AP News In Brief At 6:04 A.m. EDT
Expelled from US at night, migrant families weigh next steps
REYNOSA, Mexico (AP) - In one of Mexico's most notorious cities for organized crime, migrants are expelled from the United States throughout the night, exhausted from the journey, disillusioned about not getting a chance to seek asylum and at a crossroads about where to go next.
Marisela Ramirez, who was returned to Reynosa about 4 a.m.
Thursday, brought her 14-year-old son and left five other children - one only 8 months old - in Guatemala because she couldn't afford to pay smugglers more money. Now, facing another agonizing choice, she leaned toward sending her son across the border alone to settle with a sister in Missouri, aware that the United States is allowing unaccompanied children to pursue asylum.
"We're in God's hands," Ramirez, 30, said in a barren park with dying grass and a large gazebo in the center that serves as shelter for migrants.
Lesdny Suyapa Castillo, 35, said through tears that she would return to Honduras with her 8-year-old daughter, who lay under the gazebo breathing heavily with her eyes partly open and flies circling her face.
After not getting paid for three months' work as a nurse in Honduras during the pandemic, she wants steady work in the U.S. to send an older daughter to medical school. A friend in New York encouraged her to try again.
"I would love to go, but a mother doesn't want to see her child in this condition," she said after being dropped in Reynosa at 10 p.m.
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UK variant hunters lead global race to stay ahead of COVID
LONDON (AP) - On March 4, situs judi slot terbaru 2020, when there were just 84 confirmed cases of COVID-19 in the U.K., professor Sharon Peacock recognized that the country needed to expand its capacity to analyze the genetic makeup of the virus.
The Cambridge University microbiologist understood that genomic sequencing would be crucial in tracking the disease, controlling outbreaks and developing vaccines.
So she began working with colleagues around the country to put together a plan. Within a month, the government had provided 20 million pounds ($28 million) to fund their work.
The initiative helped make Britain a world leader in rapidly analyzing the genetic material from large numbers of COVID-19 infections, generating more than 40% of the genomic sequences identified to date.
These days, their top priority is finding new variants that are more dangerous or resistant to vaccines, information that is critical to helping researchers modify the vaccines or develop new ones to combat the ever-changing virus.
"They've show the world how you do this," said Dr.
Eric Topol, chair of innovative medicine at Scripps Research in San Diego, California.
Genomic sequencing is essentially the process of mapping the unique genetic makeup of individual organisms - in this case the virus that causes COVID-19. While the technique is used by researchers to study everything from cancer to outbreaks of food poisoning and the flu virus, this is the first time authorities are using it to provide real-time surveillance of a global pandemic.
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2 tugboats speed to Egypt's Suez Canal as shippers avoid it
SUEZ, Egypt (AP) - Two additional tugboats sped Sunday to Egypt's Suez Canal to aid efforts to free a skyscraper-sized container ship wedged for days across the crucial waterway, even as major shippers increasingly divert their boats out of fear the vessel may take even longer to free.
The massive Ever Given, a Panama-flagged, Japanese-owned ship that carries cargo between Asia and Europe, got stuck Tuesday in a single-lane stretch of the canal.
In the time since, authorities have been unable to remove the vessel and traffic through the canal - valued at over $9 billion a day - has been halted, further disrupting a global shipping network already strained by the coronavirus pandemic.
The Dutch-flagged Alp Guard and the Italian-flagged Carlo Magno, called in to help tugboats already there, reached the Red Sea near the city of Suez early Sunday, satellite data from MarineTraffic.com showed.
The tugboats will nudge the 400-meter-long (quarter-mile-long) Ever Given as dredgers continue to vacuum up sand from underneath the vessel and mud caked to its port side, said Bernhard Schulte Shipmanagement, which manages the Ever Given.
Workers planned to make two attempts Sunday to free the vessel coinciding with high tides, a top pilot with the canal authority said.
"Sunday is very critical," the pilot said.
