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

Despite Western arms, Ukraine is outgunned in the east

BAKHMUT, Ukraine (AP) — Holed up in a bombed-out house in eastern Ukraine, Ukrainian troops keep a careful accounting of their ammunition, using a door as a sort of ledger. Scrawled in chalk on the door are figures for mortar shells, smoke shells, shrapnel shells, flares.

Despite the heavy influx of weapons from the West, Ukrainian forces are outgunned by the Russians in the battle for the eastern Donbas region, where the fighting is largely being carried out by way of artillery exchanges.

While the Russians can keep up heavy, continuous fire for hours at a time, the defenders can’t match the enemy in either weapons or ammunition and must use their ammo more judiciously.

At the outpost in eastern Ukraine, dozens and dozens of mortar shells are stacked up. But the troops’ commander, Mykhailo Strebizh, who goes by the nom de guerre Gaiduk, lamented that if his fighters were to come under an intense artillery barrage, their cache would, at best, amount to only about four hours’ worth of return fire.

Ukrainian authorities say the West’s much-ballyhooed support for the country is not sufficient and is not arriving on the battlefield fast enough for this grinding and highly lethal phase of the war.

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Nobel sold for Ukrainian kids shatters record at $103.5M

NEW YORK (AP) — The Nobel Peace Prize auctioned off by Russian journalist Dmitry Muratov to raise money for Ukrainian child refugees sold Monday night for $103.5 million, shattering the old record for a Nobel.

A spokesperson for Heritage Auctions, which handled the sale, could not confirm the identity of the buyer but said the winning bid was made by proxy. The $103.5 million sale translates to $100 million Swiss francs, hinting that the buyer is from overseas.

“I was hoping that there was going to be an enormous amount of solidarity, but I was not expecting this to be such a huge amount,” Muratov said in an interview after bidding in the nearly 3-week auction ended on World Refugee Day.

Previously, the most ever paid for a Nobel Prize medal was $4.76 million in 2014, when James Watson, whose co-discovery of the structure of DNA earned him a Nobel Prize in 1962, sold his. Three years later, the family of his co-recipient, Francis Crick, received $2.27 million in bidding also run by Heritage Auctions.

Muratov, who was awarded the gold medal in October 2021, helped found the independent Russian newspaper Novaya Gazeta and was the publication’s editor-in-chief when it shut down in March amid the Kremlin’s clampdown on journalists and public dissent in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

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Biden says decision on gas tax holiday may come this week

REHOBOTH BEACH, Del. (AP) — President Joe Biden said Monday that he will decide by the end of the week whether he would support a federal gasoline tax holiday, possibly saving U.S. consumers as much as 18.4 cents a gallon.

“Yes, I’m considering it,” Biden told reporters after taking a walk along the beach near his vacation home in Delaware. “I hope to have a decision based on the data — I’m looking for by the end of the week.”

The administration is increasingly looking for ways to spare the public from higher prices at the pump, which began to climb last year and surged after Russia invaded Ukraine in February. Gas prices nationwide are averaging just under $5 a gallon, according to AAA.

Biden said members of his team were to meet this week with CEOs of the major oil companies to discuss rising prices. Biden lashed out at oil companies, saying they are making excessive profits when people are feeling the crunch of skyrocketing costs at the pump and inflation. But Biden said he would not be meeting the oil executives himself.

“I want an explanation for why they aren’t refining more oil,” Biden said.

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Report: Police at school had rifles earlier than known

UVALDE, Texas (AP) — Multiple police officers stood in a hallway at Robb Elementary School armed with rifles and at least one ballistic shield within 19 minutes of a gunman arriving at the campus, according to documents reviewed by the Austin American-Statesman, a devastating new revelation deepening questions about why police didn’t act faster to stop the shooter who killed 19 children and two teachers last month.

The series of revelations, which began the same week as the May 24 mass killing, has left the impression of a bumbling law enforcement response.

