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

Biden can’t budge fellow Dems with big overhaul at stake

WASHINGTON (AP) — His government overhaul plans at stake, President Joe Biden appeared unable Wednesday night to swiftly strike agreement with two wavering Democratic senators trying to trim back his potentially historic $3.5 trillion measure that will collapse without their support.

With Republicans solidly opposed and no Democratic votes to spare, Biden canceled a trip to Chicago that was to focus on COVID-19 vaccinations so he could dig in for a full day of intense negotiations ahead of crucial votes. Aides made their way to Capitol Hill for talks, and late in the day supportive House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer met with Biden at the White House.

The risks were clear, but so was the potential reward as Biden and his party reach for a giant legislative accomplishment — promising a vast rewrite of the nation’s balance sheet with an ever-slim majority in Congress. His idea is to essentially raise taxes on corporations and the wealthy and use that money to expand government health care, education and other programs — an impact that would be felt in countless American lives.

“We take it one step at a time,” Pelosi, told reporters.

Attention is focused on Sens. Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, centrist Democrats. They share a concern that the overall size of Biden’s plan is too big, but have infuriated colleagues by not making any counter-proposals public.

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Health workers once saluted as heroes now get threats

OMAHA, Neb. (AP) — More than a year after U.S. health care workers on the front lines against COVID-19 were saluted as heroes with nightly clapping from windows and balconies, some are being issued panic buttons in case of assault and ditching their scrubs before going out in public for fear of harassment.

Across the country, doctors and nurses are dealing with hostility, threats and violence from patients angry over safety rules designed to keep the scourge from spreading.

“A year ago, we’re health care heroes and everybody’s clapping for us,” said Dr. Stu Coffman, a Dallas-based emergency room physician. “And now we’re being in some areas harassed and disbelieved and ridiculed for what we’re trying to do, which is just depressing and frustrating.”

Cox Medical Center Branson in Missouri started giving panic buttons to up to 400 nurses and other employees after assaults per year tripled between 2019 and 2020 to 123, a spokeswoman said. One nurse had to get her shoulder X-rayed after an attack.

Hospital spokeswoman Brandei Clifton said the pandemic has driven at least some of the increase.

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Judge suspends Britney Spears’ father from conservatorship

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Britney Spears has been freed from her father. And she could be freed entirely from court control within weeks.

In a major victory for the pop star, a judge on Wednesday suspended the singer’s father from the conservatorship that has controlled her life and money for 13 years, saying the arrangement “reflects a toxic environment.”

Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Brenda Penny agreed with a petition from Spears and her attorney that James Spears needs to give up his role as conservator. The decision comes months after the Britney Spears pleaded for her father’s removal in dramatic court hearings, saying, “I want my life back.”

“The current situation is untenable,” the judge said after hearing arguments from both sides. “It reflects a toxic environment which requires the suspension of James Spears.”

And with no objections to ending the conservatorship, Penny is likely to terminate it at a Nov. 12 hearing, restoring the singer’s life and money choices to her after years of increasingly vocal calls to #FreeBritney that she eventually joined.

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North Korea’s Kim seeks better ties with South, but slams US

SEOUL, South Korea (AP) — North Korea leader Kim Jong Un expressed his willingness to restore stalled communication lines with South Korea in early October to promote peace while shrugging off U.S. offers for dialogue as “cunning ways” to conceal its hostility against the North, state media reported Thursday.

Kim’s statement is an apparent effort to drive a wedge between Seoul and Washington as he wants South Korea to help him win relief from crippling U.S.-led economic sanctions and other concessions. Pyongyang this month has offered conditional talks with Seoul alongside its first missile firings in six months and stepped-up criticism of the United States.

The U.N. Security Council scheduled an emergency closed meeting on Thursday at the request of the United States, United Kingdom and France on North Korea’s recent tests.

During a speech at his country’s rubber-stamp parliament on Wednesday, Kim said the restoration of cross-border hotlines — which have been largely dormant for more than a year — would realize the Korean people’s wishes for a peace between the two Koreas, according to the official Korean Central News Agency.

