AP News in Brief at 9:04 p.m. EDT

Funerals become scenes of Myanmar resistance, more violence

YANGON, Myanmar (AP) — Myanmar security forces opened fire Sunday on a crowd attending the funeral of student who was killed on the bloodiest day yet of a crackdown on protests against last month’s coup, local media reported.

The escalating violence — which took the lives of at least 114 people Saturday, including several children — has prompted a U.N. human rights expert to accuse the junta of committing “mass murder” and to criticize the international community for not doing enough to stop it.

The Security Council is likely to hold closed consultations on the escalating situation in Myanmar, U.N. diplomats said Sunday, speaking on condition of anonymity ahead of an official announcement. The council has condemned the violence and called for a restoration of democracy, but has not yet considered possible sanctions against the military, which would require support or an abstention by Myanmar’s neighbour and friend China.

The mounting death tolls have not stopped the demonstrations against the Feb. 1 takeover — or the violent response of the military and police to them. Myanmar Now reported that the junta’s troops shot at mourners at the funeral in the city of Bago for Thae Maung Maung, a 20-year-old killed on Saturday. He was reportedly a member of the All Burma Federation of Student Union, which has a long history of supporting pro-democracy movements in the country.

According to the report, several people attending the funeral were arrested. It did not say if anyone was hurt or killed. But at least nine people were killed elsewhere Sunday as the crackdown continued, according to the Assistance Association for Political Prisoners, which has been documenting deaths during demonstrations against the coup.

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In Minneapolis, an immigrant street struggles to recover

MINNEAPOLIS (AP) — Nearly all the wreckage along Lake Street has been hauled away. The fire-swept buildings have been torn down or repaired. The police station is empty, its entryway sealed with stacked concrete blocks like a street corner pharaoh’s tomb.

The street, the focus of so much violence when protests raged through Minneapolis after George Floyd died in police custody, looks almost normal in places.

Supermercado Morelia is again selling pickled cactus slices and two dozen varieties of Mexican cookies. At the Dur Dur grocery store, they’re back to offering goat meat, rice in 20-pound bags and cheap money transfers to East Africa. Hufan Restaurant Cafe is trumpeting “the best Somali and American cuisine.” The drive-thru at Popeyes is open every night until 11.

But look again, because plenty has also changed along Lake Street, a beacon for immigrants for more than a century.

The heart of the miles-long commercial and cultural corridor is struggling to recover. Politicians are bickering about rebuilding funds, crime is up across the city and the corridor is bracing for more protests as a former police officer goes on trial Monday in Floyd’s death. And even when Minnesota’s notorious winter surrendered recently to sunny, spring-like weather, the sidewalks in the hardest-hit neighbourhoods remained quiet.

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Record rains cause flash flooding in Tennessee; 4 dead

Torrential rains across Tennessee flooded homes and at least one church and left roads impassable, prompting dozens of people to be rescued in the Nashville area. Authorities said four bodies were found Sunday in the flood’s aftermath.

Nashville received more than 7 inches of rain, the second-highest two-day rainfall total ever recorded, Mayor John Cooper said at a news conference Sunday.

Ebony Northern said a normally tame creek running through her Nashville apartment complex swiftly rose after heavy rain started late Saturday night. Within an hour or so, she could see some first-floor units in other parts of the complex being flooded. She said people moved to the second floor and she also heard calls for boats come in over the fire department scanner.

“The units are a mess. Some of the outside air conditioning units have floated off,” she said Sunday morning.

She said the American Red Cross arrived to assist her neighbours.

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Jurors in ex-officer’s high-profile trial face heavy burden

MINNEAPOLIS (AP) — One prospective juror’s voice quivered as she told attorneys during jury selection that she feared for her family’s safety if chosen for the panel that will decide the fate of a white former police officer charged with killing George Floyd. When the judge excused her, the woman exhaled in relief.

Jurors at all trials feel pressure, knowing their decisions will alter lives. But the weight on jurors in Minneapolis is in a whole different category as they’ll be asked whether to assign guilt in the death of a Black man that prompted some of the largest protests in U.S. history.