"It will determine the next step, which highly likely involves at least the partial offloading of the vessel."
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US waives FBI checks on caregivers at new migrant facilities
HOUSTON (AP) - The Biden administration is not requiring FBI fingerprint background checks of caregivers at its rapidly expanding network of emergency sites to hold thousands of immigrant teenagers, alarming child welfare experts who say the waiver compromises safety.
In the rush to get children out of overcrowded and often unsuitable Border Patrol sites, President Joe Biden's team is turning to a measure used by previous administrations: tent camps, convention centers and other huge facilities operated by private contractors and funded by U.S.
Health and Human Services. In March alone, the Biden administration announced it will open eight new emergency sites across the Southwest adding 15,000 new beds, more than doubling the size of its existing system.
These emergency sites don't have to be licensed by state authorities or provide the same services as permanent HHS facilities.
They also cost far more, an estimated $775 per child per day.
And to staff the sites quickly, the Biden administration has waived vetting procedures intended to protect minors from potential harm.
Staff and volunteers directly caring for children at new emergency sites don't have to undergo FBI fingerprint checks, which use criminal databases not accessible to the public and can overcome someone changing their name or using a false identity.
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Myanmar forces kill scores in deadliest day since coup
YANGON, Myanmar (AP) - As Myanmar´s military celebrated the annual Armed Forces Day holiday with a parade Saturday in the country's capital, soldiers and police elsewhere killed scores of people while suppressing protests in the deadliest bloodletting since last month's coup.
The online news site Myanmar Now reported late Saturday that the death toll had reached 114.
A count issued by an independent researcher in Yangon who has been compiling near-real time death tolls put the total at 107, spread over more than two dozen cities and towns. That´s more than the previous high on March 14, which ranged from 74 to 90.
The killings quickly drew international condemnation, including a joint statement from the defense chiefs of 12 countries.
"A professional military follows international standards for conduct and is responsible for protecting - not harming - the people it serves," it said.
"We urge the Myanmar Armed Forces to cease violence and work to restore respect and credibility with the people of Myanmar that it has lost through its actions."
The European Union´s delegation to Myanmar said that the 76th Myanmar Armed Forces Day "will stay engraved as a day of terror and dishonor."
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Floyd spurred broad push for change globally, activists say
Richard Wallace had seen it all before, and he wasn´t hopeful.
It was, he thought, the same old story: Police kill a Black person, protests erupt, politicians pledge reforms and corporations offer platitudes about supporting needed change.
But Wallace, the 38-year-old founder and executive director of Equity and Transformation, a social and economic justice advocacy group in Chicago, came to realize that this time was different.
This time the victim was George Floyd, a 46-year-old Black father of five captured in a sickening citizen video taking his final breaths under a white officer´s knee.
And this time, the victim would become a global symbol for change much broader than criminal justice reform.
"George Floyd has taken systemic racism from personal problem to America's issue," Wallace said. "It's clear we're seeing a growing and maturing of a movement."
As Minneapolis braces for Monday´s opening statements in the trial of Derek Chauvin, the ex-officer who is charged with murder and manslaughter in Floyd´s death, so does the world.
Floyd was the spark that set the U.S. ablaze. In the days and months after his death on Memorial Day, millions of Americans, along with thousands in cities abroad, took to the streets in protests that were often peaceful but sometimes violent and destructive.
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GOP lawmakers seek greater control over local elections
Partisan takeovers of election boards.
Threats to fine county election officials and overturn results. Even bans on giving water to voters while they stand in line.
In addition to their nationwide efforts to limit access to the ballot, Republican lawmakers in some states are moving to gain greater control over the local mechanics of elections, from voter registration all the way to certifying results.
The bills, which have already become law in Georgia and Iowa, resurrect elements of former President Donald Trump's extraordinary campaign to subvert his loss, when his backers openly floated the notion of having legislatures override the will of the voters and launched legal challenges against measures that made it easier to vote during the coronavirus pandemic.
