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

As virus surges in some US states, emergency rooms swamped

A fast-rising tide of new coronavirus cases is flooding emergency rooms in parts of the United States, with some patients moved into hallways and nurses working extra shifts to keep up with the surge.

Patients struggling to breathe are being placed on ventilators in emergency wards since intensive care units are full, officials say, and the near-constant care they require is overtaxing workers who also are treating more typical ER cases like chest pains, infections, and fractures.

In Texas, Dr. Alison Haddock of the Baylor College of Medicine said the current situation is worse than after Hurricane Harvey, which swamped Houston with floodwaters in 2017. The state reported a new daily record for virus deaths Friday and more than 10,000 confirmed cases for the fourth consecutive day.

“I’ve never seen anything like this COVID surge,” said Haddock, who has worked in emergency rooms since 2007. “We’re doing our best, but we’re not an ICU.”

Patients are waiting “hours and hours” to get admitted, she said, and the least sick people are lying in beds in halls to make room for most seriously ill.

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Rights activists, political leaders mourn Rep. John Lewis

Rights activists, politicians from both parties and many other people touched by the legacy of John Lewis mourned the congressman and pillar of the civil rights movement Saturday, lauding the strength, courage and kindness of a man whose lifelong struggle against racial discrimination took him from a bridge in Selma to the nation’s Capitol.

“As a young man marching for equality in Selma, Alabama, John answered brutal violence with courageous hope,” said former President George W. Bush. “And throughout his career as a civil rights leader and public servant, he worked to make our country a more perfect union.”

Former President Barack Obama, America’s first Black president, recalled being sworn in for his first term: “I hugged him on the inauguration stand before I was sworn in and told him I was only there because of the sacrifices he made.”

Lewis died Friday, several months after the Georgia Democrat announced that he had been diagnosed with advanced pancreatic cancer.

Lewis, 80, often recalled his upbringing in the segregated South, including how he was denied a library card because the library was for “whites only.” He was determined to destroy segregation, joining with the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. as founder of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee to help plan the 1963 March on Washington.

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14 hours later, Trump says he is ‘saddened’ by Lewis’ death

WASHINGTON (AP) — In the hours after the death of American civil rights icon Rep. John Lewis, President Donald Trump took to Twitter to retweet old missives about Democratic rival Joe Biden and lash out at his former national security adviser and his niece for writing tell-all books about him.

Trump then headed to his golf course in northern Virginia with a political confidant, Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, for a nearly four-hour outing.

Shortly after 2 p.m., as Trump was returning from his golf outing — and more than 14 hours after Lewis’ death was announced — he offered his and the first lady’s condolences in a two-sentence Twitter message.

“Saddened to hear the news of civil rights hero John Lewis passing. Melania and I send our prayers to he and his family,” Trump wrote.

By that point all four living former U.S. presidents, Vice-President Mike Pence and scores of lawmakers had publicly remarked on the passing of the lawmaker whose brutal beating on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, 50 years earlier marked a turning point in the civil rights movement.

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Given a chance, Trump would push court pick before election

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell have tried to make it clear: Given the chance, they would push through a Supreme Court nominee should a vacancy occur before Election Day.

The issue has taken on new immediacy with the disclosure Friday that Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is receiving chemotherapy for a recurrence of cancer after four earlier bouts with the disease. The 87-year-old liberal, who apologized in 2016 for her pointed public criticism of Trump during his first campaign, says she has no plans to retire.

The development has focused even more on what’s at stake this election, with the winner in position to help shape the trajectory of the court for years to come.

Trump administration officials have underscored that Trump would not hesitate to fill an opening before voters have their say Nov. 3, less than four months away, on whether to give him a second term.

Four years ago, also in a presidential election year, the GOP-controlled Senate refused to hold a hearing or vote when President Barack Obama, a Democrat, nominated federal judge Merrick Garland to succeed Justice Antonin Scalia after his death in February. Nine months before that year’s election, McConnell said voters should determine who would nominate the person to fill that seat.

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Cost, hassle of stamps questioned as mail-in voting surges

COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) — Even if it weren’t for her disability and fear of catching COVID-19, Delinda Bryant said getting the necessary postage to cast a ballot this year will be a struggle.

Bryant, 63, doesn’t have $10 for a book of stamps, a printer to make them at home or a working car.

“My car needs its transmission fixed, but my utilities are so high I can’t afford it,” the south Georgia woman said in testimony for a federal voting rights lawsuit. “Ten dollars for a book of stamps is a hardship.”

As more states embrace mail-in voting amid the coronavirus pandemic, the often overlooked detail of postage has emerged as a partisan dividing line.

Questions over whether postage will be required for absentee ballot applications and the actual ballots, who pays for it and what happens to envelopes without stamps are the subject of lawsuits and statehouse political brawls.

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One reporter, two executions and haunting last words

TERRE HAUTE, Ind. (AP) — Daniel Lewis Lee, a condemned man and convicted murderer, was asked if he wanted to make a final statement from the execution chamber, with its institutional green-tiled walls and plate-glass interior window, moments before he too would die.

He did. He leaned his head up and we locked eyes.

“You’re killing an innocent man,” Lee said, looking directly at me.

Those were his last words. He said them to me.

Lee’s execution, one of two that I witnessed this past week at the Federal Correctional Complex in Terre Haute, Indiana, played out slowly, after painstaking hours of final, futile legal appeals, before prison officials administered a lethal injection and the federal government carried out capital punishment for the first time in almost two decades. A third execution came later in the week.

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Dress rehearsal: MLB holds first COVID-era exhibitions

NEW YORK (AP) — Didi Gregorius watched over the top of his face mask as his drive off Washington ace Max Scherzer sailed into empty outfield seats.

Fake cheers — meant to encourage the hometown Nationals — accidentally piped through the stadium as the Philadelphia Phillies shortstop rounded the bases. After touching home plate, he pantomimed air-fives to teammates.

“This is 2020 baseball,” Scherzer said. “Embrace it and have fun with it.”

Exhibition games in Washington, New York and Pittsburgh on Saturday gave Major League Baseball its first look at coronavirus-era games — cardboard cutouts for fans, sound effects for crowds and more. Still, for clubs limited to practices and intrasquads in their own ballparks for the past two weeks, Saturday stood as an important mile marker as the sport tries to start a shortened 60-game season next Thursday amid a pandemic.

“In some ways, this is very much a dress rehearsal for the new world we’re in,” Yankees manager Aaron Boone said before an exhibition at the crosstown Mets.

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Remembering John Lewis, rights icon and `American hero’

WASHINGTON (AP) — People paid great heed to John Lewis for much of his life in the civil rights movement. But at the very beginning — when he was just a kid wanting to be a minister someday — his audience didn’t care much for what he had to say.

A son of Alabama sharecroppers, the young Lewis first preached moral righteousness to his family’s chickens. His place in the vanguard of the 1960s campaign for Black equality had its roots in that hardscrabble Alabama farm and all those clucks.

Lewis, who died Friday at age 80, was the youngest and last survivor of the Big Six civil rights activists who organized the 1963 March on Washington, and spoke shortly before the group’s leader, Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., gave his “I Have a Dream” speech to a vast sea of people.

If that speech marked a turning point in the civil rights era — or at least the most famous moment — the struggle was far from over. Two more hard years passed before truncheon-wielding state troopers beat Lewis bloody and fractured his skull as he led 600 protesters over Selma’s Edmund Pettus Bridge.

Searing TV images of that brutality helped to galvanize national opposition to racial oppression and embolden leaders in Washington to pass the landmark 1965 Voting Rights Act five months later.

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Doctor who survived COVID-19 bewildered by public disregard

BIRMINGHAM, Ala. (AP) — Dr. Michael Saag spends much of his time treating patients fighting for their lives and working with colleagues who are overwhelmed and exhausted by the relentless battle against the COVID-19 pandemic.

But he enters a different world when he walks out the door of his Alabama clinic: one where many don’t wear masks, keep their distance from others or even seem aware of the intense struggle being waged against a virus that has cost about 140,000 lives nationwide and made so many — including the doctor — seriously ill.

The disconnect is devastating.

“It’s a mixture of emotions, from anger to being demoralized to bewilderment to frustration,” Saag said.

Confirmed cases of COVID-19 have increased an average of more than 1,500 a day over the past week in Alabama, bringing the total to more than 62,100 since the pandemic began in March. At least 1,230 people have died and health officials say fewer than 15% of the state’s intensive care beds are available for new patients. Some hospitals are completely out of room.

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‘Black Lives’ mural outside Trump Tower defaced for 3rd time

NEW YORK (AP) — A “Black Lives Matter” mural painted on the street in front of President Donald Trump’s namesake New York City tower has quickly become a target for vandalism, defaced with bucketfuls of paint three times in less than a week.

In the latest incident, two women were arrested around 3 p.m. Saturday after police said they poured black paint on the block-long mural outside Trump Tower on Manhattan’s chic Fifth Avenue.

Bystander video showed police officers surrounding one of the women as she rubbed the paint on the mural’s bright yellow letters and screamed: “they don’t care about Black lives” and “refund the police.”

One of the officers slipped on the paint and tumbled to the ground, sustaining injuries to his head and arm, police said. He was listed in stable condition at Bellevue Hospital.

A police department spokesperson said the women’s names and information on possible charges against them weren’t immediately available.