Kim still accused South Korea of being “bent on begging external support and cooperation while clamoring for international cooperation in servitude to the U.S.,” rather than committing to resolving the matters independently between the Koreas.

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House panel subpoenas organizers of Jan. 6 Trump rally

WASHINGTON (AP) — A House committee investigating the violent Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection has subpoenaed 11 officials who helped plan rallies in support of former President Donald Trump ahead of the attack, including the massive event on the day of the siege at which the president told his supporters to “fight like hell.”

The announcement follows a first round of subpoenas last week that targeted former White House and administration officials who were in contact with Trump before and during the insurrection.

The committee said in a release Wednesday that the subpoenas are part of the panel’s efforts to collect information from the organizers “and their associated entities on the planning, organization, and funding of those events.” In letters to those who were subpoenaed, Mississippi Rep. Bennie Thompson, demanded that the officials provide documents to the panel by Oct. 13 and appear at separate depositions that the committee has scheduled from late October through the beginning of November.

Thompson cites in the letters efforts by representatives of the group Women for America First to organize the rally on Jan. 6 and to collectively communicate with senior White House officials. The subpoenas also mention other events the group planned in the weeks between Trump’s November election defeat and the January attack.

The House committee of nine lawmakers — seven Democrats and two Republicans — has ramped up its investigation in recent weeks as it attempts to dissect the origins of the insurrection by Trump’s supporters and find ways to prevent it from ever happening again. The Trump loyalists beat and injured police as they battled their way inside the building, destroyed property and sent lawmakers running for their lives. Repeating Trump’s lies about widespread election fraud, they interrupted the certification of President Joe Biden’s victory and left those in the U.S. Capitol deeply shaken.

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At least 116 dead in gang battle at Ecuador jail; 5 beheaded

QUITO, Ecuador (AP) — A battle between gangs in a prison killed at least 116 people and injured 80 in what authorities are calling the worst penitentiary massacre in Ecuador’s history. At least five dead were reported beheaded, officials said Wednesday.

President Guillermo Lasso decreed a state of emergency in Ecuador’s prison system, allowing the government to deploy the police and soldiers to penitentiaries among other powers. Authorities attributed Tuesday’s bloodshed at the Litoral penitentiary in the coastal city of Guayaquil to gangs linked to international drug cartels fighting for control of the lockup.

Lasso, visibly affected, said at a news conference that what was happening in the Guayaquil prison was “bad and sad” and he could not for the moment guarantee that authorities had regained control of the lockup.

“It is regrettable that the prisons are being turned into territories for power disputes by criminal gangs,” he said, adding that he would act with “absolute firmness” to regain control of the Litoral prison and prevent the violence from spreading to other penitentiaries.

Images circulating on social media showed dozens of bodies in the prison’s Pavilions 9 and 10 and scenes that looked like battlefields. The fighting was with firearms, knives and bombs, officials said. Earlier, regional police commander Fausto Buenaño had said that bodies were being found in the prison’s pipelines.

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Some fear boosters will hurt drive to reach the unvaccinated

NEW YORK (AP) — The spread of COVID-19 vaccination requirements across the U.S. hasn’t had the desired effect so far, with the number of Americans getting their first shots plunging in recent weeks. And some experts worry that the move to dispense boosters could just make matters worse.

The fear is that the rollout of booster shots will lead some people to question the effectiveness of the vaccine in the first place.

“Many of my patients are already saying, ‘If we need a third dose, what was the point?’” said Dr. Jason Goldman, a physician in Coral Springs, Florida.

The average daily count of Americans getting a first dose of vaccine has been falling for six weeks, plummeting more than 50% from about 480,000 in early August to under 230,000 by the middle of last week, according to the most recently available federal data.

An estimated 70 million vaccine-eligible Americans have yet to start vaccinations, despite a summer surge in infections, hospitalizations and deaths driven by the delta variant.

