AP News in Brief at 9:04 p.m. EST
1st reported US case of COVID-19 variant found in Colorado
DENVER (AP) - The first reported U.S. case of the COVID-19 variant that's been seen in the United Kingdom has been discovered in Colorado, Gov. Jared Polis announced Tuesday, adding urgency to efforts to vaccinate Americans.
The variant was found in a man in his 20s who is in isolation southeast of Denver in Elbert County and has no travel history, state health officials said.
Elbert County is a mainly rural area of rolling plains at the far edge of the Denver metro area that includes a portion of Interstate 70, the state´s main east-west highway.
Colorado Politics reported there is a second suspected case of the variant in the state according to Dwayne Smith, director of public health for Elbert County. Both of the people were working in the Elbert County community of Simla. Neither of them are residents of that county - expanding the possibility of the variant's spread throughout the state.
The Colorado State Laboratory confirmed the virus variant, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was notified.
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Biden criticizes pace of vaccine rollout, vows to accelerate
WILMINGTON, Del. (AP) - President-elect Joe Biden criticized the Trump administration Tuesday for the pace of distributing COVID-19 vaccines and predicted that "things will get worse before they get better" when it comes to the pandemic.
"We need to be honest - the next few weeks and months are going to be very tough, very tough for our nation. Maybe the toughest during this entire pandemic," Biden said during remarks in Wilmington, Delaware on Tuesday.
His comments come as the coronavirus pandemic has killed more than 336,000 Americans, with experts warning holiday travel and gatherings could precipitate yet another spike in virus cases even as the virus has already been surging in states nationwide.
Biden encouraged Americans to "steel our spines" for challenges to come and predicted that "things are going to get worse before they get better."
He also went after the Trump administration over its vaccination efforts, warning that the project, dubbed Operation Warp Speed, is moving at a slower pace than needed.
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Feds decline charges against officers in Tamir Rice case
WASHINGTON (AP) - The Justice Department announced Tuesday that it would not bring federal criminal charges against two Cleveland police officers in the 2014 killing of 12-year-old Tamir Rice, saying video of the shooting was of too poor a quality for prosecutors to conclusively establish what had happened.
In closing the case, the department brought to an end a long-running investigation into a high-profile shooting that helped galvanize the Black Lives Matter movement and that became part of the national dialogue about police use of force against minorities, including children. The decision, revealed in a lengthy statement, does not condone the officers' actions but rather says the cumulative evidence was not enough to support a federal criminal civil rights prosecution.
Tamir was playing with a pellet gun outside a recreation center in Cleveland on Nov. 22, 2014, when he was shot and killed by Officer Timothy Loehmann, who is white, seconds after Loehmann and his partner, Officer Frank Garmback, arrived at the scene. The officers were called to the recreation center after a man drinking beer and waiting for a bus had called 911 to report that a "guy" was pointing a gun at people. The caller told a 911 dispatcher that it was probably a juvenile and the gun might be "fake," though that information was never relayed to the officers.
To bring federal civil rights charges in cases like these, the Justice Department must prove that an officer´s actions willfully broke the law rather than being the result of a mistake, negligence or bad judgment. It has been a consistently tough burden for federal prosecutors to meet across both Democratic and Republican administrations, with the Justice Department declining criminal charges against police officers in other high-profile cases in recent years, including in the deaths of Eric Garner in New York City and Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri.
In a statement, Subodh Chandra, an attorney for the boy´s family, said the Justice Department´s "process was tainted" and the family has demanded prosecutors provide additional information about recommendations made during the probe.
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'Like a bathtub filling up': Alabama is slammed by the virus
BIRMINGHAM, Ala. (AP) - With its dozen intensive care beds already full, Cullman Regional Medical Center began looking desperately for options as more and more COVID-19 patients showed up.
Ten beds normally used for less severe cases were transformed into intensive care rooms, with extra IV machines brought in. Video monitors were set up to enable the staff to keep watch over patients whenever a nurse had to scurry away to care for someone else.
The patch did the job - for the time being, at least.
"We´re kind of like a bathtub that´s filling up with water and the drain is blocked," the hospital´s chief medical officer, Dr. William Smith, said last week.
Alabama, long one of the unhealthiest and most impoverished states in America, has emerged as one of the nation's most alarming coronavirus hot spots.
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Trump's $2,000 checks stall in Senate as GOP blocks vote
WASHINGTON (AP) - President Donald Trump's push for bigger $2,000 COVID-19 relief checks stalled out Tuesday in the Senate as Republicans blocked a swift vote proposed by Democrats and split within their own ranks over whether to boost spending or defy the White House.
The roadblock mounted by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell may not be sustainable as pressure mounts. Trump wants the Republican-led chamber to follow the House and increase the checks from $600 for millions of Americans. A growing number of Republicans, including two senators in runoff elections on Jan. 5 in Georgia, have said they will support the larger amount. But most GOP senators oppose more spending, even if they are also wary of bucking Trump.
Senators will be back at it Wednesday as McConnell is devising a way out of the political bind, but the outcome is highly uncertain.
"There´s one question left today: Do Senate Republicans join with the rest of America in supporting $2,000 checks?" Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer said as he made a motion to vote.