Bystander video of the confrontation is expected to be a key exhibit at trial, with opening statements set for Monday. It shows Derek Chauvin using his knee to pin Floyd’s neck to the ground for about nine minutes during an arrest last May. Floyd cried he couldn’t breathe and called for his mother before his body went limp.

A looming question is whether Chauvin, charged with murder and manslaughter, can get a fair trial with so much pressure on jurors and with some potentially fearing the consequences to the city and country should they reach a verdict others oppose.

A high fence installed around the courthouse for the trial is a daily reminder for jurors of security concerns. On some days, protesters gathered just beyond it, holding signs that read, “Convict Derek Chauvin” and “The World Is Watching.”

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2 tugboats deploy to Egypt’s Suez Canal as shippers avoid it

SUEZ, Egypt (AP) — Two additional tugboats deployed Sunday to Egypt’s Suez Canal to aid efforts to free a skyscraper-sized container ship wedged for days across the crucial waterway, even as major shippers increasingly divert their boats out of fear the vessel may take even longer to free.

The MV Ever Given, a Panama-flagged, Japanese-owned ship that carries cargo between Asia and Europe, got stuck Tuesday in a single-lane stretch of the canal. In the time since, authorities have been unable to unstick the vessel and traffic through the canal — valued at over $9 billion a day — has been halted, further disrupting a global shipping network already strained by the coronavirus pandemic.

The Dutch-flagged Alp Guard, a specialist tugboat, arrived at the location Sunday, according to the stuck ship’s technical management company, Bernard Schulte Shipmanagement. The Italian-flagged tugboat Carlo Magno was also close, having reached the Red Sea near the city of Suez early Sunday, satellite data from MarineTraffic.com showed.

The tugboats, along with at least 10 others already there, will be used to nudge the 400-meter-long (quarter-mile-long) Ever Given as dredgers continue to vacuum up sand from underneath the vessel and mud caked to its port side, Bernhard Schulte said.

Excavators dug Sunday on the eastern wall of the Suez Canal, hoping to free the bulbous bow of the Ever Given that plowed into the embankment, satellite photos showed. Bernard Schulte said the team was also waiting for the arrival of additional equipment to dredge the canal’s seafloor. The THSD Causeway, a dredger registered in Cyprus, was expected to arrive by Tuesday.

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Unbeaten Zags keep rolling with 83-65 rout of Creighton

INDIANAPOLIS (AP) — Gonzaga guard Andrew Nembhard believes he still has room to improve.

The scary part is, he thinks that also might be true for the undefeated Zags.

Nembhard had 17 points and eight assists, both season highs, to keep the NCAA Tournament’s top overall seed rolling with Sunday’s 83-65 rout of fifth-seeded Creighton in the West Region semifinals. Afterward, he insisted nobody was satisfied.

“I don’t think we have peaked,” he said. “I think, as I said earlier, we can always get better. We can always work on our stuff. So I think we’re getting close, and we need to squeeze out that five per cent that we talked about.”

It’s hard to imagine the Bulldogs (29-0) could play much better.

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Virus fight stalls in early hot spots New York, New Jersey

ALBANY, N.Y. (AP) — A year after becoming a global epicenter of the coronavirus pandemic, New York and New Jersey are back atop the list of U.S. states with the highest rates of infection.

Even as the vaccination campaign has ramped up, the number of new infections in New Jersey has crept up by 37% in a little more than a month, to about 23,600 every seven days. About 54,600 people in New York tested positive for the virus in the last week, a number that has begun to inch up recently.

The two states now rank No. 1 and 2 in new infections per capita among U.S. states. New Jersey has been reporting about 647 new cases for every 100,000 residents over the past 14 days. New York has averaged 548.

The situation in New York and New Jersey mirrors a national trend that has seen case numbers inch up in recent days. The U.S. is averaging nearly 62,000 cases a day, up from 54,000 two weeks ago.

Asked Sunday what’s going wrong in the U.S. as cases rise, President Joe Biden told reporters: “Based on what I’m hearing, apparently people are letting their guard down.” Biden said he hopes to have a better sense of the situation after a meeting with his White House pandemic team on Monday.

