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

Trump visits Kenosha, calls violence 'domestic terrorism'

KENOSHA, Wis. (AP) — President Donald Trump stood at the epicenter of the latest eruption over racial injustice Tuesday and came down squarely on the side of law enforcement, blaming “domestic terror” for the violence in Kenosha, Wisconsin, and making no nod to the underlying cause of anger and protests — the shooting of yet another Black man by police.

Trump declared the violence “anti-American." He did not mention Jacob Blake, who was left paralyzed after being shot in the back seven times by an officer last week in Kenosha.

Soon after arriving in the city, a visit made over the objections of state and local leaders, Trump toured the charred remains of a block besieged by violence and fire. With the scent of smoke still in the air, he spoke to the owners of a century-old store that had been destroyed and continued to link the violence to the Democrats, blaming those in charge of Kenosha and Wisconsin while raising apocalyptic warnings if their party should capture the White House.

“These are not acts of peaceful protest but, really, domestic terror,” said Trump. And he condemned Democratic officials for not immediately accepting his offer of federal enforcement assistance, claiming, “They just don’t want us to come."

The city has been the scene of protests since the Aug. 23 shooting of Blake, who was shot as he tried to get into a car while police were trying to arrest him. Protests have been concentrated in a small area of Kenosha. While there were more than 30 fires set in the first three nights, the situation has calmed since then.

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AP Analysis: Trump bets presidency on 'law and order' theme

KENOSHA, Wis. (AP) — After struggling for much of the year to settle on a clear and concise reelection message, President Donald Trump appears to have found his 2020 rallying cry.

Four years ago, it was “Build the Wall," a simple yet coded mantra to white America that nonwhite outsiders threatened their way of life. This week, Trump has re-centered his campaign on another three-word phrase that carries a similar racial dynamic: “Law and Order.”

For much of the summer, the Republican president flirted with the bumper-sticker slogan championed by Richard Nixon and George Wallace in 1968. But Trump sharply increased his focus on law and order after a white police officer in Kenosha, Wisconsin, shot Jacob Blake, a Black man, multiple times last week as Blake's three children watched, sparking protest-related violence.

The president toured the Midwestern city on Tuesday, meeting with law enforcement officials and businesses affected by the protests. He largely ignored Blake's family.

Trump referred to protest-related violence as “domestic terror” while decrying “violent mobs” that demolished or damaged two dozen local businesses.

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Migrants trying to reach Europe pushed to deadly Atlantic

FUERTEVENTURA, Spain (AP) — The only person who wasn’t crying on the boat was 2-year-old Noura.

Noura’s mother, Hawa Diabaté, was fleeing her native Ivory Coast to what she believed was continental Europe. Unlike the 60 adults on board, only Noura was oblivious to the risks of crossing the open waters of the Atlantic Ocean in an overcrowded rubber dinghy.

As the waves quickly got bigger and people more nervous, Noura told her mother, “Be quiet, mama! Boza, mama! Boza!”, Diabaté recalled. The expression is used by sub-Saharan migrants to celebrate a successful crossing.

After several hours in the ocean, it was finally “Boza.” Spain’s Maritime Rescue Service brought them to safety on one of the Canary Islands.

Migrants and asylum-seekers are increasingly crossing a treacherous part of the Atlantic Ocean to reach the Canary Islands, a Spanish archipelago near West Africa, in what has become one of the most dangerous routes to European territory. Noura and her mother are among about 4,000 people to have survived the perilous journey this year.

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Large antibody study offers hope for virus vaccine efforts

Antibodies that people make to fight the new coronavirus last for at least four months after diagnosis and do not fade quickly as some earlier reports suggested, scientists have found.

Tuesday’s report, from tests on more than 30,000 people in Iceland, is the most extensive work yet on the immune system’s response to the virus over time, and is good news for efforts to develop vaccines.