"It´s an overreach of power," said Aunna Dennis, executive director of the Georgia chapter of the voting advocacy group Common Cause.
"They´re definitely trying to do an upheaval of our election system."
In a step widely interpreted as a way to check Georgia's Democratic strongholds, Republican Gov. Brian Kemp signed a bill Thursday to give the GOP-dominated Legislature greater influence over a state board that regulates elections and empowers it to remove local election officials deemed to be underperforming.
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2 in Seattle, San Francisco face anti-Asian hate charges
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) - Prosecutors in Seattle and San Francisco have charged men with hate crimes in separate incidents that authorities say targeted people of Asian descent amid a wave of high-profile and sometimes deadly violence against Asian Americans since the pandemic began.
Hundreds of protesters took to the streets of Los Angeles and throughout the San Francisco Bay Area on Saturday, the latest in a series of rallies in response what many said has become a troubling surge of anti-Asian sentiments.
"We can no longer accept the normalization of being treated as perpetual foreigners in this country," speaker Tammy Kim told a rally in LA's Koreatown.
At rally attended by more than 1,000 people in San Francisco's Civic Center, the city's police chief, Bill Scott, drew loud applause when he said, "Hate is the virus, and love is the vaccination."
On Friday, prosecutors in King County, Washington, charged Christopher Hamner, 51, with three counts of malicious harassment after police say he screamed profanities and threw things at cars in two incidents last week targeting women and children of Asian heritage, The Seattle Times reported Saturday.
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Suicide bomb hits Palm Sunday Mass in Indonesia, 14 wounded
MAKASSAR, Indonesia (AP) - At least one suicide bomber blew himself up outside a packed Roman Catholic cathedral during a Palm Sunday Mass on Indonesia´s Sulawesi island, wounding at least 14 people, police said.
A video obtained by The Associated Press showed body parts scattered near a burning motorbike at the gates of the Sacred Heart of Jesus Cathedral in Makassar, the capital of South Sulawesi province.
Rev.
Wilhelmus Tulak, a priest at the church, said he had just finished celebrating Palm Sunday Mass when a loud bang shocked his congregation. He said the blast went off at about 10:30 a.m. as a first batch of churchgoers was walking out of the church and another group was coming in.
He said security guards at the church were suspicious of two men on a motorcycle who wanted to enter the building and when they went to confront them, one of the men detonated his explosives.
The wounded included four guards and several churchgoers, police said.
Police could not immediately confirm whether both of the men on the motorbike were killed or just one.
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Williams, Bueckers lead UConn past Iowa in NCAA Sweet 16
SAN ANTONIO (AP) - The game was billed as a marquee matchup of uber-talented freshmen Paige Bueckers and Caitlin Clark.
While those two didn't disappoint, it was Christyn Williams and UConn's other upperclassmen who stepped up and helped the Huskies advance.
Williams scored 27 points and Bueckers added 18 to lead No. 1 UConn to a 92-72 win over fifth-seeded Iowa on Saturday in the Sweet 16 of the women's NCAA Tournament.
"The fact there was so much hype on those two kids. Part of it was unfair and comes with the territory," UConn coach Geno Auriemma said.
"Like I told the team before the game, in all these matchups, it comes (down) to somebody else. ... Our defense as bad as it was at times, was really, really good when it had to be. Christyn Williams, Evina Westbrook and Olivia (Nelson-Ododa), our three juniors were amazing, played the way you wanted your upperclassmen to play. It was not going to be easy on either Caitlin or Paige to play their normal game."
Bueckers and Iowa's Clark had taken the women's basketball world by storm this season. Bueckers became the third freshman ever to earn All-America honors.
Clark led the nation in scoring and came into the regional semifinals averaging 29 points in the tournament.
"I was super excited for this game, just because of the spotlight on it," said Bueckers, who also had nine rebounds and eight assists. "And I know everybody hyped it up to be Caitlin versus Paige, but I was so excited for our team because I knew that people were going to come and notice and watch our whole team play."
