AP News in Brief at 11:04 p.m. EDT

Police: More than 900 civilian bodies found in Kyiv region

KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — The bodies of more than 900 civilians have been discovered in the region surrounding the Ukrainian capital following Russia’s withdrawal — most of them fatally shot, police said Friday, an indication that many people were “simply executed.”

The jarring number emerged shortly after Russia’s Defense Ministry promised to step up missile attacks on Kyiv in response to Ukraine’s alleged assaults on Russian territory. That ominous warning followed the stunning loss of Moscow’s flagshipin the Black Sea, which a senior U.S. defense official said Friday was indeed hit by at least one Ukrainian missile.

Amid its threats, Moscow continued preparations for a renewed offensive in eastern Ukraine. Fighting also went on in the pummeled southern port city of Mariupol, where locals reported seeing Russian troops digging up bodies. In the northeastern city of Kharkiv, shelling of a residential area killed seven people, including a 7-month-old child, and wounded 34, according to regional Gov. Oleh Sinehubov.

Around Kyiv, Andriy Nebytov, the head of the capital’s regional police force, said bodies were abandoned in the streets or given temporary burials. He cited police data indicating 95% died from gunshot wounds.

“Consequently, we understand that under the (Russian) occupation, people were simply executed in the streets,” Nebytov said.

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It’s not over: COVID-19 cases are on the rise again in US

Yet again, the U.S. is trudging into what could be another COVID-19 surge, with cases rising nationally and in most states after a two-month decline.

One big unknown? “We don’t know how high that mountain’s gonna grow,” said Dr. Stuart Campbell Ray, an infectious disease expert at Johns Hopkins University.

No one expects a peak nearly as high as the last one, when the contagious omicron version of the coronavirus ripped through the population.

But experts warn that the coming wave – caused by a mutant called BA.2that’s thought to be about 30% more contagious – will wash across the nation. They worry that hospitalizations, which are already ticking up in some parts of the Northeast, will rise in a growing number of states in the coming weeks. And the case wave will be bigger than it looks, they say, because reported numbers are vast undercounts as more people test at home without reporting their infections or skip testing altogether.

At the height of the previous omicron surge, reported daily cases reached into the hundreds of thousands. As of Thursday, the seven-day rolling average for daily new cases rose to 39,521, up from 30,724 two weeks earlier, according to data from Johns Hopkins collected by The Associated Press.

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Ukrainian mom’s pain at watching daughter’s burial on phone

LVIV, Ukraine (AP) — Viktoria Kovalenko bore witness to the death of her husband and elder daughter when their car was hit by a shell in northern Ukraine.

By the time her loved ones got a proper funeral, she was 500 kilometers away, able to watch the burial only on a cellphone video sent to her by relatives.

Even in the relative peace of Lviv, a city little touched by violence in the war with Russia, it was an ordeal she couldn’t endure.

“Tears do not let me watch until the end,” she said as she played the video in a wooded area where she was pushing her one year-old daughter Varvara in a stroller.

In early March, Kovalenko and her family were in their car, fleeing the area of the city of Chernihiv, one of the war’s most intensely besieged.

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Twitter adopts ‘poison pill’ defense in Musk takeover bid

PROVIDENCE, R.I. (AP) — Twitter said Friday that its board of directors has unanimously adopted a “poison pill” defense in response to Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s proposal to buy the company for more than $43 billion and take it private.

The move would allow existing Twitter shareholders — except for Musk — to buy additional shares at a discount, thereby diluting Musk’s stake in the company and making it harder for him to corral a majority of shareholder votes in favor of the acquisition.

Twitter’s plan would take effect if Musk’s roughly 9% stake grows to 15% or more.

The poison pill injects another twist into a melodrama surrounding the possibility of the world’s richest person taking over a social media platform he described Thursday as the world’s “de facto town square.”

Twitter said its plan would reduce the likelihood that any one person can gain control of the company without either paying shareholders a premium or giving the board more time to evaluate an offer. Such defenses, formally called shareholder rights plans, are used to prevent the hostile takeover of a corporation by making any acquisition prohibitively expensive for the bidder.

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Texas halts truck inspections that caused border gridlock

AUSTIN, Texas (AP) — Texas Gov. Greg Abbott on Friday repealed his traffic-clogging immigration order that backed up commercial trucks at the U.S.-Mexico border, after a week of intensifying backlash and fears of deepening economic losses.

The Republican governor dropped his new rules that had required all commercial trucks from Mexico to undergo extra inspections to curb the flow of migrants and drugs and ratcheted up a fight with the Biden administration over immigration policy.

Some truckers reported waiting more than 30 hours to cross. Others blocked one of the world’s busiest trade bridges in protest.

Abbott, who is up for reelection in November and has made the border his top issue, fully lifted the inspections after reaching agreements with neighboring Mexican states that he says outline new commitments to border security. The last one was signed with the governor of Tamaulipas, who earlier this week said the inspections were overzealous and created havoc. On Friday, he joined Abbott and said they were ready to work together.