The newspaper cited documents, including school surveillance and police body camera video, from unidentified investigators of the May 24 massacre. The information is to be presented to a public Texas Senate hearing in Austin on Tuesday. Investigators say the latest information indicates officers had more than enough firepower and protection to take down the gunman long before they finally did, the newspaper reported.

The timeline the American-Statesman reported from the documents included footage from inside the school that showed the 18-year-old gunman casually entering a rear door at 11:33 a.m., walking to a classroom and immediately spraying gunfire before barricading himself. Video showed 11 officers entering the school three minutes later, the newspaper reported.

School district police Chief Pete Arredondo called the Uvalde Police Department landline and reported that their suspect had “shot a lot” with an AR-15-style rifle and outgunned the officers at the school, who he said were armed only with pistols, the newspaper reported.

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Wife of WNBA’s Griner tells AP scheduled call never happened

WASHINGTON (AP) — WNBA star Brittney Griner tried to call her wife nearly a dozen times through the American embassy in Russia on the couple’s fourth anniversary Saturday, but they never connected since the phone line at the embassy was not staffed, Cherelle Griner said Monday.

The couple has not spoken by phone in the four months since Griner’s arrest in Russia, where she remains jailed. That was to have changed Saturday, when a long-awaited call was to have finally taken place after getting Russian government approval. But the day came and went without any contact, leaving an anguished Cherelle Griner to wonder what went wrong and to suspect at least initially that Russian authorities had thwarted the call.

On Monday, she said she learned from her wife’s lawyers a more distressing truth: Brittney Griner had actually tried to call 11 times over a period of several hours, dialing a number she’d been given at the U.S. embassy in Moscow, which the couple had been told would then patch the call through to Cherelle Griner in Phoenix. But each time, the call went unanswered because the desk at the embassy where the phone rang was apparently unstaffed on Saturday.

“I was distraught. I was hurt. I was done, fed up,” Cherelle Griner told The Associated Press in an interview, recounting how an anniversary she had eagerly anticipated was instead spent in tears. “I’m pretty sure I texted BG’s agent and was like: ‘I don’t want to talk to anybody. It’s going to take me a minute to get my emotions together, and just tell everybody I’m unavailable right now.’ Because it just knocked me out. I wasn’t well, I’m still not well.”

The State Department said Monday that “we deeply regret that Brittney Griner was unable to speak with her wife because of a logistical error.” The department reiterated that it has no higher priority than the safety of Americans overseas and that it remains in regular contact with families of hostages and wrongful detainees.

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Sweltering streets: Hundreds of homeless die in extreme heat

PHOENIX (AP) — Hundreds of blue, green and grey tents are pitched under the sun’s searing rays in downtown Phoenix, a jumble of flimsy canvas and plastic along dusty sidewalks. Here, in the hottest big city in America, thousands of homeless people swelter as the summer’s triple digit temperatures arrive.

The stifling tent city has ballooned amid pandemic-era evictions and surging rents that have dumped hundreds more people onto the sizzling streets that grow eerily quiet when temperatures peak in the midafternoon. A heat wave earlier this month brought temperatures of up to 114 degrees (45.5 Celsius) – and it’s only June. Highs reached 118 degrees (47.7 Celsius) last year.

“During the summer, it’s pretty hard to find a place at night that’s cool enough to sleep without the police running you off,” said Chris Medlock, a homeless Phoenix man known on the streets as “T-Bone” who carries everything he owns in a small backpack and often beds down in a park or a nearby desert preserve to avoid the crowds.

“If a kind soul could just offer a place on their couch indoors maybe more people would live,” Medlock said at a dining room where homeless people can get some shade and a free meal.

Excessive heat causes more weather-related deaths in the United States than hurricanes, flooding and tornadoes combined.

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‘It always wins’: North Korea may declare COVID-19 victory

SEOUL, South Korea (AP) — It’s only been a month since North Korea acknowledged having an COVID-19 outbreak, after steadfastly denying any cases for more than two years. But already it may be preparing to declare victory.