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Expelled from US at night, migrant families weigh next steps

REYNOSA, Mexico (AP) — In one of Mexico’s most notorious cities for organized crime, migrants are expelled from the United States throughout the night, exhausted from the journey, disillusioned about not getting a chance to seek asylum and at a crossroads about where to go next.

Marisela Ramirez, who was returned to Reynosa about 4 a.m. Thursday, brought her 14-year-old son and left five other children — one only 8 months old — in Guatemala because she couldn’t afford to pay smugglers more money. Now, facing another agonizing choice, she leaned toward sending her son across the border alone to settle with a sister in Missouri, aware that the United States is allowing unaccompanied children to pursue asylum.

“We’re in God’s hands,” Ramirez, 30, said in a barren park with dying grass and a large gazebo in the centre that serves as shelter for migrants.

Lesdny Suyapa Castillo, 35, said through tears that she would return to Honduras with her 8-year-old daughter, who lay under the gazebo breathing heavily with her eyes partly open and flies circling her face. After not getting paid for three months’ work as a nurse in Honduras during the pandemic, she wants steady work in the U.S. to send an older daughter to medical school. A friend in New York encouraged her to try again.

“I would love to go, but a mother doesn’t want to see her child in this condition,” she said after being dropped in Reynosa at 10 p.m.

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Rebels besiege town in northern Mozambique for fifth day

JOHANNESBURG (AP) — Rebels fought the Mozambican army Sunday for the fifth straight day for control of the strategic northern town of Palma, as reports came in that dozens of civilians have been killed and bodies were littering the streets. The fate of scores of foreign energy workers was also unknown.

Some of the dead had been beheaded, according to Human Rights Watch. An attempt by expatriate workers to flee to safety came under heavy fire, causing many deaths, according to local reports.

The battle for Palma highlights the military and humanitarian crisis in this Southern African nation on the Indian Ocean. The three-year insurgency of the rebels, who are primarily disaffected young Muslim men, in the northern Cabo Delgado province has taken more than 2,600 lives and displaced an estimated 670,000 people, according to the U.N.

The attacks in Palma started Wednesday just hours after the French energy company Total announced that it would resume work outside the town on its huge natural gas project at Afungi, near Mozambique’s northeastern border with Tanzania. Earlier rebel attacks prompted Total in January to suspend work on the project to extract gas from offshore sites.

The Mozambican army has been fighting the rebels in several locations to regain control of Palma, Col. Omar Saranga, a Ministry of Defence spokesman, said Sunday in the capital of Maputo.

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In Brazil, moms are bearing the brunt of pandemic’s blow

RIO DE JANEIRO (AP) — When Sao Paulo city officials put out a call last month for 4,500 public school cleaning jobs, targeting Brazilian mothers affected by the raging pandemic, they were unprepared for the ensuing tsunami. More than 90,000 women applied in just two days.

“It exceeded our expectations, by far,” said Armando Junior, who helped create the initiative, aimed at trying to alleviate skyrocketing unemployment among women and helping schools comply with new COVID-19 protocols for keeping classrooms hygienic and taking students’ temperatures.

The overwhelming response offers a glimpse at how Brazilian women — particularly mothers — have been disproportionally sidelined by the crisis. Worldwide, as schools remain closed, many mothers juggle fewer work hours with homeschooling and household duties. Others put their careers on hold entirely, or were laid off.

Brazil is battling a brutal resurgence in COVID-19 cases, making it one of the hardest-hit countries in the world. Latin America’s largest nation accounts for less than 3% of the global population, but with an average of 2,400 deaths each day, it accounts for a quarter of daily COVID-19 fatalities worldwide, according to Johns Hopkins University data. Economists say the nation’s worsening health and economic crises are further delaying the return of women to the workforce.

“This job fell from the sky for me,” said Marilene Paixão, one of the mothers selected for the cleaning jobs. But just a month after Sao Paulo hired the women in mid-February, the city closed its schools again on March 15.