If a vaccine can spur production of long-lasting antibodies as natural infection seems to do, it gives hope that “immunity to this unpredictable and highly contagious virus may not be fleeting,” scientists from Harvard University and the U.S. National Institutes of Health wrote in a commentary published with the study in the New England Journal of Medicine.

One of the big mysteries of the pandemic is whether having had the coronavirus helps protect against future infection, and for how long. Some smaller studies previously suggested that antibodies may disappear quickly and that some people with few or no symptoms may not make many at all.

The new study was done by Reykjavik-based deCODE Genetics, a subsidiary of the U.S. biotech company Amgen, with several hospitals, universities and health officials in Iceland. The country tested 15% of its population since late February, when its first COVID-19 cases were detected, giving a solid base for comparisons.

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14 on trial in 2015 Paris attacks that sparked terror wave

PARIS (AP) — Thirteen men and a woman go on trial Wednesday over the 2015 attacks against a satirical newspaper and a kosher supermarket in Paris that marked the beginning of a wave of violence by the Islamic State group in Europe.

Seventeen people and all three gunmen died during the three days of attacks in January 2015.

Those on trial in France’s terrorism court are accused of buying weapons, cars, and helping with logistics. Most say they thought they were helping plan an ordinary crime. Three, including the only woman accused, are being tried in absentia after leaving to join Islamic State.

The attacks from Jan. 7-9, 2015, started during an editorial meeting at Charlie Hebdo, whose offices had been unmarked and guarded by police since the publication of caricatures of the Prophet Muhammed years before. Brothers Cherif and Said Kouachi, gunned down 12 people before carjacking a vehicle and fleeing. They claimed the attacks in the name of al-Qaida.

Two days later, on the eve of the Jewish Sabbath, Amedy Coulibaly stormed the Hyper Cacher supermarket, killing four hostages in the name of the Islamic State group as the brothers took control of a printing office outside the French capital. The attackers died that day during near-simultaneous police raids.

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Khmer Rouge’s chief jailer, guilty of war crimes, dies at 77

PHNOM PENH, Cambodia (AP) — The Khmer Rouge’s chief jailer, who admitted overseeing the torture and killings of as many as 16,000 Cambodians while running the regime’s most notorious prison, has died. Kaing Guek Eav, known as Duch, was 77 and had been serving a life prison term for war crimes and crimes against humanity.

He died at a hospital in Cambodia early Wednesday morning, said Neth Pheaktra, a spokesperson for the tribunal in Phnom Penh that handled the trials over the regime's crimes.

Duch was admitted to Cambodian Soviet Friendship Hospital after developing difficulty breathing Monday at the Kandal provincial prison, said Chat Sineang, chief of the prison where Duch had been transferred from the tribunal's prison facility in 2013. He added that the body would be examined for a cause of death before being handed to his family.

Duch, whose trial took place in 2009, was the first senior Khmer Rouge figure to face the U.N.-backed tribunal that had been assembled to deliver justice for the regime’s brutal rule in the late 1970s, which is blamed for the deaths of 1.7 million people — a quarter of Cambodia’s population at the time.

The communist Khmer Rouge regime that ruled Cambodia from 1975-79 was accused of genocide for causing the deaths of so many of their countrymen from executions, starvation and lack of medical care due to its radical policies. Only after neighboring Vietnam pushed the Khmer Rouge from power did the scale and barbarity of their rule become absolutely clear.

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5 things to know about Japan's World War II surrender

TOKYO (AP) — World War II ended 75 years ago, but not all countries commemorate it on the same day. Wednesday is the anniversary of the formal Sept. 2, 1945, surrender of Japan to the United States, when documents were signed officially ending years of bloody fighting in a ceremony aboard the USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay. It's known as V-J Day in some countries. But some nations mark Aug. 15 as the war’s end, the day Japan's emperor made a speech announcing the surrender.

Five questions and answers about Japan's surrender:

Q: WHAT IS V-J DAY?

