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

Jon Gruden resigns as Raiders coach over offensive emails

Jon Gruden has resigned as coach of the Las Vegas Raiders after emails he sent before being hired in 2018 contained racist, homophobic and misogynistic comments.

Gruden released a statement Monday night, saying: “I have resigned as head coach of the Las Vegas Raiders. I love the Raiders and do not want to be a distraction. Thank you to all the players, coaches, staff, and fans of Raider Nation. I’m sorry, I never meant to hurt anyone.”

He stepped down after The New York Times reported that Gruden frequently used misogynistic and homophobic language directed at Commissioner Roger Goodell and others in the NFL.

Special teams and assistant head coach Rich Bisaccia will take over on an interim basis.

It was a rapid downfall for Gruden, who is in the fourth year of a 10-year, $100 million contract he signed with the Raiders in 2018. It started on Friday when the Wall Street Journal reported that Gruden used a racist term to describe NFL union chief DeMaurice Smith in a 2011 email to former Washington executive Bruce Allen.

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Texas governor orders ban on private company vaccine mandate

AUSTIN, Texas (AP) — Texas Gov. Greg Abbott issued an executive order Monday to prohibit any entity, including private business, from enforcing a COVID-19 vaccine mandate on workers and called on state lawmakers to pass a similar ban into law.

The move comes as the Biden administration is set to issue rules requiring employers with more than 100 workers to be vaccinated or test weekly for the coronavirus. Several major companies, including Texas-based American Airlines and Southwest Airlines, have said they would abide by the federal mandate.

“No entity in Texas can compel receipt of a COVID-19 vaccine by any individual, including an employee or a consumer, who objects to such vaccination for any reason of personal conscience, based on a religious belief, or for medical reasons, including prior recovery from COVID-19,” Abbott wrote in his order.

Abbott, who was previously vaccinated and also later tested positive for COVID-19, noted in his order that “vaccines are strongly encouraged for those eligible to receive one, but must always be voluntary for Texans.”

Montana has passed a law preventing employers from mandating workers get vaccines, and a number of states have explicitly said schools cannot require vaccinations.

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Report concludes UK waited too long for virus lockdown

LONDON (AP) — The British government waited too long to impose a lockdown in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, missing a chance to contain the disease and leading to thousands of unnecessary deaths, a parliamentary report concluded Tuesday.

The deadly delay resulted from ministers’ failure to question the recommendations of scientific advisers, resulting in a dangerous level of “groupthink” that caused them to dismiss the more aggressive strategies adopted in East and Southeast Asia, according to the joint report from the House of Commons’ science and health committees. It was only when Britain’s National Health Service risked being overwhelmed by rapidly rising infections that Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s Conservative government finally ordered a lockdown.

“There was a desire to avoid a lockdown because of the immense harm it would entail to the economy, normal health services and society,’’ the report said. “In the absence of other strategies such as rigorous case isolation, a meaningful test-and-trace operation, and robust border controls, a full lockdown was inevitable and should have come sooner.’’

The U.K. parliamentary report comes amid frustration with the timetable for a formal public inquiry into the government’s response to COVID-19, which Johnson says will start next spring.

Lawmakers said their inquiry was designed to uncover why Britain performed “significantly worse” than many other countries during the early days of the pandemic so that the U.K. could improve its response to the ongoing threat from COVID-19 and prepare for future threats.

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Southwest cancels hundreds more flights; passengers stranded

DALLAS (AP) — Southwest Airlines canceled more than 350 flights Monday following a weekend of major disruptions that it blamed on bad weather and air traffic control issues. The pilots union accused the company of a botched response to what it said would have been a minor challenge for other airlines.

The third straight day of canceled and delayed flights left passengers stranded and steaming from California to the East Coast.

“You can’t really relax when you’re just sitting there waiting for your next flight to be canceled,” said Vanessa Wheeler, who was biding her time at the San Jose, California, airport. She said Southwest canceled six consecutive flights on her over three days before she eventually decided to book a flight home to Las Vegas with Delta Air Lines. She vowed to never fly Southwest again.

Monday’s cancellations amounted to 10% of Southwest’s schedule, and at least 1,400 other flights, or roughly 40%, were delayed, according to the FlightAware tracking service. Shares of Southwest Airlines Co. fell 4.2%.

The widespread disruptions began shortly after the Southwest Airlines Pilots Association, representing 9,000 pilots, asked a federal court on Friday to block the airline’s order that all employees get vaccinated. The union argued that Southwest must negotiate over the issue because it could involve sick leave or disability if pilots have a reaction to the vaccine.

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Gun violence claiming more lives of American teens, children

ST. LOUIS (AP) — Gun violence is killing an increasing number of American children, from toddlers caught in crossfires to teenagers gunned down in turf wars, drug squabbles or for posting the wrong thing on social media.

Shootings involving children and teenagers have been on the rise in recent years, and 2021 is no exception. Experts say idleness caused by the COVID-19 pandemic shares the blame with easy access to guns and disputes that too often end with gunfire.

LeGend Taliferro, a 4-year-old boy who loved dinosaurs and basketball, was sleeping on the floor in an apartment in Kansas City, Missouri, when he was shot on June 29, 2020. A man who had been involved in a dispute with LeGend’s father is awaiting trial for second-degree murder. A probable cause statement said the suspected shooter had been trying to find LeGend’s dad after that altercation.