According to state media, North Korea has avoided the mass deaths many expected in a nation with one of the world’s worst health care systems, little or no access to vaccines, and what outsiders see as a long record of ignoring the suffering of its people.

Daily updates from official media make it appear inevitable that the nation will completely defeat a virus that has killed more than 6 million people around the world. According to the official tally, cases are plummeting, and, while 18% of the nation of 26 million people reportedly have had symptoms that outsiders strongly suspect were from COVID=19, less than 100 have died.

The South Korean government as well as some experts believe that North Korea may soon declare that it has beaten the virus, linked, of course, to leader Kim Jong Un’s strong and clever guidance.

A victory lap, however, isn’t a foregone conclusion. Doing so, according to some experts, would deprive Kim of a useful tool to control the public and possibly open the government up to humiliation if cases continue.

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Georgia’s Raffensperger among witnesses for next 1/6 hearing

Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger is set to testify Tuesday at the House Jan. 6 committee about the extraordinary pressure he faced from former President Donald Trump to “find 11,780” votes that could flip the state to prevent Joe Biden’s election victory

Raffensperger, along with his deputy Gabe Sterling and Arizona’s state House Speaker Rusty Bowers, are scheduled to be the key witnesses when the House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021 insurrection resumes on Tuesday.

The focus will be on how the former president and his allies vigorously pressured officials in key battleground states with schemes to reject ballots or entire state tallies to upend the results of the 2020 presidential election.

Additionally, the panel will underscore how Trump knew his unrelenting pressure campaign could potentially cause violence against state and local officials and their families but pursued it anyway, according to a select committee aide.

“We will show courageous state officials who stood up and said they wouldn’t go along with this plan to either call legislatures back into session or decertify the results for Joe Biden,” Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., one of the Democratic members of the committee, told CNN on Sunday.

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Shots for tots: COVID vaccinations start for little US kids

Little Fletcher Pack woke up Monday morning and asked: “Is today vaccine day?”

For the 3-year-old from Lexington, South Carolina, the answer was yes.

The nation’s infants, toddlers and preschoolers are finally getting their chance at COVID-19 vaccination as the U.S. rolls out shots for tots this week. Shipments arrived in some locations over the weekend and some spots, including a Walgreens in South Carolina and another in New York City, opened up appointments for Monday.

Fletcher’s mother said that once her son is fully vaccinated, he can finally go bowling and visit the nearby children’s museum.

“He’s never really played with another kid inside before,” McKenzie Pack said. “This will be a really big change for our family.”

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Facebook removes GOP Senate candidate’s ‘RINO hunting’ video

WASHINGTON (AP) — Facebook on Monday removed a campaign video by Republican Missouri U.S. Senate candidate Eric Greitens that shows him brandishing a shotgun and declaring that he’s hunting RINOs, or Republicans In Name Only.

In the ad, Greitens, a former Missouri governor who resigned in disgrace in 2018, is flanked by a tactical unit outside a home on a tree-lined street as he whispers, “The RINO feeds on corruption and is marked by the stripes of cowardice,” using a term popularized by former President Donald Trump and his allies to deride moderate or establishment Republicans.

The armed tactical team breaks through the front door and throws what appear to be flash-bang grenades inside. Greitens enters an empty living room through the smoke and says: “Join the MAGA crew. Get a RINO hunting permit. There’s no bagging limit, no tagging limit and it doesn’t expire until we save our country.”

Facebook said the video was removed “for violating our policies prohibiting violence and incitement.” Twitter said Greitens’ post violated its rules about abusive behavior but said it was leaving it up because it was in the “public’s interest” for the tweet to be viewable. The company’s move prevented the post from being shared any further.

The video comes at a time of renewed focus on violence in politics following fatal mass shootings and threats to government officials. Two weeks ago, a man carrying a gun, a knife and zip ties was arrested near Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s house after threatening to kill the justice. Around the same time, a gunman killed a retired county judge in Wisconsin before fatally shooting himself, and he had a list that included the names of Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell and Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers.