The tension builds - Stars and Stripes

stripes.com Free to Deployed Areas Volume 79, No. 145A ©SS 2020 CONTINGENCY EDITION SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 7, 2020

VIDEO GAMES Pikmin 3 Deluxe loses some of original’s charmPage 14

NFL Rodgers leads Packers past depleted 49ersBack page

Afghans say they aren’t prepared to take control of airports » Page 3

VIRUS OUTBREAK Officials clarify role of military in distribution of COVID-19 vaccinePage 4

REBECCA BLACKWELL/AP

A demonstrator holds up a sign outside the Pennsylvania Convention Center on Thursday in Philadelphia as vote counting in the general election continued.

BY JONATHAN LEMIRE, ZEKE MILLER, JILL COLVIN

AND WILL WEISSERT

Associated Press

WASHINGTON — Democrat Joe Biden was on the cusp of win-ning the presidency Friday as he opened narrow leads over Presi-dent Donald Trump in the criti-cal battlegrounds of Georgia and Pennsylvania.

Those put Biden in a stronger position to capture the 270 Elec-toral College votes needed to take the White House. The winner will lead a country facing a his-toric set of challenges, including

a surging pandemic and deep po-litical polarization.

The focus on Pennsylvania, where Biden led Trump by more than 9,000 votes, and Georgia, where Biden led by more than 1,500, came as Americans en-tered a third full day after the election without knowing who will lead them for the next four years. The prolonged process added to the anxiety of a nation whose racial and cultural divides were inflamed during the heated campaign.

Biden was at his home in Wilm-ington, Del., as the vote countSEE BIDEN ON PAGE 6

BY BILL BARROW

Associated Press

ATLANTA — The outcome in several contested states will de-termine whether Joe Biden de-feats President Donald Trump. If the Democratic challenger wins, the ambitions of a Biden presi-dency could well come down to Georgia.

Georgia, long a Republican stronghold — but one with rapidly changing demographics — could be the site of two runoffs on Jan. 5 to settle which party would con-trol the Senate.

Should Democrats win them, Biden would be dealing with a

majority in the Senate, increasinghis chances for passing legisla-tion and securing major appoint-ment confirmations. Otherwise, Senate Majority Leader MitchMcConnell, a Kentucky Repub-lican, could wield the power toblock Biden.

Races in North Carolina and Alaska also hold the potential to reshape the balance of power, but Georgia offers the more likelyprospect. Two runoff electionswould mean a campaign on an al-most national scale, with tens of millions of dollars spent by bothsides.

SEE RUNOFFS ON PAGE 6

Thetensionbuilds

Twin Senate runoffs in Georgia could shape the next presidency

Biden on cusp of White House; Trump sows doubt in process

CAROLYN KASTER/AP

Former Vice President Joe Biden needs only to claim one of the remaining battleground states.

ALEX BRANDON/AP

President Donald Trump faces a narrow path to reelection as counting of votes continues.

2020 ELECTION

PAGE 2 • S T A R S A N D S T R I P E S • Saturday, November 7, 2020

T O D A YIN STRIPES

American Roundup ............ 11Comics ............................. 18Crossword ........................ 18Health and Fitness ............ 16 Movies ............................. 15Opinion ............................ 17 Sports ......................... 19-24Travel .......................... 12-13Video Games ..................... 14

Associated Press

NEW YORK — Uber’s food de-livery business brought in more money during the third quarter than its signature rides business, showing just how much consumer behavior has changed — and how far the company has adapted — since the pandemic struck.

The San Francisco-based ride-hailing company lost $1.09 billion in the three months that ended Sept. 30 as many customers were still staying out of shared

vehicles.“Without question, the (pan-

demic’s) impact on the world has been one of the most significant impacts of our lifetimes, and we moved quickly as a company to respond,” said Dara Khosrowsha-hi, CEO of Uber, in a conference call with investors Thursday.

Uber brought in $3.13 billion in revenue, down 18% from the same time last year. Its mobility busi-ness, which includes ride-hailing, scooters and bikes, accounted for $1.37 billion of that, down 53%

from the same time last year. Despite the decline, the rides business showed improvement from the second quarter, when it brought in just $790 million.

The partial recovery in rides was linked to the level of lock-down restrictions in any given city. “When cities start to move, so too does Uber,“ Khosrowshahi said.

Uber’s Eats business generated $1.45 billion in revenue, up 125% from a year ago as restaurants re-lied on Uber for delivery.

BUSINESS/WEATHER

Uber’s food delivery outshines core rides service

WEATHER OUTLOOK

Bahrain91/76

Baghdad80/59

Doha88/80

KuwaitCity

91/74

Riyadh89/63

Djibouti88/76

Kandahar78/41

Kabul68/39

SATURDAY IN THE MIDDLE EAST SUNDAY IN THE PACIFIC

Misawa59/41

Guam86/80

Tokyo73/52

Okinawa75/70

Sasebo68/55

Iwakuni68/48

Seoul50/29

Osan50/35 Busan

60/37

The weather is provided by the American Forces Network Weather Center,

2nd Weather Squadron at Offutt Air Force Base, Neb.

Mildenhall/Lakenheath

58/48

Ramstein49/35

Stuttgart53/36

Lajes,Azores64/56

Rota70/56

Morón68/49 Sigonella

70/51

Naples72/51

Aviano/Vicenza64/45

Pápa54/38

Souda Bay66/59

SATURDAY IN EUROPE

Brussels60/48

Zagan56/38

Drawsko Pomorskie

52/36

Military ratesEuro costs (Nov. 9) ................................ $1.16Dollar buys (Nov. 9) ..............................€0.82British pound (Nov. 9) .......................... $1.28Japanese yen (Nov. 9) ........................102.00South Korean won (Nov. 9) ............1,097.00

Commercial ratesBahrain (Dinar) ...................................0.3770British pound .................................... $1.3111Canada (Dollar) ..................................1.3066China (Yuan) .......................................6.6190Denmark (Krone) ...............................6.2822Egypt (Pound) ...................................15.6901Euro ....................................... $1.1859/0.8432Hong Kong (Dollar) ............................ 7.7537Hungary (Forint) ................................302.98Israel (Shekel) ....................................3.3786Japan (Yen) ..........................................103.58Kuwait (Dinar) ....................................0.3054Norway (Krone) ..................................9.1892Philippines (Peso) ................................48.22Poland (Zloty) ......................................... 3.82Saudi Arabia (Riyal) ..........................3.7508Singapore (Dollar) .............................1.3489South Korea (Won) ..........................1123.60

Switzerland (Franc) ........................... 0.9016Thailand (Baht) ....................................30.63Turkey (Lira) ........................................8.5578(Military exchange rates are those available to customers at military banking facilities in the country of issuance for Japan, South Korea, Germany, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom. For nonlocal currency exchange rates (i.e., purchasing British pounds in Germany), check with your local military banking facility. Commercial rates are interbank rates provided for reference when buying currency. All figures are foreign currencies to one dollar, except for the British pound, which is represented in dollars-to-pound, and the euro, which is dollars-to-euro.)

EXCHANGE RATES

INTEREST RATESPrime rate ................................................ 3.25Discount rate .......................................... 0.25Federal funds market rate ................... 0.093-month bill ............................................. 0.1030-year bond ........................................... 1.54

• S T A R S A N D S T R I P E S • PAGE 3Saturday, November 7, 2020

BY CAITLIN M. KENNEY Stars and Stripes

WASHINGTON — Some sailors are en-titled to a reenlistment bonus of at least $30,000 after the Navy added more critical skillsets to its eligibility list.

The Navy added 78 more skillsets eli-gible for the fiscal year 2021 Selective Re-enlistment Bonus list allowing about 5,220 additional sailors to receive the money, ac-cording to the service.

Sailors receive a skillset code after they have completed training for certain skills or knowledge, such as learning a new language or how to repair specific

equipment. “[The bonus] rewards sailors who attain

training and skills most needed in the fleet and helps meet critical skill reenlistment benchmarks, while enhancing [the] Navy’s ability to size, shape, and stabilize man-ning,” according to the Navy fact sheet on the bonus.

The Navy plans to spend slightly more than $379 million on reenlistment bonuses once the fiscal year 2021 defense budget is approved, according to the service. The De-fense Department is operating now under a continuing resolution while it waits for Congress to pass the defense funding bill.

The bonus is only eligible for sailors who

have 14 years of service or less, broken up into three zones. Zone A is for sailors who have served up to six years, Zone B is for service between six to 10 years, and Zone C is for 10 to 14 years of service.

There are five bonus levels depending on the need for a specific skill: $30,000; $45,000; $60,000; $75,000, and $100,000. Sailors will receive half of their bonus up-front and the remainder will be spread out over the rest of their enlistment, according to the Navy. In addition, if a sailor reenlists in a designated combat zone, they can re-ceive the entire bonus tax free.

The Navy said the service is constantly updating its bonus award levels, so sailors

who do not take advantage of the moneysoon could lose out later.

The bonuses have also increased payouts for 14 skillsets but decreased the moneyfor 51 others. The Navy removed 44 skill-sets from the bonus list and left the moneyamount the same for 107 skills, according to a Navy fact sheet.

Sailors must submit their request forthe bonus between 35 and 120 days prior to their reenlistment date, the fact sheetstates .

[email protected]@caitlinmkenney

BY J.P. LAWRENCE Stars and Stripes

KANDAHAR, Afghanistan — The U.S. and NATO plan to transfer control of airports in Af-ghanistan as the coalition with-draws, but Afghan officials at the country’s second largest airport say they still haven’t been trained to take over.

Locals haven’t been shown how to run the air traffic control tower, man the radar or perform a number of other crucial tasks handled by NATO personnel at Kandahar’s Ahmad Shab Baba International Airport, said Mas-soud Pashtoon, the facility’s di-rector of civil aviation.

“Our guys are not even able to start the fire trucks,” he said. “If the U.S. leaves, the airport will be in trouble.”

The State Department has said there are plans to hand full con-trol of Afghanistan’s four largest airports — Kabul, Kandahar, Herat and Mazar-e Sharif — to the government by May 2021, when a deal signed by the Tal-iban and the U.S. in February this year says all international troops will leave if the Taliban abide by its terms.

But exactly when the airports will be handed over to the Af-ghans is still under review by NATO and the Afghan govern-ment, a report released Thursday by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction said.

