AP News in Brief at 6:04 a.m. EST
Houston leaders seek clues for concert mishap that killed 8
HOUSTON (AP) - Authorities said they would watch video, interview witnesses and review concert protocols to determine how eight people died at a Houston music festival when fans suddenly surged toward the stage to watch rapper Travis Scott.
City officials said Saturday they were in the early stages of investigating the pandemonium that unfolded Friday evening at Astroworld, a sold-out, two-day event in NRG Park with an estimated 50,000 people in attendance. One attendee said that as a timer clicked down to the start of Scott´s performance, the crowd pushed forward.
"As soon as he jumped out on the stage, it was like an energy took over and everything went haywire," concertgoer Niaara Goods said. "All of a sudden, your ribs are being crushed. You have someone´s arm in your neck. You´re trying to breathe, but you can´t."
Goods said she was so desperate to get out that she bit a man on the shoulder to get him to move.
The dead ranged in age from 14 to 27, and 13 people were still hospitalized Saturday, Mayor Sylvester Turner said. He called the disaster "a tragedy on many different levels" and said it was too early to draw conclusions about what went wrong. Dozens were injured.
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Foreign citizens seek US-approved shots as travel resumes
BUDAPEST, Hungary (AP) - As COVID-19 ravaged Hungary in April, Budapest resident Akos Sipos received his second vaccine dose, believing he was doing the right thing for his own health and to help end the pandemic.
But Sipos, 46, soon discovered that the vaccine he received, Russia's Sputnik V, disqualified him from traveling to a number of other countries where it hadn't been approved. The nations include the United States, which is pushing forward with a new air travel policy that will make Sipos and many like him ineligible to enter.
"I thought it´s better to get Sputnik today than a Western vaccine at some uncertain future time," Sipos, who works as a search engine optimization specialist, said of his initial decision to receive the jab. "But I couldn´t have known at that time that I wouldn´t be able to travel with Sputnik."
Starting Monday, the United States plans to reopen to foreign travelers who are fully vaccinated against the coronavirus. But there's a catch: non-immigrant adults need to have received vaccines authorized by the Food and Drug Administration or which received an emergency use listing from the World Health Organization.
That leaves many hopeful travelers across the globe who have taken full courses of vaccines widely used in other parts of the world - Sputnik V and the China-produced CanSino jab, in particular - scrambling to get reinoculated with shots approved by U.S. authorities.
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Kerry rallies global climate push as uncertainty grows in US
GLASGOW, Scotland (AP) - John Kerry is everywhere and on the move at a fateful U.N. climate summit.
President Joe Biden´s envoy at the talks in Glasgow, Kerry steams from side talks with U.S. rivals China and Russia that painstakingly probe for common ground on climate to news conferences extolling progress. Kerry pops into project launches, rewarding CEOs and bankers for emissions-cutting efforts with high-level face time and praise. The lanky envoy smiles for a photo with Indigenous women from Brazil, their feather headdresses barely reaching his chin.
Toward the end of the U.N. climate summit's first of two weeks, Kerry´s voice grew hoarse from his mission of rallying global climate efforts that are threatening to hit a wall at home.
"The alternative is you don´t do anything, you don´t say anything" on climate, Kerry told reporters at the summit. "You don´t have any promises, you don´t have any commitments. And you´re sitting there, waiting for the deluge."
He was speaking of a climate fight growing more urgent, as global warming from the burning of fossil fuel intensifies, and more fraught, as the United States' own wildly swinging seesaw politics imperil Biden's climate efforts and again threaten global momentum on the matter.
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Iraqi prime minister survives assassination bid with drones
BAGHDAD (AP) - Iraq's Prime Minister Mustafa al-Kadhimi survived an assassination attempt with armed drones that targeted his residence early Sunday and officials said he was unharmed. The attack was a major escalation amid tensions sparked by the refusal of Iran-backed militias to accept last month's parliamentary election results.
Two Iraqi officials told The Associated Press that seven of al-Kadhimi's security guards were injured in the attack with two armed drones which occurred in Baghdad's heavily fortified Green Zone area. They spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to give official statements.
"I am fine and among my people. Thank God," the prime minister tweeted shortly after the attack. He called for calm and restraint, "for the sake of Iraq."
He later appeared on Iraqi television, seated behind a desk in a white shirt, looking calm and composed. "Cowardly rocket and drone attacks don´t build homelands and don´t build a future," he said.
In a statement, the government said an explosives-laden drone tried to hit al-Kadhimi´s home. Residents of Baghdad heard the sound of an explosion followed by heavy gunfire from the direction of the Green Zone, which houses foreign embassies and government offices.
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Appeals court stays vaccine mandate on larger businesses
NEW ORLEANS (AP) - A federal appeals court on Saturday temporarily halted the Biden administration's vaccine requirement for businesses with 100 or more workers.
The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals granted an emergency stay of the requirement by the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration that those workers be vaccinated by Jan. 4 or face mask requirements and weekly tests.
Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry said the action stops President Joe Biden "from moving forward with his unlawful overreach."
"The president will not impose medical procedures on the American people without the checks and balances afforded by the constitution," said a statement from Landry, a Republican.
The U.S. Labor Department's top legal adviser, Solicitor of Labor Seema Nanda, said the department is "confident in its legal authority to issue the emergency temporary standard on vaccination and testing."
