AP News in Brief at 9:04 p.m. EST
Sanders refocusing his campaign after Biden's super Tuesday
WASHINGTON (AP) — His front-runner status slipping, Bernie Sanders refocused his Democratic presidential campaign on surging rival Joe Biden on Wednesday as the Vermont senator's allies grappled with the fallout from a Super Tuesday stumble that raised internal concerns about the direction of his White House bid.
Sanders targeted Biden's record on trade, Social Security and fundraising just hours after billionaire Mike Bloomberg suspended his campaign and Elizabeth Warren confirmed she was privately reassessing her future in the race. The dramatic shifts signaled that the Democrats' once-crowded nomination fight had effectively come down to a two-man race for the right to face President Donald Trump in November.
Sanders declared himself “neck and neck” with Biden as he faced reporters in his home state, Vermont, one of just four states he captured on the most consequential day of voting in the party's 2020 primary season. Biden won 10 states, assembling victories that transcended geography, race and class.
“What this campaign, I think, is increasingly about is, Which side are you on?” Sanders said.
The progressive candidate lobbed familiar attacks against the former vice president's record but ignored supporters' calls to be more aggressive and insisted his campaign would avoid any “Trump-type effort” that included personal criticism.
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China's virus slowdown offers hope for global containment
The slowdown in coronavirus cases out of China offers a sliver of hope that the global outbreak can be controlled, but whether that can happen anytime soon without drastic measures remains to be seen, public health authorities say.
With China accounting for the overwhelming majority of the world's 94,000 infections and 3,200 deaths since the virus first surfaced there in late December, it’s hard to see the country as a success story. But some experts believe the easing of the crisis — there are now more new cases being reported outside China than inside it — suggests containment is possible.
World Health Organization outbreak expert Maria Van Kerkhove, who recently traveled to China as part of a team from the U.N. health agency, said the international experts noted a drop in cases there since the end of January.
“We scrutinized this data and we believe this decline is real,” she said, adding that the extraordinary measures undertaken in China — including the unprecedented lockdown of more than 60 million people — had a significant role in changing the direction of the outbreak.
“We believe that a reduction of cases in other countries, including Italy, Korea, Iran, everywhere, that this is possible,” she said.
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Feds investigate nursing home as U.S. death toll hits 11
SEATTLE (AP) — The U.S. death toll from the coronavirus climbed to 11 on Wednesday with a patient succumbing in California — the first reported fatality outside Washington state — as federal authorities announced an investigation of the Seattle-area nursing home where most of the victims were stricken.
Officials in California's Placer County, near Sacramento, said an elderly person who tested positive after returning from a San Francisco-to-Mexico cruise had died. The victim had underlying health problems, authorities said.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom declared a statewide emergency. Washington and Florida had already declared emergencies.
Washington also announced another death, bringing its total to 10. Most of those who died were residents of Life Care Center, a nursing home in Kirkland, a suburb east of Seattle. At least 39 cases have been reported in the Seattle area, where researchers say the virus may have been circulating undetected for weeks.
Seema Verma, head of the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, said the agency is sending inspectors to Life Care along with experts from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to figure out what happened and determine whether the nursing home followed guidelines for preventing infections.
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Stocks soar on plans for more stimulus measures, Biden wins
The Dow Jones Industrial Average soared more than 1,100 points, or 4.5%, Wednesday as governments and central banks around the globe took more aggressive measures to fight the virus outbreak and its effects on the economy.
The gains more than recouped the market's big losses from a day earlier as Wall Street's wild, virus-fueled swings extend into a third week.
Stocks rose sharply from the get-go, led by big gains for health care stocks after Joe Biden solidified his contender status for the Democratic presidential nomination. Investors see him as a more business-friendly alternative to Bernie Sanders.
The rally's momentum accelerated around midday after House and Senate leadership reached a deal on a bipartisan $8.3 billion bill to battle the coronavirus outbreak. The measure's funds would go toward research into a vaccine, improved tests and drugs to treat infected people.
Investors are also anticipating other central banks will follow up on the Federal Reserve’s surprise move Tuesday to slash interest rates by half a percentage point in hopes of protecting the economy from the economic fallout of a fast-spreading virus. Canada's central bank cut rates on Wednesday, also by half a percentage point and citing the virus' effect.
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Cellphone alerts helped Tennessee couple escape to basement
BAXTER, Tenn. (AP) — Billy Dyer's cellphone blared out an emergency alert, then his wife Kathy's phone followed, giving them just enough time to get downstairs and flip on a TV to check the news.
Then the tornado hit.
When the sun rose Tuesday morning, the Dyers emerged to find the walls around their corner bedroom gone. Their mattress was perched precariously on their bed's headboard, with only sky all around.
“Thank God we had enough time to get downstairs to the basement or we would probably not be here,” Dyer said.
State emergency officials said 24 people died when fast-moving storms crossed Tennessee early Tuesday. Eighteen of them, including five pre-teen children, died in Putnam County, some 80 miles (130 kilometers) east of Nashville. Eighty-eight more were injured in the county.