NATO’s Resolute Support mis-

sion said there is “no ‘deadline’ for a full turnover of Kandahar Airfield.” “We will hand over operations and facilities when conditions permit and there is no longer a military requirement for the airfield,” Resolute Support

said in a command statement. NATO has said it wants the

Afghan government to develop a plan for the airport handovers, and to familiarize local staff with key airfield functions, the state-ment said.

The Afghan Civil Aviation Authority, formed in 2012, was supposed to take control of the airports in 2014, during an ear-lier drawdown of international troops, but was prevented from doing so because it didn’t have

enough certified air traffic con-trollers, SIGAR said.

Last year, the director generalof the ACAA said it was two tothree years away from being ableto independently shoulder all civil aviation responsibilities.

This week, however, the ACAA said it will be able to take control if international troops leave inMay.

“Some of our foreign col-leagues will still be coordinatingwith us in some of the sectors of the airports after the handover isfinished,” ACAA spokesman Mo-hammad Naim Salihi said.

But Kandahar Gov. Hayatul-lah Hayat said he remained con-cerned about handing over theprovince’s airport operations.

NATO training for locals in vital civil aviation functions was delayed because of the corona-virus — which SIGAR estimateshas affected roughly a third of Af-ghans — and then canceled afterinternational officials said the Af-ghans sent for training were “notcapable of being trained,” Hayatsaid. He also worried about howthe facility would be protectedfrom Taliban mortar and rocketattacks.

“I don’t want to transfer control and then everything is collapsed,”he said. “I think we didn’t planthis well ... We should have beenthinking about this day, that thiswill be transferred to us.” Zubair Babakarkhail contributed to this report. [email protected] Twitter: @jplawrence3

Associated Press

OCALA, Fla. — A Florida high school dean has been fired after he tested positive for marijuana, even though it had been pre-scribed for him by a doctor to treat post-traumatic stress disor-der he incurred in the Marines.

The Marion County School Board voted 5-0 Wednesday to fire Mike Hickman, saying that while medical marijuana is legal in Florida, it is illegal under fed-eral law, its use violates district

policy and he failed to notify his supervisor he was using it.

The central Florida district of-fered to suspend Hickman, 51, if he agreed not to use medical marijuana in the future, but the 10-year employee refused. After an administrative judge upheld a previous superintendent’s recom-mendation that he be fired, the board acted.

Mark Levitt, an attorney who represents current Superinten-dent Diane Gullett, told the board

Gullett agrees with her prede-cessor’s decision and Hickman’s military service should not cloud their judgment. Hickman fought in Iraq during Gulf Storm 30 years ago.

“He was given the opportunity to stop using it,” Levitt said.

Hickman’s attorney, Mark Herdman, told the Ocala Star-Banner, “It is just another unfor-tunate decision handed down by the Marion County School Board to fire yet another good em-

ployee.” Hickman argued it was unfair that he legally could have kept using the opioid painkiller he took before switching to mari-juana because it was more effec-tive and has fewer side effects.

Chris Altobello, an executive director with the Marion County teachers union, told the paper in a text message that Hickman “was no more impaired than someone who took an aspirin for a head-ache. They implied that this is tantamount to smoking pot in the

boys bathroom!”The district learned of Hick-

man’s use one year ago when he was injured breaking up a fight atBelleview High School. A work-ers’ compensation doctor whotreated Hickman discovered the drug in a urine test and notifiedthe district.

“Imagine if this employee justsat back and let the two students continue to fight without regardfor their safety. We wouldn’t behere right now,” Altobello said.

MILITARY

Marine vet fired over using medical marijuana to treat PTSD

Over 5K sailors with critical skills eligible for $30,000 bonus

Afghans: Airport workers remain untrained

J.P. LAWRENCE/Stars and Stripes

Afghans are supposed to take control of Ahmad Shah Baba International Airport in Kandahar, Afghanistan, from U.S. and NATO troops when they leave the country, but officials say the locals are not up to the job.


BY NIKKI WENTLING Stars and Stripes

WASHINGTON — Nearly6,900 Department of VeteransAffairs patients were battlingcoronavirus infections Thursday— a record-breaking number of cases for the department.

On Thursday morning, the agency reported 6,890 activecases, which includes veterans and VA employees. The previ-ous high was about 6,400 duringa surge of infections in mid-July.Cases increased 10% sinceMonday.

According to agency data, 81more veterans and two employ-ees died since Tuesday, bringing the total deaths to 4,098 veteransand 64 employees since the startof the pandemic.

Reflecting national trends, cases among VA patients are surging in the Midwest. The Min-neapolis VA hospital has the mostcases across the VA system, with203 patients who are currently sick with the virus – up 8.5% fromTuesday. Milwaukee, Wisc., is a close second, with 196 patients,an increase of 7% from Tuesday.

Though active cases are rising higher than ever, VA Press Secre-tary Christina Noel said the countof active cases is not the best wayto measure how the virus is af-fecting patients. Instead, the agency is looking to the rate ofhospitalizations.

For the month of October, hos-pitalizations among coronaviruspatients reached a low point of15%. All VA hospitals have capac-ity to meet current demand and care for additional patients, Noelsaid.

However, hospitalizations areon the rise. They increased by more than 20% over the past week, bringing the total to 606veterans hospitalized with the virus Thursday.

The VA’s data does not include all veterans, such as those who have died or contracted the virus at state-run veterans homes.

[email protected] Twitter: @nikkiwentling

Stars and Stripes

TOKYO — The U.S. military in Asia re-ported 11 new coronavirus cases on Friday, one in Japan and 10 in South Korea.

U.S. Forces Korea said nine service members tested positive at Osan Air Base after arriving on government-chartered Patriot Express flights on Oct. 29 and on Monday and Tuesday, according to a USFK news release. One service member tested

positive after arriving on a commercial flight Tuesday at Incheon International Airport.

Eight of the individuals tested positive on the mandatory first test prior to enter-ing the required 14-day quarantine; two others tested positive while in quarantine, according to USFK.

All 10 are in isolation at Camp Hum-phreys, the release said. On Thursday, USFK also reported 10 new coronavirus

patients that arrived and were tested dur-ing the same time frame.

The U.S. military in South Korea has reported 298 total coronavirus cases dur-ing the pandemic, of which 224 were active duty service members.

In Japan, one person at Kadena Air Base tested positive for the virus after returning to Okinawa from elsewhere in the country, according to a base Facebook post Thurs-day evening.

Public health authorities identified andquarantined five of the individual’s closecontacts, according to Kadena’s 18th Wing.

The U.S. military in Japan does not al-ways specify whether its coronavirus patients are service members, DefenseDepartment civilian employees or family members.

[email protected]

BY EMILY KOPP

CQ-Roll Call

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump has often touted the role of the military in dis-tributing a COVID-19 vaccine, but health officials close to the process who are concerned about public distrust are taking pains to say the federal government won’t actually be handling vaccines.

The president said at the final presidential debate that the dis-tribution of a vaccine would be swift because he’s “counting on the military.”

“We have our generals lined up, one in particular that’s the head of logistics. ... He’s ready to go,” Trump said Oct. 22.

But Paul Mango, a spokes-man for Operation Warp Speed, the federal effort to develop vac-cines, clarified the next day: “It is extremely unlikely that anyone from the government will touch a vaccine, whether that’s loading a truck, unloading a truck, moving dry ice or actually injecting the vaccine prior to Americans get-ting it.”

Mango said the Defense De-partment would oversee logistics from a distance. Operation Warp Speed is led by the departments of Defense and Health and Human Services.

“I know what the president means because (Operation Warp Speed leader Gen. Gustave Perna) has briefed him several times on this, and that is we have the best logisticians in the United States at the Department of De-fense,” he said. “Every logistical detail you could think of: needles, syringes, swabs, bandages, dry ice, trucks, U.S. marshals guid-ing those trucks, planes, flying in equipment, getting vaccines out.”

Perna clarified at an Oct. 27 event that the military is helping with things like planning, logis-tics, augmentation and program

support.“There will not be this vision

that some people have that there’ll be Army trucks driving through the streets delivering vaccine,” he said, adding that is not “fea-sible or the right way to do it.”

Even if federal troops do not end up handling vaccines, Na-tional Guard units operating under control of a governor may do so in many states, which could lead to public confusion.

A review by CQ Roll Call of 16 states’ COVID-19 vaccina-tion plans indicates that at least nine expect to incorporate state National Guard units under gov-ernors’ control. The draft propos-als indicate plans for those units to provide backup transportation and security. At least one state, Maryland, signaled intentions to use its National Guard Medi-cal Service Corps to administer shots.

Sandra Quinn, a University of Maryland health equity professor who studies racial differences in flu vaccination rates, said the pub-lic is unlikely to make a clear dis-tinction between state-deployed National Guard and Trump’s in-vocation of “the military.”

Two Democrats on the Sen-ate Armed Services Committee have called for a hearing on the military’s role in Operation Warp Speed. Elizabeth Warren of Mas-sachusetts and Mazie K. Hirono of Hawaii wrote that the organi-zational structure of Operation Warp Speed, dominated by mem-

bers of the military, is a “stark de-parture” from prior public health crises.

A Defense Department spokes-person told CQ Roll Call there is sufficient U.S. commercial transportation capacity so “there should be no need for a large commitment of DOD units or per-sonnel” in distribution. Any DOD support in distribution beyond planning would be an exception, such as if military air assets were needed to deliver vaccines to a remote location, according to the agency.

Federal officials’ careful com-ments in recent days on the military’s role reflect growing concerns that even with a safe and effective vaccine, conflicting messages and deep distrust could jeopardize its success.

Quinn said the president’s comments further linking the COVID-19 vaccine and the gov-ernment won’t help.

“White people would be more likely to question the govern-ment’s competence, while African Americans would be more likely to question the government’s mo-tives. Does the government really have our best interest at heart?” she said of her research.

Touting the military’s logisti-cal prowess is unlikely to be an effective way to assuage concerns rooted in centuries of harms by the government and medical community on Black, Latino and Indigenous Americans.

For example, in the infamous

Tuskegee experiment that oc-curred from the 1930s to the 1970s, the government enticed Black men to participate in a study of untreated syphilis by promising medical care that was ultimately withheld. This year, human rights groups alleged that officials at a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement facil-ity performed hysterectomies on women without their consent.

Susan Winkler, chief executive of the Reagan-Udall Foundation, a nonprofit that advises the Food and Drug Administration, is con-ducting focus groups with people who experience health disparities and are also at an increased risk for COVID-19. She said their con-cerns were often left out of previ-ous research on attitudes toward vaccines.

Some front-line workers in health care and retail, as well as Black, Latino and Indigenous peo-ple, have fears around the speed of the vaccines being developed and worry about being “guinea pigs,” according to the interim findings, which she recently pre-sented to the FDA. Transparency is important, experts say. Some states have not yet published their draft vaccination plans.

“Clarifying (the National Guard’s) role is really important, and some of that will have to hap-pen at state and local health de-partments. As they finalize their plans, they should be talking to their communities,” Quinn said.

VIRUS OUTBREAK

Military role for vaccine clarified

VA cases increase to record numbers

US military reports 10 new cases in S. Korea, 1 in Japan

KREGG YORK/U.S. Air National Guard

Cpl. Nikki Sherman, a soldier assigned to the Ohio Military Reserve, conducts a COVID-19 test during a pop-up testing drive-thru in Whitehouse, Ohio, on Oct. 19 .


VIRUS OUTBREAK ROUNDUP

Unemployment drops as US adds solid 638K jobs

BY CHRISTOPHER RUGABER

Associated Press

WASHINGTON — U.S. em-ployers added 638,000 jobs in October, a solid pace though far fewer than needed to regain most of the jobs lost to the pandemic recession just as new viral cases are setting record highs.

The gain suggested that a ten-tative economic recovery is still intact even as it faces a surging viral outbreak. October’s gain was slightly below the 672,000 jobs added in September and the 1.5 million in August.

But last month’s gain was stron-ger than it appears: It was held down by the loss of about 150,000 temporary Census jobs. Exclud-ing governments, private em-ployers added a healthy 906,000 jobs. Job growth was particularly strong in construction, retail, and a category that includes restau-rants and hotels.

The report Friday from the Labor Department said the un-employment rate fell to 6.9% from 7.9% in September. Still, the nation now has 10.1 million fewer jobs than it did before the pan-demic intensified in March.

And the job market and the overall economy are under inten-sified pressure from the acceler-ating pandemic. On Thursday, the nation broke another record in the seven-day rolling average for new cases, hitting nearly 90,000. Daily new cases were also on track for another day above 100,000, with surging numbers reported all around the country, including a combined nearly 25,000 in Texas, Illinois and Florida.

The economy, which had re-bounded sharply in the July-Sep-tember quarter as businesses reopened from virus-related shut-downs, is now expanding more slowly. Many businesses, espe-cially restaurants and bars that had made use of outdoor seating, may struggle as the weather turns colder. Consumers could also pull back again on shopping, traveling and other activities to avoid con-tracting the virus.

Some large companies are still shedding workers. ExxonMobil said late last month that it would cut 1,900 jobs, mostly at corpo-rate headquarters. Chevron has said it will cut about a quarter of the employees from its newly ac-quired unit Noble Energy. Boeing said it expects to cut its workforce by 30,000 to 130,000.

Connecticut Connecticut residents were

being urged Thursday to limit any nonessential trips between 10 p.m. and 5 a.m. to help reduce the spread of the coronavirus, a move that comes as the state starts rolling back portions of the third phase of reopening.

The Department of Public Health issued the statewide advi-sory, which takes effect at 12:01 a.m. on Friday. It applies to all residents except essential work-

ers who need to leave home to get to their jobs during that time pe-riod and people who need to leave home for an emergency to seek medical care, purchase medical supplies, food or groceries.

Also at 12:01 a.m. on Friday, the state begins Phase 2.1, which limits restaurant capacity to 50% instead of 75%, with no more than eight people at a table; recom-mends indoor gatherings, includ-ing Thanksgiving meals, to be limited to 10 people; and limits religious venues to a maximum of 100 people, or 50% capacity, among other measures.

Gov. Ned Lamont had original-ly said restaurants and certain at-tractions such as movie theaters would have to close by 9:30 p.m., with an exception for takeout and delivery of meals. But he said Thursday that restaurants will be allowed to stay open until 10 p.m.

Kentucky FRANKFORT — Kentucky’s

bar and restaurant operators are getting a break from alcoholic beverage renewal fees in a cost-saving step as they struggle with revenue losses from the coronavi-rus pandemic.

The Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control is granting a 12-month fee renewal waiver to license holders, Gov. Andy Bes-hear said Thursday.

Bar and restaurant operators who haven’t submitted the re-newal fee this year won’t have to pay until 2021, he said. Those who have paid this year will have their fees waived in 2021, he said.

“This has certainly been a diffi-cult year for our bars, restaurants and venues, and they deserve this innovative support as we face what could be a very painful win-ter,” Beshear said.

Bars and restaurants have en-dured capacity limitations to help contain the virus.

The fee waiver doesn’t apply to producers, distributors, whole-salers and others able to continue operations throughout the virus-related state of emergency.

Michigan TRAVERSE CITY — Gov.

Gretchen Whitmer urged Michi-gan lawmakers Thursday to enact a statewide law on mask wearing, as the state continues to shatter coronavirus case records and hospital admissions steadily rise.

A state emergency order al-ready requires people to wear masks in indoor public places and crowded outdoor areas. But the Democratic governor said compliance might improve with bipartisan support from the GOP-led Legislature.

“We’ve known for a long time that the single most important weapon we have against this virus is the simple act of wearing a mask,” Whitmer said. “Wear-ing a mask protects our families, it protects ourselves, it protects our frontline workers, and our

most vulnerable members of our society.”

New Mexico ALBUQUERQUE — New Mex-

ico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham on Thursday said the state has re-corded its highest daily count for deaths related to the coronavirus pandemic in what has become a “dramatic, critical situation” that will likely result in tougher public health restrictions.

She announced an additional 23 deaths during a public brief-ing, saying that the statewide total now stands at more than 1,080. More than 10% of those deaths have come in the last two weeks as the state has been deal-ing with a surge of infections, higher positivity rates and more hospitalizations.

Nearly 17% of those who have been hospitalized in the state due to COVID-19 have died, state health officials said. They also re-ported that the number of deaths has increased 230% in just the last two weeks and hospital ca-pacity is shrinking to unsustain-able levels.

New York ALBANY — Nearly 3,000 peo-

ple tested positive for COVID-19 in New York in one day, a mile-stone that illustrates the steady erosion of the progress the state made to get the virus under con-trol this summer, according to state data released Thursday.

After averaging as few as 600 positive tests per day in August, autumn has brought a disturbing upswing.

Gov. Andrew Cuomo has said weddings, birthdays and other private gatherings have fueled the spread, on top of universities and schools opening their doors. He has also pointed to public weariness of mask mandates and distancing rules.

“COVID fatigue is creeping up and there are serious caution

flags in western New York, the Finger Lakes, and in other com-munities across the state, so it is more important than ever that we be vigilant,” the Democrat said.

Tennessee JOHNSON CITY — Health of-

ficials in northeastern Tennessee say they do not have enough nurs-es to combat COVID-19 inside its hospital system.

“There are no longer enough nurses to fill the need that we have,” Ballad Health Senior Vice President and Chief Nurs-ing Officer Lisa Smithgall told WJHL-TV.

According to Ballad Health, the hospital system is looking to hire 350 registered nurses to fill its nurse shortage.

“In the last eight weeks, we’ve had more than 900 patients ad-mitted to COVID-19,” said Ballad Health Chief Administrative Of-ficer Eric Deaton.

After hitting 200 inpatients this week, the health care system has adjusted its COVID-19 surge plan to receive 300 inpatients.

Deaton said: “These numbers represent lives, they’re non-en-couraging. In fact, it’s really be-coming a tragedy in the increased rates that we’re seeing.”

Texas EL PASO — Five trailers from

the Federal Emergency Manage-ment Administration have been brought to El Paso to help accom-modate the surge of COVID-19 fatalities in the border city, offi-cials said Thursday.

Three of the trailers were staged at the El Paso County Med-ical Examiner’s Office while two were being held in reserve, said Jorge Rodriguez, the city’s emer-gency management coordinator.

The Texas Funeral Service Commission also has been asked to send representatives to make an assessment of the needs of the area’s funeral homes and mortu-

aries, he said.Twenty-two more COVID-19

deaths were reported Thursdayin El Paso County, bringing thecounty’s death toll for the eight-month pandemic to 639.

Meanwhile, 1,920 new cases were reported in the countyThursday, a significant increasefrom the 1,537 new cases report-ed Wednesday, Mayor Dee Margo said.

Vermont MONTPELIER — Five Ver-

mont state senators said Thurs-day that they were disturbed tolearn that Walmart will not seekhazard pay grants for its Vermont employees who worked during thefirst three months of the COVID-19 pandemic.

In a Thursday press release,the senators, led by Senate Presi-dent Pro Tem Tim Ashe, said thegrants of $1,200 or $2,000 arepaid for by the state, but employ-ers must apply on behalf of their workers.

They said the workers putthemselves at risk while mostAmericans stayed at home.

“Their decision, cruel underany circumstances, is especiallyunthinkable since the grants areintended to thank essential work-ers who stayed on the job in high risk positions in the earliest daysof the COVID pandemic,” theysaid in the press release.

There are six Walmart stores inVermont. The politicians said the company’s decision not to seekthe grants means that “hundreds,if not more than a thousand”Walmart employees in Vermontwon’t receive the grants.

Walmart has given employeesspecial cash bonuses during thepandemic, and it believes the Ver-mont program’s funds are moreappropriately used by “smalland medium employers in the state who might be unable to paya similar bonus,” said company spokesperson Jami Lamontagne.

COLTER PETERSON, ST. LOUIS (MO.) POST-DISPATCH/AP

Mike Wagner, left, and Ken Gleich, dressed in hazmat suits, wheel cleaning carts to their next classroom as they disinfect Richard A. Simpson Elementary School in Arnold, Mo., on Thursday


FROM FRONT PAGE

Biden has been mum on the Senate balance as he awaits the results in his race, but he offered a preview days before Tuesday’s election.

“I can’t tell you how important it is that we flip the United States Senate. There’s no state more consequential than Georgia in that fight,” Biden declared at an Atlanta rally on Oct. 27, when he campaigned alongside Demo-cratic Senate hopefuls Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock.

Votes were still being counted to determine whether Ossoff will meet Georgia Sen. David Perdue in a second round. Georgia law requires an outright majority to win a statewide office.

Separately, a Georgia special election to fill the unexpired term of former Sen. Johnny Isakson will require a runoff between Warnock and Sen. Kelly Loef-fler, the Republican appointed to the post last year after Isakson retired.

Nationally, the Senate stands at 48-48. But Republicans lead un-called races in Alaska and North Carolina. By Thursday, the focus turned to Georgia.

Both sides promised unlimited funds would flow to the campaigns and onto the airwaves, and they predicted an all-star cast of cam-paigners for a state that in recent weeks drew visits from Biden, Trump, Vice President Mike Pence, Democratic vice presiden-tial nominee Kamala Harris and former President Barack Obama.

Sen. Chris Van Hollen, a Mary-land Democrat who led Senate Democrats’ campaign efforts in the 2018 cycle, warned that McConnell, who has gleefully dubbed himself the “grim reaper” of the Democratic agenda, would threaten a Biden presidency if he returns as majority leader.

“His DNA has been all about obstruction and very little about constructive progress together,” Van Hollen said.

McConnell almost certainly wouldn’t grant a floor vote to Biden’s proposal for a public op-tion expansion of the 2010 Afford-able Care Act or the Democrat’s proposed repeal of some of Trump’s top-end tax cuts. Mc-Connell refused to grant Obama’s Supreme Court nominee, Merrick Garland, hearings or a vote.

Progressives, meanwhile, la-ment losses in Senate races that could have given Democrats a majority with a cushion. Adam Green, co-founder of the Progres-sive Change Campaign Commit-tee, tried Thursday to downplay the pitfalls of GOP control, argu-ing that “bold executive branch actions that impact people’s lives” still could “define Biden’s

legacy.”Republicans countered with

warnings of an “extremist” gov-ernment if Democrats, who ap-pear positioned to keep the House majority despite losing seats, con-trol both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue.

“David Perdue won this race in regular time and will do the same in overtime,” said Kevin McLaughlin, executive director of the Senate Republicans’ cam-paign arm, blasting Ossoff as a front man for “national Demo-crats and their shared dream of a socialist America.”

Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley, a potential 2024 presidential can-didate, was harsher. “We are in danger of losing the Senate to ex-tremist liberals who want to raise your taxes, defund the police and pass legislation for a sweeping government takeover,” Hawley wrote in a fundraising pitch for Loeffler.

Biden’s tax plan proposes in-creases only on corporations and the wealthiest Americans. Nei-ther Ossoff nor Warnock propos-es “defunding the police.” And Hawley’s fundraising email didn’t

explain what Democrats’ “takeover” would be. But his asser-tions track the fault lines that will define the runoff campaigns.

In Geor-gia, Repub-

licans and Democrats embraced the national frame, even as they talked up their candidates’ in-dividual attributes. Loeffler is Georgia’s first female senator in the modern era. Warnock, pas-tor of the church where civil rights icon Martin Luther King Jr. preached, would be Georgia’s first elected Black senator.

“These are compelling candi-dates … but I think they have to accept it for what it is: a Demo-crats-versus-Republican race that’s all about the setup and au-thority in the Senate,” said Jack Kingston, a former congressman who narrowly lost a GOP Senate runoff to Perdue in 2014.

State Democratic Chair Nike-ma Williams, just elected to suc-ceed the late Rep. John Lewis in Congress, said it’s impossible to separate Senate control from issues that matter to voters on the ground. “That national con-versation has implications for every Georgian,” she said, not-ing that McConnell has blocked Democratic bills to expand the Voting Rights Act and send aid to state and local governments hammered by the pandemic and would do the same on health care and other Biden initiatives.

“I can’t wait to have that dis-cussion,” Williams said.

Williams further celebrated the attention as confirmation of Georgia’s battleground status.

FROM FRONT PAGE

continued and aides said he would address the nation in primetime. Trump remained in the White House residence as more results trickled in, expanding Biden’s lead in must-win Pennsylvania. In the West Wing, televisions re-mained tuned to the news amid trappings of normalcy, as report-ers lined up for coronavirus tests and outdoor crews worked on the North Lawn on a mild, muggy fall day.

Trump’s campaign, meanwhile, was quiet — a dramatic differ-ence from the day before, when it held a morning conference call projecting confidence and held a flurry of hastily arranged press conferences announcing litiga-tion in key states.

With his pathway to reelec-tion appearing to greatly narrow, Trump was testing how far he could go in using the trappings of presidential power to undermine confidence in the vote.

On Thursday, he advanced un-supported accusations of voter fraud to falsely argue that his rival was trying to seize power in an extraordinary effort by a sitting American president to sow doubt about the democratic process.

“This is a case when they are trying to steal an election, they are trying to rig an election,” Trump said from the podium of the White House briefing room.

Biden spent Thursday trying to ease tensions and project a more traditional image of presidential leadership. After participating in a coronavirus briefing, he de-clared that “each ballot must be counted.”

“I ask everyone to stay calm. The process is working,” Biden said. “It is the will of the vot-ers. No one, not anyone else who chooses the president of the Unit-ed States of America.”

Trump showed no sign of giv-ing up and was back on Twitter around 2:30 a.m. Friday, insisting the “U.S. Supreme Court should decide!”

Trump’s erroneous claims about the integrity of the elec-tion challenged Republicans now faced with the choice of whether to break with a president who, though his grip on his office grew tenuous, commanded sky-high approval ratings from rank-and-file members of the GOP. That was especially true for those who are eyeing presidential runs of their own in 2024.

Maryland GOP Gov. Larry Hogan, a potential presidential hopeful who has often criticized Trump, said unequivocally: “There is no defense for the Pres-ident’s comments tonight under-mining our Democratic process. America is counting the votes, and we must respect the results as we always have before.”

But others who are rumored to be considering a White House run of their own in four years aligned themselves with the incumbent, including Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., who tweeted support for Trump’s claims, writing that “If last 24 hours have made anything clear, it’s that we need new elec-tion integrity laws NOW.”

Trump’s campaign engaged in a flurry of legal activity to try to improve the Republican pres-ident’s chances, saying it would seek a recount in Wisconsin and file lawsuits in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Georgia.

Judges in Georgia and Michigan quickly dismissed Trump cam-paign lawsuits there Thursday.

In Pennsylvania, officials were not allowed to process mail-in ballots until Election Day under state law. It’s a form of voting that has skewed heavily in Biden’s favor after Trump spent months claiming without proof that vot-

ing by mail would lead to wide-spread voter fraud.

Mail ballots from across thestate were overwhelmingly breaking in Biden’s direction. Afinal vote total may not be clear for days because the use of mail-in ballots, which take more timeto process, has surged as a resultof the coronavirus pandemic.

The Trump campaign saidit was confident the president would ultimately pull out a vic-tory in Arizona, where votes were also still being counted, includingin Maricopa County, the state’smost populous area. The AP has declared Biden the winner inArizona and said Thursday that it was monitoring the vote count asit proceeded.

“The Associated Press con-tinues to watch and analyze votecount results from Arizona asthey come in,” said Sally Buzbee,AP’s executive editor. “We willfollow the facts in all cases.”

Trump’s campaign was lodginglegal challenges in several states, though he faced long odds. Hewould have to win multiple suitsin multiple states in order to stopvote counts, since more than onestate was undeclared.

Some of the Trump team’s law-suits only demand better accessfor campaign observers to loca-tions where ballots are being pro-cessed and counted. A judge inGeorgia dismissed the campaign’ssuit there less than 12 hours afterit was filed. And a Michigan judgedismissed a Trump lawsuit overwhether enough GOP challengers had access to handling of absen-tee ballots

Biden attorney Bob Bauer saidthe suits were legally “meritless.”Their only purpose, he said “is to create an opportunity for them to message falsely about what’staking place in the electoralprocess.”

2020 ELECTION

GENE J. PUSKAR/AP

Election office workers process ballots as counting continues from the general election at the Allegheny County elections returns warehouse in Pittsburgh on Friday .

Biden: Mail-in vote favoring Democrat

Runoffs: Georgia emerges as key to balance of Senate

Ossoff Perdue


BY NOMAAN MERCHANT AND TIM SULLIVAN

Associated Press

Election officials in several closely contested states said they are worried about the safety of their workers amid threats and gatherings of angry protesters outside vote tabulation centers, drawn by President Donald Trump’s baseless claim of wide-spread fraud in the race for the White House.

“I can tell you that my wife and my mother are very concerned for me,” said Joe Gloria, the regis-trar in Clark County, Nev., which includes Las Vegas. He said his staff was bolstering security and tracking vehicles coming and going from the election offices.

But he added that he and others would not be stopped from “doing what our duty is and counting ballots.”

Groups of Trump supporters gathered at vote tabulation sites in Detroit and Philadelphia again Friday, decrying counts that showed Democrat Joe Biden lead-ing in those and other key states.

While the protests have not been violent or very large, local officials were distressed by the gatherings and concerned about the relentless accusations.

Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel tweeted a plea Thursday to “stop making ha-rassing & threatening calls” to her staff.

“Asking them to shove sharpies in uncomfortable places is never appropriate & is a sad commen-tary on the state of our nation,” wrote Nessel, a Democrat, refer-ring to a false conspiracy theory that Trump supporters were told to fill out ballots with Sharpie markers instead of regular pens so that their votes wouldn’t be counted by the machines.

Dozens of Trump supporters rallied outside Detroit’s con-

vention center Friday morning, where election workers have counted ballots.

“Stop the steal,” the protest-ers chanted. Some carried signs that read, “Make Elections Fair

Again,” and “We Love Trump.” Police cordoned off streets lead-ing to the tabulation center and maintained a close watch on the protest.

Arizona Secretary of State

Katie Hobbs, speaking on CNN, said her main concern was staff safety but that sheriff’s deputies were providing protection. She said the protesters were “causing delay and disruption and prevent-

ing those employees from doing their job.”

On Thursday, about 100 Trumpsupporters gathered in front ofthe Maricopa County electioncenter in Phoenix, some carryingmilitary-style rifles and hand-guns. Arizona law allows peopleto openly carry guns.