“Why do we have to resort to violence because we’re mad?” LeGend’s mother, Charron Powell, asks. “What are other ways we can figure out an issue without harming somebody?”

The U.S. saw 991 gun violence deaths among people 17 or younger in 2019, according to the website Gun Violence Archive, which tracks shootings from more than 7,500 law enforcement, media, government and commercial sources. That number spiked to 1,375 in 2020 and this year is on pace to be worse. Through Monday, shootings had claimed 1,179 young lives and left 3,292 youths injured.

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Risky move: Biden undercuts WH executive privilege shield

WASHINGTON (AP) — It’s a risky move by President Joe Biden that could come back to haunt him — and future presidents — in the hyperpartisan world of Washington politics.

Democrat Biden has agreed to a request from Congress seeking sensitive information on the actions of Republican Donald Trump and his aides during the Jan. 6 insurrection, though the former president claims the information is guarded by executive privilege.

The move by Biden isn’t the final word; Trump says he will challenge the requests, and a lengthy legal battle is likely to ensue over the information. Courts have ruled that former presidents are afforded executive privilege in some cases.

But the playbook for the legal world is different from the political world. And in the political world, “every time a president does something controversial, it becomes a building block for future presidents,” said Saikrishna Prakash, a law professor at the University of Virginia who studies presidential powers.

Biden’s decision not to block the information sought by Congress challenges a tested norm — one in which presidents enjoy the secrecy of records of their own terms in office, both mundane and highly sensitive, for a period of at least five years, and often far longer. That means Biden and future presidents, as well as Trump.

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At least 2 dead in California plane crash that torched homes

SANTEE, Calif. (AP) — A small plane crashed in a densely populated San Diego suburb Monday, killing two people, including a UPS driver and an Arizona physician, and leaving a trail of destruction that sent neighbors scrambling to save neighbors. At least two others were injured.

Neighbors described the dramatic rescue of a retired couple from one of two burning homes that were destroyed in Santee, a suburb of 50,000 people. Ten other homes were damaged.

Several vehicles, including the UPS delivery truck, were also torched.

“Not to be too graphic, but it’s a pretty brutal scene,” Justin Matsushita, Santee’s deputy fire chief, said as firefighters searched the smoldering ruins.

United Parcel Service of America Inc. confirmed one of its workers died.

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3 US-based economists win Nobel for research on wages, jobs

STOCKHOLM (AP) — A U.S.-based economist won the Nobel prize in economics Monday for pioneering research that transformed widely held ideas about the labor force, showing how an increase in the minimum wage doesn’t hinder hiring and immigrants don’t lower pay for native-born workers. Two others shared the award for developing ways to study these types of societal issues.

Canadian-born David Card of the University of California, Berkeley, was awarded half of the prize for his research on how the minimum wage, immigrationand education affect the labor market.

The other half was shared by Joshua Angrist of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Dutch-born Guido Imbens of Stanford University for their framework for studying issues that can’t rely on traditional scientific methods.

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said the three “completely reshaped empirical work in the economic sciences.”

Together, they helped rapidly expand the use of “natural experiments,” or studies based on observing real-world data. Such research made economics more applicable to everyday life, provided policymakers with actual evidence on the outcomes of policies, and in time spawned a more popular approach to economics epitomized by the blockbuster bestseller “Freakonomics,” by Stephen Dubner and Steven Levitt.

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Indigenous Peoples Day marked with celebrations, protests

FLAGSTAFF, Ariz. (AP) — Indigenous people across the United States marked Monday with celebrations of their heritage, education campaigns and a push for the Biden administration to make good on its word.

The federal holiday created decades ago to recognize Christopher Columbus’ sighting in 1492 of what came to be known as the Americas increasingly has been rebranded as Indigenous Peoples Day.

For Michaela Pavlat, cultural interpreter at the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, the day is one of celebration, reflection and recognition that Indigenous communities are fighting for land rights, for the U.S. government to uphold treaties, and for visibility and understanding.

“As long as you’re on Native land and stolen land, it’s Indigenous Peoples Day,” said Pavlat, who is Sault Ste. Marie Band of Chippewa Indians (Anishinaabe). “We have a lot of movement and a lot of issues we’re facing in our communities, and you can have that conversation every day.”

EVENTS THIS YEAR

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Walk it off: Red Sox eliminate Rays 6-5 with late sac fly

BOSTON (AP) — Kiké Hernandez delivered Boston’s second straight walk-off win, scoring pinch-runner Danny Santana with a sacrifice fly in the ninth inning to send the Red Sox to the AL Championship Series with a 6-5 win over the Tampa Bay Rays on Monday night.

After winning Game 3 of their AL Division Series on Sunday with Christian Vázquez’s two-run homer in the 13th, Boston took Game 4 for its first set of consecutive walk-off postseason wins since 2004 ALCS Games 4 and 5, both courtesy of David Ortiz against the Yankees.

Rafael Devers had a three-run home run off rookie Shane McClanahan to ignite a five-run third inning that put Boston in front 5-0. Tampa Bay battled back and tied it in the eighth.

The wild-card Red Sox will await the winner of the other ALDS matchup between the Houston Astros and Chicago White Sox. Houston leads 2-1 going into Game 4 in Chicago on Tuesday, a makeup of Monday’s rainout.

Boston improved to 15-3 in potential clinching postseason games and have won each of their last eight. It brings an abrupt end to the season for the Rays, who’d been eyeing back-to-back trips to the World Series after winning 100 games during the regular season and rolling to AL East title.