Meanwhile, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said some of the $600 payments might be sent by direct deposit to Americans' bank accounts as early as Tuesday night. Mnuchin tweeted that paper checks will begin to go out Wednesday.
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Officers connected to Taylor's death could face dismissal
LOUISVILLE, Ky. (AP) - Louisville police have taken steps that could result in the firing of two officers connected to Breonna Taylor's death - the one who sought the no-knock search warrant that led detectives to her apartment and another found to have opened fire.
Detective Joshua Jaynes received a pretermination letter, media outlets reported Tuesday. It came after a Professional Standards Unit investigation found he had violated department procedures for preparation of a search warrant and truthfulness, his attorney said.
Detective Myles Cosgrove also received a pretermination letter, media outlets later reported, citing his attorney, Jarrod Beck. Kentucky's attorney general has said it was Cosgrove who appeared to have fired the fatal shot at Taylor, according to ballistics tests.
The shooting death of the 26-year-old Black woman in her home sparked months of protests in Louisville alongside national protests over racial injustice and police misconduct.
Jaynes has a hearing with interim Chief Yvette Gentry and her staff on Thursday.
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New US dietary guidelines: No candy, cake for kids under 2
Parents now have an extra reason to say no to candy, cake and ice cream for young children. The first U.S. government dietary guidelines for infants and toddlers, released Tuesday, recommend feeding only breast milk for at least six months and no added sugar for children under age 2.
"It´s never too early to start," said Barbara Schneeman, a nutritionist at University of California, Davis. "You have to make every bite count in those early years."
The guidelines stop short of two key recommendations from scientists advising the government. Those advisers said in July that everyone should limit their added sugar intake to less than 6% of calories and men should limit alcohol to one drink per day.
Instead, the guidelines stick with previous advice: limit added sugar to less than 10% of calories per day after age 2. And men should limit alcohol to no more than two drinks per day, twice as much as advised for women.
"I don´t think we´re finished with alcohol," said Schneeman, who chaired a committee advising the government on the guidelines. "There´s more we need to learn."
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Argentine Senate weighs fate of abortion in pope's homeland
BUENOS AIRES, Argentina (AP) - The decades-long fight by Argentine women´s groups for legal abortion was being decided by the Senate in a debate Tuesday that could change the outlook for the procedure across a continent where it is still largely illegal.
The bill, which would legalize elective abortion in the first 14 weeks of a pregnancy, was already approved by Argentina´s Chamber of Deputies and had the support of President Alberto Fernández, meaning the Senate vote would be its final hurdle in the homeland of Pope Francis.
A previous abortion bill was voted down by lawmakers in 2018, but this time it was being backed by the center-left government. Seventy senators, more than half of them men, were to vote on the measure following a debate that could stretch into the early hours of Wednesday. The outcome was considered uncertain.
"The vote is even," said Sen. Nancy González, a backer of the legislation. "This is vote by vote. We are still working on the undecided."
Outside the Senate in Buenos Aires, pro- and anti-abortion activists gathered, with the bill's supporters wearing the color green that represents their pro-abortion movement.
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Child labor in palm oil industry tied to Girl Scout cookies
They are two young girls from two very different worlds, linked by a global industry that exploits an army of children.
Olivia Chaffin, a Girl Scout in rural Tennessee, was a top cookie seller in her troop when she first heard rainforests were being destroyed to make way for ever-expanding palm oil plantations. On one of those plantations a continent away, 10-year-old Ima helped harvest the fruit that makes its way into a dizzying array of products sold by leading Western food and cosmetics brands.
Ima is among the estimated tens of thousands of children working alongside their parents in Indonesia and Malaysia, which supply 85% of the world´s most consumed vegetable oil. An Associated Press investigation found most earn little or no pay and are routinely exposed to toxic chemicals and other dangerous conditions. Some never go to school or learn to read and write. Others are smuggled across borders and left vulnerable to trafficking or sexual abuse. Many live in limbo with no citizenship and fear being swept up in police raids and thrown into detention.
The AP used U.S. Customs records and the most recently published data from producers, traders and buyers to trace the fruits of their labor from the processing mills where palm kernels were crushed to the supply chains of many popular kids´ cereals, candies and ice creams sold by Nestle, Unilever, Kellogg´s, PepsiCo and many other leading food companies, including Ferrero - one of the two makers of Girl Scout cookies.
Olivia, who earned a badge for selling more than 600 boxes of cookies, had spotted palm oil as an ingredient on the back of one of her packages but was relieved to see a green tree logo next to the words "certified sustainable." She assumed that meant her Thin Mints and Tagalongs weren´t harming rainforests, orangutans or those harvesting the orange-red palm fruit.
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From the camera rolls of American phones, glimpses of 2020
A year like no other: Americans shambled through it, doing the best they could under circumstances that were uneven at best - and sometimes downright punishing.
As they endured, here and there they pulled out their phones and did what so many people do these days: They snapped photos of the world around them.
Snapshots of 2020. We all have them. And behind some are the stories of an era of pandemic and polarization and progress and upheaval and daily life - the visual representations of the lives people experienced and the moments they captured.
Associated Press reporters went back to some of the people they interviewed during the news events of the past year and asked a straightforward question: What image on your phone's camera roll tells YOUR story of 2020?
For the next three days, we are sharing some of their answers in photographs and words, adding new ones each day.