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Biden hails infrastructure win as 'monumental step forward'
WASHINGTON (AP) - President Joe Biden on Saturday hailed Congress' passage of his $1 trillion infrastructure package as a "monumental step forward for the nation" after fractious fellow Democrats resolved a months-long standoff in their ranks to seal the deal.
"Finally, infrastructure week," a beaming Biden told reporters. "I´m so happy to say that: infrastructure week."
The House passed the measure 228-206 late Friday, prompting prolonged cheers from the relieved Democratic side of the chamber. Thirteen Republicans, mostly moderates, supported the legislation while six of Democrats' farthest left members opposed it.
Approval of the bill, which promises to create legions of jobs and improve broadband, water supplies and other public works, sends it to the desk of a president whose approval ratings have dropped and whose nervous party got a cold shoulder from voters in this past week´s off-year elections.
Democratic candidates for governor were defeated in Virginia and squeaked through in New Jersey, two blue-leaning states. Those setbacks made party leaders - and moderates and liberals alike - impatient to produce impactful legislation and demonstrate they know how to govern. Democrats can ill afford to seem in disarray a year before midterm elections that could give Republicans congressional control.
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Roads, transit, internet: What's in the infrastructure bill
WASHINGTON (AP) - The $1 trillion infrastructure plan that now goes to President Joe Biden to sign into law has money for roads, bridges, ports, rail transit, safe water, the power grid, broadband internet and more.
The House passed the bipartisan plan Friday night and Biden said Saturday he will hold a signing ceremony when lawmakers return from a week´s recess.
The new law promises to reach almost every corner of the country. It's a historic investment that the president has compared to the building of the transcontinental railroad and Interstate Highway System. The White House is projecting that the investments will add, on average, about 2 million jobs per year over the coming decade.
The bill cleared the House on a 228-206 vote, ending weeks of intraparty negotiations in which liberal Democrats insisted the legislation be tied to a larger, $1.75 trillion social spending bill - an effort to press more moderate Democrats to support both.
The Senate passed the legislation on a 69-30 vote in August after rare bipartisan negotiations, and the House kept that compromise intact. Thirteen House Republicans voted for the bill, giving Democrats more than enough votes to overcome a handful of defections from progressives.
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Glasgow climate negotiators seek to resolve 4 key challenges
GLASGOW, Scotland (AP) - As this year's U.N. climate talks go into their second week, negotiations on key topics are inching forward. Boosted by a few high-profile announcements at the start of the meeting, delegates are upbeat about the prospects for tangible progress in the fight against global warming.
Laurent Fabius, the former French foreign minister who helped forge the Paris climate accord, said the general atmosphere had improved since the talks began Oct. 31 and "most negotiators want an agreement."
But negotiators were still struggling late Saturday to put together a series of draft decisions for government ministers to finalize during the second week of the talks.
"People are having to take tough decisions, as they should," Archie Young, the U.K.´s lead negotiator, said Saturday.
Here's the state of play in four main areas halfway through the U.N. climate talks in Glasgow:
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Local Democrats warn party: Growing Republican wave is real
NEW HOPE, Pa. (AP) - The Democrats of Bucks County, Pennsylvania, felt the red wave building over the summer when frustrated parents filled school board meetings to complain about masking requirements and an academic theory on systemic racism that wasn't even taught in local schools.
They realized the wave was growing when such concerns, fueled by misleading reports on conservative media, began showing up in unrelated elections for judges, sheriff and even the county recorder of deeds. And so they were not surprised - but devastated all the same - when Democrats all across this key county northeast of Philadelphia were wiped out in Tuesday's municipal elections.
"This is a bell we need to pay attention to. This is something going on across the country," said attorney Patrice Tisdale, a Democrat who lost her bid to become a magisterial district judge against a Republican candidate with no formal legal training. "The Democrats can´t keep doing politics as usual."
She's among the down-ballot Democrats sending an urgent message to the national party: It´s worse than you think.
This suburban region northeast of Philadelphia is a critical political battleground in one of the nation's premier swing states. It's the type of place where moderate and college-educated voters, repelled by former President Donald Trump's divisive behavior, helped Democrats retake control of Congress in 2018 and win back the White House in 2020. That's what makes the setbacks here so alarming to many Democrats.
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EXPLAINER: How warming affects Arctic sea ice, polar bears
Majestic, increasingly hungry and at risk of disappearing, the polar bear is dependent on something melting away on our warming planet: sea ice.
In the harsh and unforgiving Arctic, where frigid cold is not just a way of life but a necessity, the polar bear stands out. But where it lives, where it hunts, where it eats - it's disappearing underfoot in the crucial summertime.
"They have just always been a revered species by people, going back hundreds and hundreds of years," said longtime government polar bear researcher Steve Amstrup, now chief scientist for Polar Bear International. "There´s just something special about polar bears."
Scientists and advocates point to polar bears, marked as "threatened" on the endangered species list, as the white-hot warning signal for the rest of the planet - "the canary in the cryosphere." As world leaders meet in Glasgow, Scotland, to try to ramp up efforts to curb climate change, the specter of polar bears looms over them.
United Nations Environment Program head Inger Andersen used to lead the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, which monitors and classifies species in trouble. She asks: "Do we really want to be the generation that saw the end of the ability of something as majestic as the polar bear to survive?"
