AP News in Brief at 6:04 a.m. EDT
In a horrific instant, a burst of power that ravaged Beirut
BEIRUT (AP) — As black smoke billowed into the sky, Shiva Karout stepped out of his gym with his colleagues and customers to watch. His gym, Barbell House, sits just across the coastal highway from Beirut’s port where a fire raged. They were curious.
Then a first boom shook them, and curiosity turned to fear realizing how close they were. “We got a bit scared, and we all went back in,” Karout recounted. Tense moments passed, waiting inside, and one of his customers panicked and ran out. Karout went after him.
That was when hell erupted. A gigantic explosion threw up a towering mushroom cloud and sucked out the air, and a wave of destructive energy shot across Lebanon’s capital.
The force threw Karout to the ground. He was cut and bruised, his full arm and leg tattoos of the Hindu god Shiva, after whom he is named, were punctured with lacerations and clotted blood.
But his gym — and everyone still in it — took the brunt of the blast. It smashed out the windows, knocked holes in the walls. Blood now stains the welcome counter. One of his clients took a major head injury and lies in a coma in a hospital and nearly a dozen others sustained medium to serious injuries.
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Lebanese clear blast rubble from roads around cratered port
BEIRUT (AP) — Lebanese army bulldozers plowed through wreckage to reopen roads around Beirut's demolished port Thursday, a day after the government pledged to investigate this week's devastating explosion and placed port officials under house arrest.
The blast Tuesday, which appeared to have been caused by an accidental fire that ignited a stockpile of ammonium nitrate at the port, rippled across the Lebanese capital, killing at least 135 people, injuring more than 5,000 and causing widespread destruction.
It also may have accelerated the country's coronavirus outbreak, as thousands flooded into hospitals in the wake of the blast. Hundreds of thousands have been forced to move in with relatives and friends after their homes were damaged, further raising the risks of exposure.
French President Emmanuel Macron arrived Thursday amid pledges of international aid, and tweeted that “Lebanon is not alone.” He planned to visit the devastated port and meet with top officials.
But Lebanon, which was already mired in a severe economic crisis, faces a daunting challenge in rebuilding. It's unclear how much support the international community will offer the notoriously corrupt and dysfunctional government.
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Seeking refuge in US, children fleeing danger are expelled
HOUSTON (AP) — When officers led them out of a detention facility near the U.S.-Mexico border and onto a bus last month, the 12-year-old from Honduras and his 9-year-old sister believed they were going to a shelter so they could be reunited with their mother in the Midwest.
They had been told to sign a paper they thought would tell the shelter they didn’t have the coronavirus, the boy said. The form was in English, a language he and his sister don’t speak. The only thing he recognized was the letters “COVID.”
Instead, the bus drove five hours to an airport where the children were told to board a plane.
“They lied to us,” he said. “They didn’t tell us we were going back to Honduras.”
More than 2,000 unaccompanied children have been expelled since March under an emergency declaration enacted by the Trump administration, which has cited the coronavirus in refusing to provide them protections under federal anti-trafficking and asylum laws. Lawyers and advocates have sharply criticized the administration for using the global pandemic as a pretext to deport children to places of danger.
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N. Korea's escalating virus response raises fear of outbreak
SEOUL, South Korea (AP) — North Korea is quarantining thousands of people and shipping food and other aid to a southern city locked down over coronavirus worries, officials said, as the country’s response to a suspected case reinforces doubt about its longstanding claim to be virus-free.
But amid the outside skepticism and a stream of North Korean propaganda glorifying its virus efforts, an exchange between the country and the United Nations is providing new clarity — and actual numbers — about what might be happening in North Korea, which has closed its borders and cut travel — never a free-flowing stream — by outsider monitors and journalists.
In late July, North Korea said it had imposed its “maximum emergency system” to guard against the virus spreading after finding a person with COVID-19 symptoms in Kaesong city, near the border with rival South Korea.
State media reported that leader Kim Jong Un then ordered a total lockdown of Kaesong, and said the suspected case was a North Korean who had earlier fled to South Korea before slipping back into Kaesong last month.
North Korea’s public admission of its first potential case and the emergency steps it took prompted immediate outside speculation that it may be worried about a big outbreak after months of steadfastly claiming it had no cases. Foreign experts are highly skeptical of North Korea’s assertion of no cases, in large part because of its long, porous border with China, where the virus emerged, and its history of hiding past disease outbreaks.
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New lockdown ratchets up economic pain in Australian city
MELBOURNE, Australia (AP) — A bright side for plant nurseries of Melbourne’s first pandemic stay-at-home order was that many householders took the time to garden. But the latest lockdown in Australia’s second-largest city is far tougher.
More than 250,000 people were thrown out of work on Thursday. Those whose jobs are deemed essential need government-issued permits to travel the near-empty streets of a virtual ghost town to get to their jobs.
The rolling restrictions have created confusion and uncertainly in a population navigating Australia’s toughest-ever lockdown that makes masks compulsory and imposes an 8 p.m.-to-5 a.m. curfew.
Melbourne gardener Simon Collings said the nursery and hardware industries became the surprise winners of the city's original lockdown in March when home improvement became a popular pastime.
“The first time, everybody went: ‘Oh my god!’ and then everything turned out to be fine,” Collings said.