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US general: Afghan collapse rooted in 2020 deal with Taliban

WASHINGTON (AP) — Senior Pentagon officials said Wednesday the collapse of the Afghan government and its security forces in August could be traced to a 2020 U.S. agreement with the Taliban that promised a complete U.S. troop withdrawal.

Gen. Frank McKenzie, the head of Central Command, told the House Armed Services Committee that once the U.S. troop presence was pushed below 2,500 as part of President Joe Biden’s decision in April to complete a total withdrawal by September, the unraveling of the U.S.-backed Afghan government accelerated.

“The signing of the Doha agreement had a really pernicious effect on the government of Afghanistan and on its military — psychological more than anything else, but we set a date-certain for when we were going to leave and when they could expect all assistance to end,” McKenzie said.

He was referring to a Feb. 29, 2020, agreement that the Trump administration signed with the Taliban in Doha, Qatar, in which the U.S. promised to fully withdraw its troops by May 2021 and the Taliban committed to several conditions, including stopping attacks on American and coalition forces. The stated objective was to promote a peace negotiation between the Taliban and the Afghan government, but that diplomatic effort never gained traction before Biden took office in January.

McKenzie said he also had believed “for quite a while” that if the United States reduced the number of its military advisers in Afghanistan below 2,500, the Kabul government inevitably would collapse “and that the military would follow.” He said in addition to the morale-depleting effects of the Doha agreement, the troop reduction ordered by Biden in April was ”the other nail in the coffin” for the 20-year war effort because it blinded the U.S. military to conditions inside the Afghan army, “because our advisers were no longer down there with those units.”

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South Dakota lawmakers question Noem’s meeting with daughter

SIOUX FALLS, S.D. (AP) — South Dakota Republican and Democratic legislators alike said Wednesday that they want more details from Gov. Kristi Noem’s administration about a meeting last year that included the governor, her daughter and state employees overseeing an agency that had moved to deny her daughter’s application to become a certified real estate appraiser.

In response tothe report from The Associated Press this week, the Legislature’s Government Operations and Audit Committee will look into the matter when it meets at the end of October, according to the committee chairman, state Sen. Kyle Schoenfish. The Republican governor has dismissed the report as an attack on her family, but lawmakers from within her party said they want answers from her administration about what happened.

Schoenfish, a Republican, said the committee is still working out the details of how it will address the issue. Republicans, who hold supermajorities in the Legislature, will ultimately determine how far-ranging the inquiry is.

The AP reported Monday that Noem last year summoned to her office a state employee who was overseeing her daughter’s appraiser license application just days after the agency moved to deny her the license. After the meeting, Noem’s daughter, Kassidy Peters, was not denied a license, according to the Department of Labor and Regulation. Peters received her certification four months later, on Nov. 25, 2020.

A week after Peters received her license, the state employee who directed the agency was allegedly pressured to retire by Noem’s Cabinet secretary. The state employee, Sherry Bren, eventually received a $200,000 payment from the state to withdraw an age discrimination complaint and leave her job.

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Reopening of ‘Aladdin’ on Broadway halted by COVID-19 cases

NEW YORK (AP) — The hit Broadway show “Aladdin” was canceled Wednesday night when breakthrough COVID-19 cases were reported within the musical’s company, a day after the show reopened following some 18 months of being shuttered due to the pandemic. It was a worrying sign for Broadway’s recovery.

“Through our rigorous testing protocols, breakthrough COVID-19 cases have been detected within the company of ‘Aladdin’ at the New Amsterdam Theatre,” the show announced on social media. “Because the wellness and safety of our guests, cast and crew are our top priority, tonight’s performance, Wednesday, Sept. 29 , is canceled.”

It was the first Broadway COVID-19 cancellation since shows resumed with Bruce Springsteen’s concert returning in July and “Pass Over” as the first play to debut in August. “Aladdin” said the status of future performances “will be updated.”

The pandemic forced Broadway theaters to abruptly close on March 12, 2020, knocking out all shows and scrambling the spring season. Several have restarted, including the so-called big three of “Wicked,” “Hamilton” and “The Lion King.”