Authorities at the center used fences to create a “freedom ofspeech zone” and keep the en-trance to the building open. The crowd took turns chanting— “Count the votes!“ and “Four more years!“ — and complainingthrough a megaphone about the voting process.

They paused to listen as Trump spoke from the White House,where he repeated many of hisgroundless assertions of a riggedvote. They whooped and clapped when the president said, “We’reon track to win Arizona.” The As-sociated Press has called Arizonafor Biden.

In Atlanta, roughly 100 chant-ing Trump supporters gathered outside State Farm Arena Thurs-day as votes were being counted.Several Atlanta police officersmonitored the scene.

In Las Vegas, about 100 back-ers of the president chanted asthey stood along the road in frontof the election offices.

Meanwhile, Facebook banneda large group called “Stop the Steal” that Trump supporterswere using to organize protestsagainst the vote count. Somemembers had called for violence,while many falsely claimed Dem-ocrats are stealing the election. The group had amassed morethan 350,000 members before Facebook took it down.

Associated Press

PHILADELPHIA — Phila-delphia police said they arrested two men Thursday for not hav-ing permits to carry the guns they were armed with near the state convention center, where vote counting is ongoing.

Police said they had received

information earlier in the day that individuals armed with firearms were on their way to the convention center in Phila-delphia in a Hummer truck. The two men arrested acknowl-edged that the Hummer spot-ted by officers near the center was their vehicle, police said

Friday.An additional firearm was

recovered from inside the ve-hicle, police said.

Both men will face firearm charges but have not been for-mally charged yet, police said. Their names had not been re-leased as of Friday morning.

REBECCA BLACKWELL/AP

A parking violation envelope is affixed to the windshield of a Hummer parked near the Pennsylvania Convention Center where votes are being counted, Friday in Philadelphia. Two men with guns arrested near the center admitted the Hummer was their vehicle.

2020 ELECTION

Election officials worried by threats, protests

2 with guns arrested near counting

BY MATTHEW DALY

Associated Press

WASHINGTON — Key Repub-lican lawmakers, including 2012 presidential nominee Mitt Rom-ney, on Friday slammed President Donald Trump’s unsubstantiated claim that Democrats are trying to “steal” the election, even as GOP leaders struck a more neu-tral tone — and others urged the White House to fight.

Sen. Mitt Romney, R-Utah, said Trump was within his rights to request recounts and call for investigations where evidence of irregularities exists.

But Trump “is wrong to say the election was rigged, corrupt and stolen,” Romney said on Twit-ter. Trump’s claim ”damages the cause of freedom here and around the world ... and recklessly in-flames destructive and danger-ous passions,” Romney said.

Romney’s comments came as GOP Sen. Pat Toomey of Penn-

sylvania — whose state is a key battleground in the presidential election, where votes are still being tallied — called Trump’s claim of fraud “very disturbing.”

“There’s simply no evidence anyone has shown me of any widespread corruption or fraud,” Toomey told “CBS This Morn-ing.” “The president’s speech last night was very disturbing to me because he made very, very seri-ous allegations without any evi-dence to support it. .

While he voted for Trump, “I want the next president to be the person who legitimately wins the Electoral College, and I will ac-cept whoever that is,” Toomey said.

Trump, who has complained for weeks about mail-in ballots, esca-lated his allegations late Thurs-day, saying at the White House that the ballot-counting process is unfair and corrupt. Trump did not back up his claims with any

details or evidence, and state and federal officials have not report-ed any instances of widespread voter fraud.

Yet Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell struck a more neutral tone, and other top Re-publicans more defiantly urged Trump to fight to defeat Demo-crat Joe Biden.

“Every legal vote should be counted,” McConnell tweeted early Friday. “All sides must get to observe the process.”

McConnell grew testy during a press conference later in Ken-tucky when was repeatedly asked to say more.

“Beyond that, I don’t have any-thing to say,” McConnell said. “It won’t make any difference how many times you ask, I’ve already given my answer.”

Missouri Sen. Roy Blunt, a member of the GOP leadership, said Friday that Trump’s cam-paign was making inconsistent

arguments.“You can’t stop the count in

one state and decide you want the count to continue in another state. That might be how you’d like to see the system work but that’s not how the system works,” Blunt said at the Capitol.

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy took a more confronta-tional tone, insisting inaccurately that Trump “won” the election — even though officials in several states are still counting Ameri-cans’ ballots.

“So everyone who’s listening, do not be quiet, do not be silent about this. We cannot allow this to happen before our very eyes,” McCarthy, R-Calif., said Thurs-day on Fox News. “Join together and let’s stop this.”

The split showed the grip Trump still has on his party, par-ticularly after Republicans in Congress won seats in the House and Senate running for reelection

alongside the president.One top Trump ally, Sen. Lind-

sey Graham, told reporters Fri-day that he supports Trump’sefforts to challenge ballot countsin several states yet to be called inthe presidential race. The SouthCarolina Republican said he hadtalked to the Trump campaignand expects evidence of voting ir-regularities to surface in the next48 hours, but added that it was upto the Trump campaign to makethat case.

While he’s “not conceding” thatBiden is going to win the presi-dency, Graham said he will try towork with a potential Democraticadministration.

“It’s important for me to be me,and that is, be a solid conserva-tive, fight like hell for stopping a radical agenda for the conserva-tive cause, but also recognizingthat, if Biden does win, he’s presi-dent, and try to work with him when we can,” Graham said.

GOP split over Trump claim that Dems trying to ‘steal’ election


NATION

Associated Press

U.S. voters went to the polls starkly di-vided on how they see President Donald Trump’s response to the coronavirus pan-demic. But in places where the virus is most rampant now, Trump enjoyed enor-mous support.

An Associated Press analysis reveals that in 376 counties with the highest number of new cases per capita, the overwhelming majority — 93% of those counties — went for Trump, a rate above other less severely hit areas.

Most were rural counties in Montana, the Dakotas, Nebraska, Kansas, Iowa and Wisconsin — the kinds of areas that often have lower rates of adherence to social dis-tancing, mask-wearing and other public health measures, and have been a focal point for much of the latest surge in cases.

Taking note of the contrast, state health officials are pausing for a moment of intro-spection. Even as they worry about rising numbers of hospitalizations and deaths, they hope to reframe their messages and aim for a reset on public sentiment now

that the election is over.“Public health officials need to step

back, listen to and understand the people who aren’t taking the same stance” on mask-wearing and other control measures, said Dr. Marcus Plescia of the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials.

“I think there’s the potential for things to get less charged and divisive,” he said,

adding that there’s a chance a retooled public health message might unify Ameri-cans around lowering case counts so hospi-tals won’t get swamped during the winter months.

The electoral divide comes amid an ex-plosion in cases and hospitalizations in the U.S. and globally.

The U.S. broke another record in the 7-day rolling average for daily new cases, hitting nearly 90,000. The tally for new cases Thursday was on track for another day above 100,000, with massive numbers reported all around the country, including a combined nearly 25,000 in Texas, Illinois and Florida. Iowa and Indiana each report-ed more than 4,000 cases as well.

The AP’s analysis was limited to coun-ties in which at least 95% of precincts had reported results, and grouped counties into six categories based on the rates of COVID-19 cases they’d experienced per 100,000 residents.

Polling, too, shows voters who split on Republican Trump vs. Democrat Joe Biden differed on whether the pandemic is

under control.Thirty-six percent of Trump voters de-

scribed the pandemic as completely ormostly under control, and another 47% said it was somewhat under control, accordingto AP VoteCast, a nationwide survey ofmore than 110,000 voters conducted for theAP by NORC at the University of Chicago.Meanwhile, 82% of Biden voters said the pandemic is not at all under control.

The pandemic was considered at least somewhat under control by slim majoritiesof voters in many red states, including Ala-bama (60%), Missouri (54%), Mississippi(58%), Kentucky (55%), Texas (55%), Ten-nessee (56%) and South Carolina (56%).

In Wisconsin, where the virus surged just before the election, 57% said the pan-demic was not under control. In Washing-ton state, where the virus is more in control now compared to earlier in the year, 55%said the same. Voters in New York and NewHampshire, where the virus is more con-trolled now after early surges, were rough-ly divided in their assessments, similar tovoters nationwide.

Counties hard-hit by virus vote for Trump

Associated Press

President Donald Trump and his Republican allies made signif-icant inroads with Latino voters in Tuesday’s election, alarming some Democrats who warned that immigration politics alone was not enough to hold their edge with the nation’s largest minority group.

Trump’s strong performance with Cuban Americans in South Florida narrowed the traditional Democratic edge in Miami-Dade County and helped put Florida in Trump’s column early Tues-day. In Texas, Trump won tens of thousands of new support-ers in predominantly Mexican American communities along the border.

A GOP win in a heavily Latino New Mexico congressional dis-trict suggested a surge of Repub-lican-leaning support there. And even in Nevada, where Demo-crats’ strength among Latinos had powered the party to domi-nance, there were some signs of new Trump support among La-tinos frustrated at the economic toll of coronavirus-related shut-downs. Democrat Joe Biden and Trump were still locked in a tight race there as officials counted the vote.

Democrats had hoped this would be the year when their strength among Latino voters would translate into victories in Florida and Texas, a game-changer that would reshape presidential politics. But Trump’s margins dashed those hopes and prompted debate on whether the party was taking Latino voters’ support for granted.

“It was tighter than all of us

wanted,” said Chuck Rocha, a for-mer strategist for Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, whose presiden-tial campaign dominated with Latino voters during the Demo-cratic primary. “Until we start treating Latinos as a diverse and not monolithic group, Democrats are going to lose more and more of them.”

The overwhelming majority of Trump’s support comes from white voters, not Latinos, who re-mained heavily Democratic. But even small shifts in a population can have huge repercussions in an almost evenly divided country.

Biden still won a sizable ma-jority of Latino voters — 63% na-tionwide, compared to Trump’s 35%, according to AP VoteCast, a massive survey of the electorate. But Trump was able to shave that margin somewhat in some com-petitive states, like Florida and Nevada.

Trump’s appeal to Latino vot-ers is no surprise to veteran po-litical observers in those states. Trump’s emphasis on jobs and economic growth got the atten-tion of at least some in a group of voters that has been dispropor-tionately hit by the pandemic and ensuing plunge in business.

In Nevada, where tourism is the economic engine, about half of all Latino voters said they thought casinos should be open as usual or with just minor restrictions during the pandemic, AP Vote-Cast found.

Forty-one percent said they approved of the way Trump has handled the public health crisis, compared with 34% of Latinos nationally.

“The emerging Latino vote is going to have some deeply popu-

list economic tendencies,” said Mike Madrid, a California-based strategist and former Republican who is part of the anti-Trump Lincoln Project. “They’re not listening to the vulgarity; they’re not on Twitter. They just want to go and do their jobs.”

VoteCast data shows the wide range of views among Latinos. About a quarter identify as con-servative ideologically, roughly 4 in 10 favor building a wall at the U.S.-Mexico border and roughly that many say they want abortion illegal in all or most circumstanc-es. About half of self-identified Protestants and Christians backed Trump, while roughly one-third of Roman Catholics did.

The most dramatic shift in La-tino voters came in Florida. Biden won Miami-Dade, home to a large Cuban American community, by 7 percentage points compared with Hillary Clinton’s 30-point victory margin four years ago.

Republicans defeated two Miami-area congressional incumbents - Reps. Donna Shalala and Debbie Mucarsel-Powell.

Maria Peiro, 47, a third grade teacher who lives in Miami’s Lit-tle Havana and volunteered with the Trump campaign, said she saw the Republican Party attract more Cuban American voters who have arrived in the U.S. since the late 1990s and were previously not interested in politics.

“We have seen a huge change. It’s no longer just the Cubans who arrived after the 1959 revolution,” Peiro said, adding that the shift was dramatic over the summer after racial justice protests erupt-ed around the country. Peiro said she believes Democrats “were not supporting the police“ and was troubled by acts of vandalism and violence.

“We didn’t come to this country for this. We came here to live in peace,” she said.

Geraldo Cadava, a Northwest-ern University Latino studiesprofessor and author of “TheHispanic Republican,” saidDemocrats need to pay attentionto voters like Peiro. “It’s not just about Biden needing to do more and earlier,” Cadava said. “Theargument just underestimatesthe political agency of Latinos.People need to start listening to Republican Latinos instead ofjust calling them traitors.”

Trump also made huge gainsin heavily Latino areas alongthe South Texas border. He won sparsely populated Zapata Coun-ty, south of Laredo, after losing it by a 2-to-1 margin to Hillary Clin-ton four years ago. And he closed the gap in larger counties thatcover the border cities of Laredo,McAllen and Brownsville, add-ing tens of thousands of votes in parts of the state that have long been considered a Democratic stronghold.

Confounding Dems, Trump, GOP make inroads with Latinos

WILFREDO LEE/AP

Supporters of President Donald Trump chant and wave flags outside the Versailles Cuban restaurant during an Election Night celebration Tuesday in the Little Havana neighborhood of Miami.

ROGELIO V. SOLIS/AP

A voters uses hand sanitizer at a polling place to clean their hands before casting their ballot in Jackson, Miss., on Tuesday.


NATION

Portland rejects bid for $18M police cut

Oregon man charged with supporting ISIS

Study: Fix to global warming doesn’t require veganism

AP

Volunteers put together food trays from excess food donated by a casino at Three Square, a food bank in Las Vegas last year. A study in the journal Science, says how we grow, eat and waste food is a big climate change problem that may keep the world from reaching its temperature-limiting goals.

BY SETH BORENSTEIN

Associated Press

The world likely can’t keep global warming to a relatively safe minimum unless we change how we grow, eat and throw away our food, but we don’t need to all go vegan, a new study says.

Researchers looked at five types of broad fixes to the food system and calculated how much they fight warming. They found that sampling a buffet of partial fixes for all five, instead of just diving into the salad bar, can get the job done, according to a study published in Thursday’s Science journal.

If the world food system keeps on current trajectories, it will produce near 1.5 trillion tons of greenhouse gases over the next 80 years, the study found. That’s coming from belching cows, fer-tilizer, mismanaged soil and food waste.

That much emissions — even if the globe stops burning fos-sil fuels which produce twice as much carbon pollution as food — is enough to likely warm Earth by more than the goals set in the 2015 Paris climate accord.

“The whole world doesn’t have to give up meat for us to meet our climate goals,” said study co-author Jason Hill, a biosystems engineering professor at the Uni-versity of Minnesota. “We can eat better, healthier foods. We can improve how we grow foods. And we can waste less food.”

The researchers from the Unit-

ed States and the United King-dom found:

� A nearly complete switch to a plant-rich diet around the world could slash almost 720 billion tons of greenhouse gases .

� If almost everyone ate the right number of calories based on their age, around 2,100 calories a day for many adults, it would cut about 450 billion tons of green-house gases .

� If farming got more carbon efficient — by using less fertil-izer, managing soil better and doing better crop rotation — it would slice nearly 600 billion tons of greenhouse gases .

� If farms could increase yield through genetics and other meth-ods, it would trim almost 210 bil-lion tons of greenhouse gases .

� If people waste less food ei-ther on their plates, in restaurants or by getting it to people in poorer countries, that would eliminate nearly 400 billion tons of green-house gases .

Or if the world does each of those five things but only half way, emissions would plummet by almost 940 billion tons . And that, with fossil fuel emissions cuts, would give the world a fighting chance of preventing another 0.5 to 1.3 degrees of warming, which the Paris accord aims to do, the study found.

Hans-Otto Poertner, who leads the United Nations science panel looking at world climate change impacts, said the study makes sense in laying out the many paths to achieving the needed emission

reductions.“There are many innovations

that are possible with stopping food waste as well as stopping unsustainable practices such as cutting tropical forests for soy production and its export as (ani-mal) feed,” said Poertner, who wasn’t part of the study. “It can-not be ignored that reducing meat consumption to sustainable levels would be important.”

A Mediterranean diet of less meat and animal fats, along with cutting portions, would do the trick and make people healthier, Hill said.

“Something like convincing the whole world to go vegan was always going to be an impossible large sell,” said Breakthrough Institute climate director Zeke Hausfather, who wasn’t part of the study. “This paper shows that a mix of different behavioral and technological solutions can make a real difference.”

While most of the world’s heat-trapping gases come from the burning of coal, oil and natural gas, one-quarter to one-third of the greenhouse gases come from agriculture, Hill said.

John Roy Porter, a professor of agriculture at the University of Montpellier in France, said some of the calculations from Hill’s study double counted emissions, which Hill disputes, and said he worried that “the only people re-ally to profit from such a paper will be the fossil fuel lobby who can divert attention from oil wells to farmers’ fields.”

BY ANDREW SELSKY

Associated Press

SALEM, Ore. — An Oregon man was indicted Thursday after authorities said he supported the Islamic State by distributing arti-cles on how to kill and maim with a knife and encouraging readers to carry out attacks.

Hawazen Sameer Mothafar, 31, appeared in federal court in Portland on charges of conspira-cy to provide material support to a designated terrorist organiza-tion and providing such support, U.S. Attorney Billy J. Williams and FBI Special Agent in Charge Renn Cannon said.

“The threat of ISIS-inspired terrorism remains very real thanks, in part, to an army of on-line supporters who produce pro-paganda that aims to incite ‘lone actor’ operators in the U.S. and around the world,” Cannon said.

Mothafar, who has physical dis-abilities and uses a wheelchair, was released on condition that he limit travel and the use of elec-tronic devices.

The federal public defender ap-pointed to represent him did not

immediately respond to messagesseeking comment. Mothafar lives in a Portland suburb.

The indictment by a federal grand jury alleges that betweenFebruary 2015 until the time ofhis arrest Thursday, Mothafarconspired with ISIS members toprovide support, including creat-ing and editing publications andarticles.

He also is accused of providingtechnical support to members ofthe group overseas on opening so-cial media and email accounts.

In December 2019, according to the indictment, Mothafar at-tempted to acquire information on the piloting of a drone for Sal-eck Ould Cheikh Mohamedou,an Islamic extremist who wasconvicted of attempting to assas-sinate then-President MohamedOuld Abdel Aziz of Mauritania. Mohamedou is currently incar-cerated in the African nation.

Mothafar is accused of pro-viding assistance to Al Dura’a al Sunni, or Sunni Shield, a pro- ISIS internet-based media orga-nization that published Al-Anja!newspaper, including by moder-ating private chat rooms.

BY GILLIAN FLACCUS

Associated Press

PORTLAND, Ore. — City commissioners in Portland, Ore. on Thursday rejected a budget amendment that would have slashed another $18 million from the Portland Police Bureau amid months of racial justice protests, and shifted the money to the city’s pandemic response.

The commission voted 3-2 against the amendment, which had been proposed by Commis-sioner Jo Ann Hardesty, the first Black woman on the elected body that acts like a city council.

Mayor Ted Wheeler, who is also police commissioner, was one of three commissioners who voted last week to delay a vote on the budget amendment until after Tuesday’s election. Wheeler won a second term and voted “no” on the amendment Thursday.

“Last week, we heard that it won’t require layoffs, which is wrong. It will require layoffs. This is not a detail. This is a criti-cal piece of information,” he said before voting no.

“The testimony we’ve heard is clear: The status quo is unaccept-able. Many Portlanders, and most of the people who testified about this item, do not trust the current criminal legal system — they do not trust the Police Bureau,” he said, adding that he nonetheless felt cutting the police budget fur-ther was not the solution.

The commission voted in Juneto cut nearly $16 million from the police — eliminating schoolresource officers, transit police and a gun violence reduction unit— and the force has also sufferedpandemic-related budget cuts.

Police accountability has beena driving issue in Portland since the killing of George Floyd inMay and was one of the biggest is-sues in the mayor’s race. Portlandhas been roiled by five months of near-nightly Black Lives Matterprotests and Wheeler has come under intense criticism for whatmany see as an overly aggressivepolice force.

A challenger to Wheeler’s leftwho attended dozens of protestsagainst racial injustice and policebrutality almost beat him by dou-bling down on a platform of po-lice reform and proposed policebudget cuts of $50 million, amongother things.

And while protests around thecountry focused on the vote count in the U.S. presidential election this week, protests in Portlandwere centered on racial injustice and police brutality.

On Thursday, a day after dem-onstrators smashed windows inthe downtown, a group of protest-ers stood in heavy rain for sever-al hours to call for authorities toreopen an investigation into thefatal police shooting of a 27-year-old Black man, Patrick Kimmons, two years ago.

PAGE 10 • S T A R S A N D S T R I P E S •

BY CARA ANNA AND ELIAS MESERET

Associated Press

Ethiopia’s prime minister on Friday night said airstrikes have been carried out against the forces of the country’s well-armed Tigray region, asserting that the strikes in multiple locations “completely destroyed rockets and other heavy weap-ons” and made it impossible for a retalia-tory attack.

Abiy Ahmed’s announcement on the state broadcaster marked another escala-tion in clashes this week that experts say could slide into civil war.

There was no mention of casualties in what Abiy called the “first round of opera-tion” against the region’s government, the Tigray People’s Liberation Front. He said the air force destroyed heavy weapons in Tigray’s capital, Mekele, and its surround-ing areas, alleging that the TPLF “has the desire to use them.”

The operation will continue, Abiy said, “until the junta is made accountable by law.”

There was no immediate response from the Tigray government, while the region is increasingly boxed in by movement re-strictions and a six-month state of emer-gency imposed by the federal government.

Hours earlier, the prime minister de-fended the military operations that were

launched early Wednesday after Abiy ac-cused the Tigray government of a deadlyattack on a military base. He asserted thatmonths of patiently trying to resolve differ-ences with the regional government have failed because of the leadership’s “crimi-nal hubris and intransigence.”

And with that, the prime minister ap-peared to close the door on dialogue, which some experts and diplomats say is desper-ately needed.

He asserted that the “large-scale lawenforcement operation” has “clear, limitedand achievable objectives: to restore therule of law and the constitutional order.” He described the region’s leadership as “fugitives from justice ... using the civilianpopulation as human shields.”

The prime minister, who won the NobelPeace Prize last year for his sweepingpolitical reforms, now faces his great-est test as the TPLF, which dominatedEthiopia’s government before he took of-fice in 2018, has pushed back while feelingmarginalized.

Aid groups warn a humanitarian disas-ter is in the making if fighting continues,with the COVID-19 pandemic just one ofseveral crises.

Communications remained almost com-pletely cut off in Tigray. They disappearedaround the time that Abiy made his earlyWednesday announcement.

Saturday, November 7, 2020

WORLD

Dozens dead in flooding, mudslides from Eta

Ethiopian PM announces airstrikes in Tigray, defends efforts to restore order

Iraq ratifies new law to help restore confidence in elections

BY MARLON GONZALEZ AND SONIA PEREZ D.

Associated Press

TEGUCIGALPA, Honduras — The rain-heavy remnants of Hur-ricane Eta flooded homes from Panama to Guatemala Thursday as the death toll across Central America rose to 57, and aid or-ganizations warned the flooding and mudslides were creating a slow-moving humanitarian disas-ter across the region.

The storm that hit Nicaragua as a mighty Category 4 hurricane on Tuesday had become more of a vast tropical rainstorm, but it was advancing so slowly and dumping so much rain that much of Cen-tral America remained on high alert. Forecasters said the now-tropical depression was expected to regather and head toward Cuba and possibly the Gulf of Mexico by early next week.

On Thursday afternoon, Gua-temala President Alejandro Giammattei said a water-soaked mountainside in the central part of the country had slid down onto the town of San Cristobal Vera-paz, burying homes and leaving at least 25 dead.

Two other slides in Huehu-etenango had killed at least 12 more, he said. Earlier Thursday, five others had been killed in smaller slides in Guatemala.

Guatemala’s toll was on top of 13 victims in Honduras and two in Nicaragua. Panamanian au-thorities reported eight missing.

Eta had sustained winds of 35 mph and was moving north-north-west at 8 mph Thursday. It was centered 65 miles west-northwest of La Ceiba, Honduras.

In Guatemala, two children died when their home collapsed under heavy rains in the central department of Quiche, according to a statement by local firefight-ers. A third person also died in Quiche, but details were not im-mediately available. Giammat-tei confirmed a fourth death in a landslide in Chinautla Wednes-day night.

On Thursday, Giammattei said on local radio that 60% of the eastern city of Puerto Barrios was flooded and 48 more hours of rain was expected.

Honduras’ National Police said six more bodies had been found,

bringing that country’s toll to 13. The bodies of two adults and two children were found after excava-tions in a mudslide that occurred Wednesday in the township of Gualala, and two boys aged 8 and 11 died in another mudslide in the township of El Nispero.

Earlier, residents found the body of a girl buried in a landslide Wednesday in mountains outside the north coast city of Tela. In the same area, a landslide bur-ied a home with a mother and two children inside it, according to Honduras Fire Department spokesman Oscar Triminio. He said there was also a 2-year-old

girl killed in Santa Barbara de-partment when she was swept away by floodwaters.

Heavy rain was forecast to con-tinue across Honduras through at least Thursday as Eta moved toward the northern city of San Pedro Sula.

Dozens of residents of a San Pedro Sula neighborhood had to abandon their homes at 4 a.m. Thursday when water from the Chamelecon river arrived at their doorsteps.

Honduran officials earlier re-ported that a 12-year-old girl died in a mudslide and a 15-year-old boy drowned trying to cross a

rain-swollen river.Marvin Aparicio of Honduras’

emergency management agencysaid Wednesday that some 457homes had been damaged, most-ly by floodwaters. There were 41communities cut off by washedout roads.

At least eight people were re-ported missing after flooding andlandslides in the Panama prov-ince of Chiriqui, which bordersCosta Rica.

“The situation is worrisome ; alot of help is needed,” said JavierPitti, mayor of Tierras Altas inChiriqui. Landslides had closed many roads, including the main highway connecting the provinceto the rest of Panama.

The homes of more than 200 residents of the Ngabe Bugle au-tonomous indigenous area wereflooded.

The U.S. National Hurricane Center forecast that parts of Ni-caragua and Honduras couldreceive 15 to 25 inches of rain, with 40 inches possible in some isolated parts. When what’s leftof the storm wobbles back intothe Caribbean it will regain some strength and become a tropicalstorm again, forecasts show.

And then Eta is predicted toslowly move toward Cuba and Florida, or at least close enough to Florida for forecasters to warn of7 inches of rain for South Floridain the next five to seven days. Andnext week, Eta could even moveinto the Gulf of Mexico.

“Whatever comes out (of Cen-tral America) is going to lingerawhile,” said Colorado State Uni-versity hurricane researcher PhilKlotzbach. “I’m not convincedwe’re done with Eta.”

BY QASSIM ABDUL-ZAHRA

Associated Press

BAGHDAD — Iraq’s president ratified on Thursday a new election law aimed at giving political independents a better chance of winning seats in parliament, paving the way for early elections next year.

President Barham Saleh stressed the need for free, fair and transparent ballot-ing that would restore Iraqi citizens’ confi-dence in the legitimacy of the process.

The new law changes each of the coun-try’s 18 provinces into several electoral districts and prevents parties from run-ning on unified lists, which has in the past helped them easily sweep all the seats in a specific province. Instead, the seats would go to whoever gets the most votes in the electoral districts.

Drafting a new election law has been a key demand of the hundreds of thousands of protesters who have been taking to the streets in Baghdad and the predominantly Shiite south since last year. The protesters have called for an end to endemic corrup-tion by a political class that is largely seen as having squandered Iraq’s resources through greed and mismanagement over the past years.

The protests were met with a heavy mili-

tary crackdown and hundreds were killed.The Iraqi president said that although

the new law was not perfect, it signaled progress and had the potential to enable future reforms. He called for the quick ful-fillment of remaining conditions required to hold elections, including biometric voter registration and reforming the electoral commission.

A dispute over the mechanism to replace retired judges at the Federal Supreme Court — the body that rules on constitu-tional disputes — still needs to be settled before the elections can take place.

“We have to create a political climate which will help alleviate this suffering, as well as ensuring justice and integrity dur-ing the choosing of a strong government,” Saleh said in a speech Thursday. “This is what we aspire to, through an electoral law which will enable Iraqis from all walks of life to vote and to participate in elec-tions, God willing, without the historical problems of forgery, manipulation and pressure.”

Iraq’s Parliament earlier this week passed the final version of the new law despite objections from some political parties. The 329-member chamber was elected in May 2018. The vote is held every four years, but the protesters have been demanding early elections.

DELMER MARTINEZ/AP

A toddler is carried over a street flooded by Hurricane Eta in Jerusalen, Honduras, Thursday .

• S T A R S A N D S T R I P E S • PAGE 11

snapped pictures and submitted them this year.

The annual project is sponsored by the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection’s Adopt A Highway program. The state’s Operation Wildflower program helps create garden beds and plant wildflowers along roadways.

Calendars can be ordered on the Department of Environmen-tal Protection’s website.

County approves sale of beer and liquor

MS TYLERTOWN — A county in southwest-

ern Mississippi has voted to le-galize the sale of beer, light wine and liquor.

Walthall County joins several other places in Mississippi that have moved from dry to wet in recent years.

The Enterprise-Journal re-ported that the beer and light wine were one ballot question and liquor was another in Walthall County, which borders Louisi-ana. Each passed with about 75% support.

Mississippi Department of Revenue maps show that Walthall had been among a small number of counties that were completely dry because they did not have any exceptions for cities or resort areas to sell beer, light wine or liquor.

Boy, 2, shoots mother after finding gun

IN DANVILLE — A 2-year-old central Indiana boy

shot his mother, seriously wound-ing her, with a gun he found in the

family’s home, police said.After the toddler shot his moth-

er Wednesday morning with a semi-automatic pistol, his 5-year-old brother called their grand-mother for help and she then called 911, the Hendricks County Sheriff’s Office said.

The siblings’ 40-year-old moth-er was taken in serious condition to an Indianapolis hospital, where she was in stable condition.

Police said the shooting ap-pears to have been an accident. Neither child was injured .

Illegal gambling found at Moose Lodge

NC CHARLOTTE — A Moose Lodge in North

Carolina could lose its liquor li-cense and pay a fine after state agents discovered illegal pool gambling involving NASCAR races, authorities said.

The N.C. Alcoholic Beverage Control Commission reported the game was discovered at the Mooresville lodge on March 5, The Charlotte Observer reported Thursday. No one answered the phone at the lodge on Thursday.

A report by an Alcohol Law Enforcement agent said cigarette cartons were cut open, with hand-written names on one side and numbers on the other covered by

a flap. An envelope attached to the carton contained $85, accord-ing to the report.