A: An abbreviation for Victory over Japan Day, marked by the United States and its allies in the war and by the Asian victims of Japan who won their liberation from years of atrocities and oppression. Some countries, including Britain, Australia, the Netherlands and the Koreas, mark Japan's surrender on Aug. 15. Others, including the United States, mark the day on Sept. 2, while the Philippines, China and Russia observe Sept. 3. Japan mourns for its war dead on Aug. 15 in a solemn ceremony attended by the emperor, political leaders and veterans' families.

Q: WHY ARE THERE DIFFERENT DATES?

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AP FACT CHECK: Trump misstates what happened in Kenosha

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump is not waiting for a trial to sort out what happened on the streets of Kenosha, Wisconsin, where prosecutors say a 17-year-old with a semi-automatic rifle fatally shot two men on a night of protest and violence. He’s giving an account at odds with the authorities who charged Kyle Rittenhouse with homicide.

In remarks surrounding and during his trip Tuesday to Kenosha, Trump also falsely claimed credit for National Guard deployments that he actually did not authorize. Wisconsin's Democratic governor did.

TRUMP, asked if was going to condemn the actions of Rittenhouse: “We’re looking at all of it. And that was an interesting situation. You saw the same tape as I saw. And he was trying to get away from them, I guess; it looks like. And he fell, and then they very violently attacked him. And it was something that we’re looking at right now and it’s under investigation. But I guess he was in very big trouble. He would have been — I — he probably would have been killed.” — news conference Monday before traveling to Kenosha on Tuesday.

THE FACTS: His implication that Rittenhouse only shot the men after he tripped and they attacked him is wrong. The first fatal shooting happened before Rittenhouse ran away and fell.

Trump did not say whom he meant by “they” — the two men he shot or others in pursuit of him. But he spoke in defense of someone who opposed racial-justice protesters, who authorities say was illegally carrying a semi-automatic rifle and who prosecutors accuse of committing intentional homicide.

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Markey defeats Kennedy III in Massachusetts’ Senate primary

BOSTON (AP) — U.S. Sen. Edward Markey of Massachusetts defeated U.S. Rep. Joe Kennedy III in Tuesday’s hard-fought Democratic primary, harnessing support from progressive leaders to overcome a challenge from a younger rival who is a member of America’s most famous political family.

It was the first time a Kennedy has lost a race for Congress in Massachusetts.

Markey appealed to voters in the deeply Democratic state by positioning himself as aligned with the liberal wing of the party. He teamed up with a leading progressive, New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, on the Green New Deal climate change initiative — and at one point labeled Kennedy “a progressive in name only.”

That helped Markey overcome the enduring power of the Kennedy name in Massachusetts. The 39-year-old congressman sought to cast the 74-year-old Markey as someone out of touch after spending decades in Congress, first in the House before moving to the Senate.

At a victory celebration in his hometown of Malden, Massachusetts, Markey ticked off a series of priorities, from support for the Black Lives Matter movement to a call for Medicare for All, to combating climate change, a signature issue for Markey.

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Mrs. Trump's ex-adviser says she taped calls for protection

WASHINGTON (AP) — A former friend and adviser of Melania Trump said Tuesday that she made recordings of her conversations with the first lady because she needed evidence to protect herself amid questions about the costs of President Donald Trump's inauguration.

Stephanie Winston Wolkoff, whose book “Melania and Me: The Rise and Fall of My Friendship with the First Lady,” was released this week, helped produce Trump's inauguration and later worked for the first lady as an unpaid White House adviser.

Wolkoff left the White House in February 2018 when her contract was terminated. The White House blasted the book as “full of mistruths and paranoia.”

Separately, Wolkoff told The Washington Post that Mrs. Trump used private email accounts while at the White House. Others in the White House, including Trump’s daughter Ivanka and her husband, Jared Kushner, have been criticized for doing official business on private accounts – but, unlike them, the first lady is not a government employee.

In an interview on MSNBC’s “The Rachel Maddow Show," Wolkoff said, “I’ve been accused of taping my friend, as the White House said, and how horrible of a human being I am for doing that."