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Lack of study and oversight raises concerns about tear gas
SALEM, Ore. (AP) — On June 2, Justin LaFrancois attended a protest against police violence and racism in downtown Charlotte, North Carolina, where he planned to livestream the event for his alternative newspaper’s website.
Shortly into the march, police, who reported that water bottles and rocks were being thrown at them, unleashed a volley of tear gas on the entire crowd, including those who were marching peacefully. The protesters tried to run. But hemmed in by tall buildings and desperate for an escape route, they tugged at the closed gate of a parking garage, pulling it up just high enough so they could slip inside to escape the pepper balls and exploding flashbangs.
“Oh, my God,” LaFrancois said in a video that captured him wheezing hard and coughing from exposure to the gas. “My face is on fire. My eyes are on fire.”
The Charlotte protest was one of the dozens around the country during the past few months where police unleashed tear gas on peaceful protesters. Tear gas has commonly been used as a defensive tool by law enforcement to make rioters disperse.
But during the nationwide Black Lives Matter protests, federal, state and local law enforcement agencies have sometimes been using it offensively, including against peaceful protesters, children, and pregnant women, without providing an escape route or piling on excessive amounts of gas, witnesses and human rights advocates say.
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Survivors mark 75th anniversary of world’s 1st atomic attack
HIROSHIMA, Japan (AP) — Survivors of the world’s first atomic bombing gathered in diminished numbers near an iconic, blasted dome Thursday to mark the attack’s 75th anniversary, many of them urging the world, and their own government, to do more to ban nuclear weapons.
An upsurge of coronavirus cases in Japan meant a much smaller than normal turnout, but the bombing survivors’ message was more urgent than ever. As their numbers dwindle — their average age is about 83 — many nations have bolstered or maintained their nuclear arsenals, and their own government refuses to sign a nuclear weapons ban treaty.
Amid cries of Japanese government hypocrisy, survivors, their relatives and officials marked the 8:15 a.m. blast anniversary with a minute of silence.
The United States dropped the world’s first atomic bomb on Hiroshima on Aug. 6, 1945, destroying the city and killing 140,000 people. The United States dropped a second bomb three days later on Nagasaki, killing another 70,000. Japan surrendered Aug. 15, ending World War II and its nearly half-century of aggression in Asia.
But the decades since have seen the weapons stockpiling of the Cold War and a nuclear standoff among nations that continues to this day.
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Polish LGBT people leaving as post-vote mood grows hostile
WARSAW, Poland (AP) — When a right-wing populist party won the right to govern Poland five years ago, Piotr Grabarczyk feared “bad things” might happen to gay men like him and other LGBT people. He sometimes considered leaving the country, but waited.
Friends and a job bound Grabarczyk to Warsaw, the relatively liberal capital city. He trusted that Poland's membership in the European Union would protect his community. Yet his dwindling faith finally fell away as President Andrzej Duda campaigned for reelection on an anti-LGBT platform - and won.
Duda, who repeatedly described the LGBT rights movement as a dangerous “ideology,” is being sworn into his second term Thursday. Grabarczyk, 31, is now gone, along with other gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender Poles who have emigrated to escape what they consider homophobia promoted by the highest levels of government.
“Like where’s the line? Is there a line they are not going to cross? I don’t know," Grabarczyk said after landing last week in Barcelona, Spain, where both same-sex marriages and adoptions are legal. "That was kind of scary.”
He spoke to The Associated Press alongside his boyfriend, Kamil Pawlik, 34, who left Poland three days after Duda beat Warsaw's mayor in a runoff last month.
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Facebook, citing virus misinformation, deletes Trump post
Facebook has deleted a post by President Donald Trump for violating its policy against spreading misinformation about the coronavirus.
The post in question featured a link to a Fox News video in which Trump says children are “virtually immune” to the virus.
Facebook said Wednesday that the “video includes false claims that a group of people is immune from COVID-19 which is a violation of our policies around harmful COVID misinformation.”
A few hours later, Twitter temporarily blocked the Trump campaign from tweeting from its account, until it removed a post with the same video. Trump's account retweeted the video. The company said in a statement late Wednesday that the tweet violated its rules against COVID misinformation. When a tweet breaks its rules, Twitter asks users to remove the tweet in questions and bans them from posting anything else until they do.
Twitter has generally been quicker than Facebook in recent months to label posts from the president that violate its policies against misinformation and abuse.
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Virus lockdown for world’s smallest and rarest wild pigs
NEW DELHI (AP) — Pygmy hogs — the world’s smallest and rarest wild pig — are under a virus lockdown.
Not because of the coronavirus, but because of the first outbreak of African swine fever in India. There is neither a vaccine nor cure for the highly contagious viral disease that has already killed over 16,000 domestic pigs, said Pradip Gogoi, an official at Assam state’s animal husbandry wing.
The shy, 10-inch tall pygmy hogs suffered severe habitat loss and were thought to be extinct in the 1960s. Then in recent decades, a captive breeding program and other conservation efforts have brought the species back.
Now there are nearly 300 animals living in pockets of the northeastern state of Assam, but scientists fear the virus could decimate the still-endangered population.
After authorities confirmed the swine fever outbreak reached India on May 18, scientists virtually locked down the breeding centers and adopted strict precautions, said Parag Deka, who heads the Pygmy Hog Conservation Program run jointly by Indian authorities, U.K.-based Durrell Wildlife Conservation Trust and local nonprofit Aaranyak.