When Abbottfirst ordered the inspections, he did not say lifting them was conditional on such arrangements with Mexico.

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Officer’s camera misses key moment of Patrick Lyoya’s death

Body camera footage of Patrick Lyoya’s fatal encounter with a Michigan police officer shows a close-up view of an intense struggle, but the video goes dark 42 seconds before the officer shoots the Black man in the head.

It’s the latest high-profile case in which body cameras — touted as tools to hold police accountable — have failed, leaving prosecutors and the public to rely on bystander video for a clearer picture of what happened.

One expert said vendors could make changes to avoid accidental camera deactivations, though it’s not clear that is what happened in Lyoya’s case, and some activists said an accident seems unlikely. Regardless, Lyoya’s family and their attorneys say it shows the importance of citizen video. The shooting was captured by Lyoya’s passenger, with a cellphone, and a doorbell camera across the street.

“Keep videoing the police because transparency is important for them and it’s sure important for us,” said Ben Crump, an attorney for Lyoya’s family.

The officer was on top of Lyoya, who was facedown on the ground, when he shot the 26-year-old Congolese refugee in the head April 4.

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After bullets flew, NYC subway workers kept their cool

NEW YORK (AP) — When smoke bombs and bullets were unleashed on a subway full of morning commuters as it crawled toward a stop in Brooklyn, the train’s driver, David Artis, couldn’t hear the shots.

His first indication something was wrong was when passengers crowded near the door to his operator’s compartment to report chaos, one car back.

Artis said after a moment of shock, his thoughts quickly shifted from, “Oh my God!” to concern for his passengers. He leaned on his emergency training.

“Then it kicked in. Get them out,” he said Friday after he and fellow transit workers were honored by the mayor for their response to Tuesday’s shooting.

In a few minutes of lightning-quick decisions, Artis and train conductor Raven Haynes radioed in the attack, threw open the train doors and evacuated all of the passengers to another train on the same platform, then began getting aid to the wounded.

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‘Detest me with moderation,’ Paris attacks defendant pleads

PARIS (AP) — The only surviving member of the Islamic State attack team that terrorized Paris in 2015 asked Friday for forgiveness and expressed condolences for the victims, wiping away tears during court testimony as he pleaded with survivors to “detest me with moderation.”

For years, Salah Abdeslam stayed silent about what happened Nov. 13, 2015 in the Bataclan theater, Paris cafes and the national stadium, and the 130 people who were killed. After his trial opened last year, he had a few outbursts of extremist bravado, but for months he refused to answer most questions.

Then this week, his words started flowing, in lengthy testimony that at times contradicted earlier statements. His words at times prompted angry outbursts from the public.

Survivors and victims’ families, who hope the extensive trial helps them find justice and clarity, had mixed reactions.

Abdeslam said the mastermind of the attacks convinced him two days beforehand to join the team of suicide bombers. The next day, Abdeslam said his brother Brahim showed him the café in northern Paris where Salah was meant to detonate himself in a crowd.

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Trump backs GOP’s JD Vance in US Senate primary in Ohio

COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) — Former President Donald Trump on Friday endorsed “Hillbilly Elegy” author JD Vance in Ohio’s bitterly competitive Republican Senate primary, ending months of jockeying in a race where his backing could be pivotal.

In a statement, Trump described Vance as “the candidate most qualified and ready to win in November.”

“It is all about winning!” he wrote.

The decision marks a major blow for Vance’s top rivals — former state treasurer Josh Mandel, investment banker Mike Gibbons and former Ohio Republican Party chair Jane Timken — who have been locked in a heated and contentious race for both the nomination and Trump’s backing in a primary that is now less than three weeks away.

On Thursday night, dozens of Republican leaders in Ohio mounted a last-minute effort to urge Trump not to endorse Vance following a news report that said Trump had made a decision.

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States scale back food stamp benefits even as prices soar

DES MOINES, Iowa (AP) — Month by month, more of the roughly 40 million Americans who get help buying groceries through the federal food stamp program are seeing their benefits plunge even as the nation struggles with the biggest increase in food costs in decades.

The payments to low-income individuals and families are dropping as governors end COVID-19 disaster declarations and opt out of an ongoing federal program that made their states eligible for dramatic increases in SNAP benefits, also known as food stamps. The U.S. Department of Agriculture began offering the increased benefit in April 2020 in response to surging unemployment after the COVID-19 pandemic swept over the country.

The result is that depending on the politics of a state, individuals and families in need find themselves eligible for significantly different levels of help buying food.

Nebraska took the most aggressive action anywhere in the country, ending the emergency benefits four months into the pandemic in July 2020 in a move Republican Gov. Pete Ricketts said was necessary to “show the rest of the country how to get back to normal.”

Since then, nearly a dozen states with Republican leadership have taken similar action, with Iowa this month being the most recent place to slash the benefits. Benefits also will be cut in Wyoming and Kentucky in the next month. Arkansas, Florida, Idaho, Missouri, Mississippi, Montana, North Dakota, Nebraska, South Dakota and Tennessee have also scaled back the benefits.