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

AP review: At least 13 auto safety rules are years overdue

WASHINGTON (AP) — After their 16-year-old daughter died in a car crash, David and Wendy Mills wondered whether she would be alive if federal rules on rear seat belt warnings had been issued on time.

Four years later, with no rule and traffic fatalities spiking, they’re still at a loss over the inaction.

The teenager was riding in the back seat of a car to a Halloween party in 2017 just a mile from her house in Spring, Texas, when she unfastened her seat belt to slide next to her friend and take a selfie. Moments later, the driver veered off the road and the car flipped, ejecting her.

Kailee died instantly. Her three friends who remained buckled walked away with minor scrapes.

A 2012 law had directed the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, an agency of the Department of Transportation, to implement safety rules requiring car manufacturers to install a warning to drivers if an unbuckled passenger is sitting in a rear seat. The agency had three years to act.

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In New Hampshire, vaccine fights and misinformation roil GOP

BOSTON (AP) — Republican Rep. Ken Weyler was known around the New Hampshire Statehouse for dismissing the benefits of COVID-19 vaccines and opposing tens of millions of dollars in federal funds to promote vaccinations.

But when the 79-year-old Weyler, a retired commercial pilot and Massachusetts Institute of Technology graduate who chaired the legislature’s powerful fiscal committee, sent a 52-page report likening vaccines to “organized mass murder,” Republican leaders were compelled to act.

“I don’t know of anyone who agrees with it. It’s absolute craziness,” said Republican House Speaker Sherman Packard, who quickly accepted Weyler’s resignation from his committee post.

The episode was especially piercing in New Hampshire, where the previous House speaker died of COVID-19 last year. It has also exposed Republicans’ persistent struggle to root out the misinformation that has taken hold in its ranks across the country.

A year and a half into the pandemic, surveys show Republicans are less worried about the threat from COVID-19 or its variants, less confident in science, less likely to be vaccinated than Democrats and independents and more opposed to vaccine mandates.

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Bitcoin-mining power plant raises ire of environmentalists

An obstacle to large-scale bitcoin mining is finding enough cheap energy to run the huge, power-gobbling computer arrays that create and transact cryptocurrency. One mining operation in central New York came up with a novel solution that has alarmed environmentalists. It uses its own power plant.

Greenidge Generation runs a once-mothballed plant near the shore of Seneca Lake in the Finger Lakes region to produce about 44 megawatts to run 15,300 computer servers, plus additional electricity it sends into the state’s power grid. The megawatts dedicated to Bitcoin might be enough electricity to power more than 35,000 homes.

Proponents call it a competitive way to mine increasingly popular cryptocurrencies, without putting a drain on the existing power grid.

Environmentalists see the plant as a climate threat.

They fear a wave of resurrected fossil-fuel plants pumping out greenhouse gasses more for private profit than public good. Seeing Greenidge as a test case, they are asking the state to deny renewal of the plant’s air quality permit and put the brakes on similar projects.

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Unhappy with prices, ranchers look to build own meat plants

DES MOINES, Iowa (AP) — Like other ranchers across the country, Rusty Kemp for years grumbled about rock-bottom prices paid for the cattle he raised in central Nebraska, even as the cost of beef at grocery stores kept climbing.

He and his neighbors blamed it on consolidation in the beef industry stretching back to the 1970s that resulted in four companies slaughtering over 80% of the nation’s cattle, giving the processors more power to set prices while ranchers struggled to make a living. Federal data show that for every dollar spent on food, the share that went to ranchers and farmers dropped from 35 cents in the 1970s to 14 cents recently.

It led Kemp to launch an audacious plan: Raise more than $300 million from ranchers to build a plant themselves, putting their future in their own hands.

“We’ve been complaining about it for 30 years,” Kemp said. “It’s probably time somebody does something about it.”

Crews will start work this fall building the Sustainable Beef plant on nearly 400 acres near North Platte, Nebraska, and other groups are making similar surprising moves in Iowa, Idaho and Wisconsin. The enterprises will test whether it’s really possible to compete financially against an industry trend that has swept through American agriculture and that played a role in meat shortages during the coronavirus pandemic.

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Strike dodged with deal between film and TV crews, studios

LOS ANGELES (AP) — An 11th-hour deal was reached Saturday, averting a strike of film and television crews that would have seen some 60,000 behind-the-scenes workers walk off their jobs and would have frozen productions in Hollywood and across the U.S.

After days of marathon negotiations, representatives from the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees and from the studios and entertainment companies who employ them reached the three-year contract agreement before a Monday strike deadline, avoiding a serious setback for an industry that had just gotten back to work after long pandemic shutdowns.

“This is a Hollywood ending,” union president Matthew Loeb said. “Our members stood firm.”

The workers still must vote to approve it, but the strike has been called off with the tentative deal.

Many in Hollywood celebrated the news.

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‘God have mercy’: Tigray residents describe life under siege

NAIROBI, Kenya (AP) — As food and the means to buy it dwindled in a city under siege, the young mother felt she could do no more. She killed herself, unable to feed her children.

In a Catholic church across town, flour and oil to make communion wafers will soon run out. And the flagship hospital in Mekele, the capital of Ethiopia’s Tigray region, wrestles with whether to give patients the expired medications that remain. Its soap and bleach are gone.

Ayear of war and months of government-enforced deprivation have left the city of a half-million people with rapidly shrinking stocks of food, fuel, medicine and cash. In rural areas, life is even grimmer as thousands of people survive on wild cactus fruit or sell the meager aid they receive. Man-made famine, the world’s worst hunger crisis in a decade, has begun.

Despite the severing of almost all communication with the outside world, The Associated Press drew on a dozen interviews with people inside Mekele, along with internal aid documents, for the most detailed picture yet of life under the Ethiopian government’s blockade of the Tigray region’s 6 million people.

Amid sputtering electricity supplies, Mekele is often lit by candles that many people can’t afford. Shops and streets are emptying, and cooking oil and baby formula are running out. People from rural areas and civil servants who have gone unpaid for months have swelled the ranks of beggars. People are thinner. Funeral announcements on the radio have increased.

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Robert Durst hospitalized with COVID-19, his lawyer says

LOS ANGELES (AP) — New York real estate heir Robert Durst, who days ago was sentenced in a two-decade-old murder case, has been hospitalized after contracting COVID-19, his lawyer said Saturday,

Defense Attorney Dick DeGuerin said he was notified that Durst was admitted after testing positive for the coronavirus. DeGuerin said he didn’t know Durst’s condition and was trying to find out more details.

The Los Angeles Superior Court said in a statement Saturday that the court was notified someone present for the sentencing hearing Thursday had tested positive for COVID-19.

“As a result, the Court will follow CDC and LA County Department of Public Health guidelines for assessing close contacts of the infected individual,” the statement read.

No additional COVID-19 cases have been reported.

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Bill Clinton to spend 1 more night in California hospital

ORANGE, Calif. (AP) — Bill Clinton will spend one more night at a Southern California hospital where he is recovering from an infection, a spokesman said Saturday.

“President Clinton has continued to make excellent progress over the past 24 hours,” spokesman Angel Ureña said in a statement.

Clinton will remain overnight at University of California Irvine Medical Center “to receive IV antibiotics before an expected discharge tomorrow,” the statement said.

Hillary Clinton has been with her husband at the hospital southeast of Los Angeles. She returned Saturday with her daughter Chelsea Clinton around 8 a.m. Saturday in an SUV accompanied by secret service agents.

President Joe Biden said Friday night that he had spoken to Bill Clinton and the former president “sends his best.”

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Venezuela halts talks after Maduro ally’s extradition to US

MIAMI (AP) — Venezuela’s government said Saturday it would halt negotiations with its opponents in retaliation for the extradition to the U.S. of a close ally of President Nicolás Maduro who prosecutors believe could be the most significant witness ever about corruption in the South American country.

Jorge Rodríguez, who has been heading the government’s delegation, said his team wouldn’t travel to Mexico City for the next scheduled round of negotiations.

The announcement capped a tumultuous day that saw businessman Alex Saab placed on a U.S.-bound plane in Cape Verde after a 16-month fight by Maduro and his allies, including Russia, who consider the Colombian-born businessman a Venezuelan diplomat.

A few hours after news of Saab’s extradition blew up Venezuelan social media, six American oil executives held on house arrest were picked up by security forces — a sign that relations between Washington and Caracas could be upended after months of quiet diplomacy since Joe Biden entered the White House. Families of the men known as the Citgo 6 — for the Houston subsidiary of Venezuela’s state-owned oil company where they worked — fear they could be thrown back into jail.

“The fact that Mr. Saab is in the U.S. before my father is a disgrace,” said Cristina Vadell, whose father, Tomeu Vadell, is among the Americans serving out long sentences in the country on what the U.S. government considers trumped-up charges.

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Grand game: Boston’s 2 slams lead 9-5 ALCS win over Astros

HOUSTON (AP) — J.D. Martinez and Rafael Devers helped the Red Sox have a grand old time in Houston.

Boston became the first team to slug two grand slams in a postseason game, with Martinez and Devers connecting in the first two innings of a 9-5 win over the Astros on Saturday that tied their AL Championship Series at one game apiece.

Game 3 is Monday night in Boston. It’s the first of three consecutive home games for the Red Sox, back in the playoffs for the first time since winning the 2018 World Series after downing Houston in the ALCS.

Martinez made it 4-0 with his opposite-field shot off rookie Luis García with two outs in the first. It was the first career playoff slam for the four-time All-Star, who began his career with the Astros.

“That situation, the pressure is on him, it’s not on me to come through there,” Martinez said. “It’s the first inning. He has bases loaded. I’m trying to tell myself that, trying to stay relaxed and just looking for a pitch so I can just put a barrel on it.”