and her hospital emptied of COVID-19 patients, she found it hard to share the relief she observed in other people, those who had not seen the trauma of her ward. On a short summer break, she saw the virus' fall return in the unmasked faces of fellow vacationers. And her worry grew.

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Analysis: 2020, and the American chorus' newly loud voices

It's LOUD in the United States these days. Voices are being raised everywhere, speaking about everything.

They’re talking policing, health care, COVID. They're discussing the economic safety net, the environment. They’re challenging racism, sexism and the myriad ways we come up with to judge each other. They're defending tradition, law and order, and individual rights. And many people are listening, too, in entirely new ways.

The opportunity, the right, to be heard and to be acknowledged. In the history of this country, has there been anything more fundamental? Or more contested?

In that respect, 2020 is like any other year, only much more so. An election is approaching unlike any in recent memory, guaranteed to be a signpost in the long tale of what America is becoming and how it gets there. Divisions are sharp. Heels are dug in.

Yet the chaos unleashed by The American Breaking of 2020 — the pandemic, the disruption, the falling apart of so much we thought we knew — has created space for different voices to speak, for different conversations to take place and for different questions to be asked.

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Unrest erupts over police killing of Black man near Portland

VANCOUVER, Wash. (AP) — Tensions boiled over into unrest late Friday following a vigil for a Black man shot and killed by law enforcement in a city near Portland, Oregon, in southwestern Washington state.

Mourners gathered in Hazel Dell, an unincorporated area of Vancouver, Washington, where family and friends say Kevin E. Peterson Jr., 21, was shot Thursday night. The city is about 12 miles (19 kilometers) north of Portland.

Hundreds of people gathered for the vigil Friday evening, with some holding signs reading, “Honk for Black lives. White silence is violence” and “Scream his name.”

Nearby, tensions flared between left- and right-wing protesters. Video recorded by journalists in a parking lot showed two groups of people shouting at each other. Also, some armed demonstrators gathered near a building they told reporters they were protecting.

The crowds ultimately fizzled out near the vigil but a group of hundreds of protesters later marched through downtown Vancouver. Windows were shattered, flags were burned and federal agents clothed in riot gear surrounded a building — warning people that trespassing on federal property would be subject to arrest.

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Nearly 3 months after vote, Belarus protests still go strong

KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — Nearly three months after Belarus' authoritarian president's re-election to a sixth term in a vote widely seen as rigged, demonstrators keep swarming the streets of Belarusian cities to demand his resignation in the most massive and sustained wave of protests the ex-Soviet nation has ever seen.

While President Alexander Lukashenko has relied on massive arrests and intimidation tactics to hold on to power, the continuing rallies have cast an unprecedented challenge to his 26-year rule.

Authorities have responded to protests triggered by Aug. 9 election that gave Lukashenko a landslide victory over Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya by unleashing a violent post-election crackdown. Police dispersed peaceful demonstrators with stun grenades and rubber bullets, detained thousands and beat hundreds, which caused protests to swell and prompted the U.S. and the European Union to introduce sanctions against Belarusian officials.

Tsikhanouskaya, who went to Lithuania after the vote under pressure from authorities, called for a nationwide strike this week that so far has failed to halt production at state-run industrial plants forming the backbone of the Belarusian economy. But observers predict that economic troubles amid a surge in coronavirus infections will fuel discontent and steadily erode Lukashenko's grip on power.

By putting forward an ultimatum to Lukashenko to resign by Oct. 25 or face the strike, Tsikhanouskaya has managed to mobilize and re-invigorate her supporters after nearly three months of protests. About 200,000 demonstrators flooded the Belarusian capital last Sunday, one of the biggest rallies since the protests began. Another massive protest is planned for this Sunday.

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Death toll reaches 27 in quake that hit Turkey, Greek island

IZMIR, Turkey (AP) — Rescue teams on Saturday plowed through concrete blocks and the debris of eight collapsed buildings in search of survivors of a powerful earthquake that struck Turkey’s Aegean coast and north of the Greek island of Samos, killing at least 27 people. More than 800 others were injured.

The quake hit Friday afternoon, toppling buildings in Izmir, Turkey’s third largest city, and triggering a small tsunami in the district of Seferihisar and on Samos. The quake was followed by hundreds of aftershocks.

Early on Saturday, onlookers cheered as rescuers lifted teenager Inci Okan out of the rubble of a devastated eight-floor apartment block in Izmir's Bayrakli district. Her dog, Fistik, was also rescued, Sozcu newspaper reported. Friends and relatives waited outside the building for news of loved ones still trapped inside, including employees of a dentist’s surgery that was located on the ground floor.

In another collapsed building, rescuers made contact with a 38-year-old woman and her four children — aged 3, 7 and 10-year old twins — and were working to clear a corridor to bring them out, state-run Anadolu Agency reported.

Two other women, aged 53 and 35, were brought out from the rubble of another toppled two-story building earlier on Saturday.

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Tanzania, once envy of the region, watches democracy slide

NAIROBI, Kenya (AP) — Vote-counting was far from over when Tanzanian opposition leader Seif Sharif Hamad was frustrated enough to call people onto the streets. As thwarted observers alleged the most blatant election fraud in the country’s history, and with no way to challenge the results in court, there was little to do but protest.

But Hamad and others didn’t get far. As they walked toward a roundabout in the semi-autonomous region of Zanzibar on Thursday, police fired tear gas, then arrested them — Hamad's second arrest in a week. A party official, Ismail Jussa, was badly beaten by soldiers and hospitalized. On the eve of the vote, at least 10 people in Zanzibar were killed.

“We were a cradle of peace,” their colleague, ACT Wazalendo party campaign manager Emmanuel Mvula, told The Associated Press after describing the events. But after witnessing Tanzania’s sharp turn away from democratic ideals, “I’m worried for our future as a nation.”

That populist President John Magufuli late Friday was declared the overwhelming winner of Wednesday’s election was no surprise. But the ruling party’s victory in almost all parliament seats has shocked even critics who had warned of creeping repression under Magufuli’s first five years in power.

Now the Chama Cha Mapinduzi party, a version of which has ruled since independence, has enough seats to change the constitution and perhaps extend the presidency’s two-term limit, a goal of some party leaders and a much-criticized trend in parts of Africa.