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Roberts chides Schumer for 'dangerous' remarks on 2 justices
WASHINGTON (AP) — Çhief Justice John Roberts on Wednesday criticized as “inappropriate" and “dangerous" comments that Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer made outside the Supreme Court earlier in the day about Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh.
Roberts was responding to Schumer's remarks at a rally outside the court while a high-profile abortion case was being argued inside. “You have released the whirlwind, and you will pay the price. You will not know what hit you if you go forward with these awful decisions,” Schumer said, naming the two appointees of President Donald Trump, according to video of the rally available online.
In a statement, Schumer spokesman Justin Goodman criticized Roberts, saying that “to follow the right wing’s deliberate misinterpretation of what Sen. Schumer said” shows the chief justice "does not just call balls and strikes.”
Goodman said Schumer's comments “were a reference to the political price Senate Republicans will pay for putting these justices on the court, and a warning that the justices will unleash a major grassroots movement on the issue of reproductive rights against the decision.”
He noted that the chief justice remained quiet in recent weeks when Trump questioned the impartiality of Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor.
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'Bob Durst killed his wife,' prosecutor says at his trial
LOS ANGELES (AP) — Robert Durst has never been charged in the 1982 New York disappearance of his wife Kathie Durst, who was later declared dead despite no body being found, but on Wednesday a prosecutor in a Los Angeles courtroom repeatedly told a jury that he killed her.
“Bob Durst killed his wife,” Deputy District Attorney John Lewin said at one point during his opening statement at the trial of the real estate heir Durst, who is charged only with the murder of his friend Susan Berman in 2000.
The judge in the case has ruled that the prosecution can provide evidence and say that Durst killed his wife to establish motive for Berman's killing, and Lewin took full advantage, repeating and emphasizing the statement.
“On the day that Durst killed her,” Lewin said as he opened one part of his presentation. “They were married at the time he killed her," he said in another part, “Durst killed Kathie when they were spending the weekend together," he said later .
He said it so much that it drove Durst's attorney Dick DeGuerin to interrupt.
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Trump gets desired Democratic foes, but Biden worries linger
WASHINGTON (AP) — While Super Tuesday left the Democrats with a pair of front-runners whom President Donald Trump believes he can define and defeat, there are still some private worries in the White House.
There is concern that the Democrats' messy nomination contest may end up producing an emboldened version of the very man who once worried Trump so much as a foe that it led to the president's impeachment.
That would be Joe Biden.
Still, there was plenty for Trump to like in Tuesday's 14-state round of voting that transformed the Democratic race into a delegate shootout between an avowed proponent of democratic socialism (Bernie Sanders) and a longtime Washington insider (Biden). It banished from the race former New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg, whose endless millions had gotten under the president’s skin, and it pushed aside Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who could have proved to be a formidable rhetorical challenger against Trump.
That sets up Trump to run for reelection on familiar territory and allows him to revive some of the same lines of attack that proved successful in 2016.
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Twitter preps ephemeral tweets, starts testing in Brazil
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Twitter is starting to test tweets that disappear after 24 hours, although initially only in Brazil.
The company says the ephemeral tweets, which it calls “fleets” because of their fleeting nature, are designed to allay the concerns of new users who might be turned off by the public and permanent nature of normal tweets.
Fleets can't be retweeted and they won't have “likes.” People can respond to them, but the replies show up as direct messages to the original tweeter, not as a public response, turning any back-and-forth into a private conversation instead of a public discussion.
Despite having high-profile users such as President Donald Trump, Twitter has lagged behind other tech powerhouses like Facebook and Google in terms of user growth and advertising revenue. Twitter is hoping that by offering disappearing tweets, people will be more likely to share casual, everyday thoughts — and to do so more often.
The new feature is reminiscent of Instagram and Facebook “stories” and Snapchat's snaps, which let users post short-lived photos and messages. Such features are increasingly popular with social-media users looking for smaller groups and and more private chats.
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Doctors try 1st CRISPR editing in the body for blindness
Scientists say they have used the gene editing tool CRISPR inside someone's body for the first time, a new frontier for efforts to operate on DNA, the chemical code of life, to treat diseases.
A patient recently had it done at the Casey Eye Institute at Oregon Health & Science University in Portland for an inherited form of blindness, the companies that make the treatment announced Wednesday. They would not give details on the patient or when the surgery occurred.
It may take up to a month to see if it worked to restore vision. If the first few attempts seem safe, doctors plan to test it on 18 children and adults.
“We literally have the potential to take people who are essentially blind and make them see,” said Charles Albright, chief scientific officer at Editas Medicine, the Cambridge, Massachusetts-based company developing the treatment with Dublin-based Allergan. “We think it could open up a whole new set of medicines to go in and change your DNA.”
Dr. Jason Comander, an eye surgeon at Massachusetts Eye and Ear in Boston, another hospital that plans to enroll patients in the study, said it marks “a new era in medicine” using a technology that “makes editing DNA much easier and much more effective.”