An employee told the agent that customers paid $5 to participate in the lottery, writing their name across from the covered numbers, the report said. After a race fin-ished, the numbers were revealed and the money awarded, the re-port said. The employee told the agent similar games are played at the lodge awarding prizes like guns and money.

The lodge faces suspension for five days starting Dec. 4 unless it pays a $500 fine by Nov. 30, the report said.

New company to make medical gloves, hire 192

KY PARIS — A new com-pany plans to open a

high-tech manufacturing facil-ity in central Kentucky, creat-ing nearly 200 new jobs, officials said.

U.S. Medical Glove Co. LLC plans to invest $32.5 million to purchase, retrofit and expand an existing facility in Paris that will employ 192 people and produce medical-grade gloves, Gov. Andy Beshear said in a statement on Wednesday.

The company’s automated manufacturing operation is ex-

pected to start next year with theproduction of more than 1 billionLiberty Gloves. Initially, the com-pany plans to hire 45 computer technicians and hire additionalstaff as new production lines areinstalled.

Retired Maj. Gen. Michael Da-vidson is the CEO of U.S. Medical Glove and said the company aimsto provide jobs for area veterans.

“They bring the values andskills they learned in their mili-tary service, “ Davidson said. ”Wedescribe Liberty Gloves as madefor America by Americans.”

Man struck, killed by car in his own yard

MA SHERBORN — AMassachusetts man

was struck and killed by a carin his own yard and the driver is facing charges, police said Wednesday.

Sherborn police said a 40-year-old man was struck at around4:40 p.m. by an Acura SUV. The Sherborn resident, who policedidn’t identify, was pronounceddead on scene.

The driver of the vehicle, Josh-ua Patel, 37, of Mansfield, wasarrested and charged with op-erating under the influence andother charges.

He was to be arraigned in NatickDistrict Court on Thursday.

Police said their preliminary investigation suggests Patelstruck the victim and then struck another car. Responding officersalso observed signs of impair-ment on Patel, police said.

The Middlesex District Attor-ney’s Office and State Police are also investigating.


From wire reports

AMERICAN ROUNDUP

The dollar amount Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee’s administration is offering in grants for charter schools across the state. Lee’s Department of Education says the charter school support grant is funded through the Governor’s Emergency Education Relief Fund. Every charter school will be allocated per-pupil

money based on 2020 enrollment, totaling $2.5 million. The other $2.5 million will be awarded to charter schools based on their significant academic growth.

Great white shark reappears off coast

NC BUXTON — A massive great white shark who

often swims off of North Caroli-na’s coast has kept an active sat-ellite tag longer than any other of her kind.

The Virginian-Pilot reported Tuesday that scientists tagged the now-famous shark seven years ago off Cape Cod.

The shark, named Katherine, was recently spotted swimming hundreds of miles off the coast of Virginia on Monday. It was the first evidence of her whereabouts in about a year and a half.

Ocearch, a nonprofit group doing research on large marine animals, has tagged about two dozen great whites. The tags bounce a signal from a satellite when they surface.

Katharine is 14 feet, 2 inches long and weighs 2,300 pounds. She has spent a large part of her life off the Outer Banks.

Gang leader sentenced to 18 years in prison

MA BOSTON — The former second in

command of the Massachusetts Almighty Latin Kings gang has been sentenced to 18 years in prison, federal prosecutors said Thursday.

U.S. Attorney Andrew Lelling’s office said Jorge Rodriguez, 32, was sentenced Wednesday in Boston federal court. He pleaded guilty to racketeering and drug charges in June.

Prosecutors say Rodriguez ran a cocaine distribution network in New Bedford that used apartment buildings known as “trap houses” to distribute the narcotics.

Troopers injured in crash scene response

WA LAKEWOOD — Two troopers in Washing-

ton state were injured after one trooper crashed into another’s patrol car as they were respond-ing to a single-vehicle accident on a rain-soaked highway, authori-ties said.

Washington State Patrol Troop-er Ryan Burke said a trooper ar-rived on scene Thursday just before 2:30 a.m. on Interstate 5 where a driver had fallen asleep and struck a barrier, KOMO-TV reported.

A second trooper lost control of his patrol car as he was approach-ing the scene and smashed into the first trooper’s patrol vehicle, which then collided with the civil-ian’s car, Burke said.

Both troopers were taken to St. Clare Hospital and treated for minor injuries, Burke said.

Calendar of roadside wildflowers available

WV CHARLESTON — West Virginia’s free

2021 calendar of wildflowers growing in the state is now avail-able to order.

The calendar has 12 pictures of flowers growing along state high-ways or in beds created by the state. Dozens of photographers

THE CENSUS

Up in lights

5M

BMS employee Zach Smtih installs Christmas lights along pit road on Wednesday in Bristol, Tenn.. The 24th annual Pinnacle Speedway In Lights, Powered by TVA, began Friday . The 4 mile drive through the Bristol Motor Speedway property features more than 2 million lights.

DAVID CRIGGER, BRISTOL HERALD COURIER/AP


BY SEBASTIAN MODAK

Special to The Washington Post

In today’s travel guides to Japan, tattoos are generally only mentioned in the context of places where tourists should be prepared to cover them up,

such as gyms, public pools and bath-ing houses known as onsens. A cen-tury ago, it was a very different story.

Guidebooks, like Basil Hall Cham-berlain’s 1893 “Handbook for Travel-lers in Japan,” feature ads for fi ne art galleries that double as tattoo parlors; you could pick up a piece of Japanese pottery while getting a more per-manent souvenir. In “Vacation Days in Hawaii and Japan,” published in the early 1900s, Philadelphia-based

writer Charles M. Taylor Jr. devotes multiple pages to a meeting with Hori Chiyo, an artist who claimed to have tattooed the British princes Albert Victor and the future King George V.

In Japan at the time, tattoos were seen as a sign of degeneracy. They were used to brand criminals — and for those criminals to then cover up their brands. As the country opened up to the West for the fi rst time, the emperor outlawed the art, seeing it as antithetical to modernity. Ironically, tattooing for tourists remained legal — and, as Chamberlain wrote in a 1905 travel guide, the Japanese take on the art was considered the cham-pagne of tattooing: “an art as vastly superior to the ordinary British sail-or’s tattooing as Heidsieck Monopole

is to small beer.”Today, tattoos are popular among

travelers, as ways to pay homage to a place (e.g., Japanese kanji script, an iconic building) or to traveling as a way of life (e.g., a compass, a map of the world). But how far back does the practice go? The history of tattoo-ing as a way to mark travels is hard to pin down. But there is something that most scholars agree on: The most common origin story is wrong, and the meaning of tattoos isn’t always clear cut.CONTINUED ON PAGE 13

TRAVEL

Michelle Myles, a co-owner of Daredevil Tattoo, sits inside her shop in Lower Manhattan. The shop also serves as a kind of museum, showcasing antique tattoo machines, original photos, news articles and sideshow banners. SARAH BLESENER/For The Washington Post

Tattooing:A colorful history

Centuries-old art has complicated origins


FROM PAGE 12

Yes, Capt. James Cook sailed the Pacifi c Ocean in the 18th century, and many of his crewmen might have received tattoos from the Polynesian people they encoun-tered along the way. Sometimes there might have even been an overlap in the reasons British and Polynesian sailors got tattoos: protection, for example. The letters “H-O-L-D F-A-S-T” tattooed across the knuckles was thought to save a sailor when letting go of a rope was a matter of life and death.

But the common narrative that those sailors were the fi rst people to bring tattoos back to Europe isn’t true. Rather, according to some, it’s a story rooted in some of the same instincts that make people get tattooed on their travels today.

“There’s a misconception in certain Western cultural memory that tattooing is sort of something that’s for-eign,” says Matt Lodder, senior lecturer of art history at the University of Essex in England. “Certainly that’s what drove a lot of the history: it was part of a cultural encounter, acquiring something ‘exotic.’ ”

Tracing the history of Europeans getting tattoos to mark trips to distant lands brings us much further back than British nobility visiting Japan or even sailors returning from the Pacifi c islands with the bold, black Polynesian tattoos that are still popular today.

Both Lodder and Lars Krutak, a tattoo anthropologist, pinpoint some of the fi rst instances of traveler tattoos in Europe to pilgrims visiting the Holy Land. In the 1600s, a trip to Jerusalem was arduous, dangerous and the ultimate way to show just how good of a Christian you were. There, Coptic Christians from Egypt had tattooing down to a brisk business, using carved blocks to replicate commonly requested designs, like the Jerusalem cross — a grid of four small crosses around one central cross — accompanied by the year of the pilgrimage.

“By having a stencil block pre-made, they could just stamp it on somebody’s arm and go on to the next person,” Krutak says. “On holy days, you’d have a line of people out the door and around the block.”

Hundreds of years later, some of those blocks can still be found at Razzouk Tattoo in Jerusalem’s Old City. Claiming to be in operation in some capacity since 1300 and run by the 27th generation of tattooists in the Raz-zouk family, the shop still attracts long lines of pilgrims during Easter festivities.

By the 19th century, tattooing was integral to the pilgrimage tradition in Jerusalem, to the point that even British nobility — the future King George V among them — were getting inked as a way to show their piety. At the same time, according to Lodder, some visitors com-plained about it being too commercialized.

“We have traveler accounts from the 1850s, where people are complaining about how dirty, busy and noisy it is,” Lodder says. “And in those descriptions, you have peddlers selling trinkets in a big list of things found ob-jectionable, right alongside all the tattoo shops.”

They were descriptions that would be just as applicable to tourist strips in Bali or Cancun today. Or New York City’s Bowery neighborhood more than 100 years ago.

‘Flash’ in the BoweryStarting around the 1880s, the Bowery in Lower Man-

hattan was a destination for a far less wholesome kind of pilgrimage.

“The Bowery was the place that you came to in New York City when you wanted to have fun, get in trouble, do some drinking, maybe do some fi ghting — and get tattooed,” says Michelle Myles, a co-owner of Daredevil Tattoo in New York’s Lower East Side. “Whether it was with tourists, sailors or New Yorkers, the Bowery just had this reputation as a playground for the working class.”

Myles, who also led tattoo history walking tours of the neighborhood before the coronavirus pandemic, says she often meets visitors from all over the world looking for vestiges of that past.

Myles and her business partner, Brad Fink, opened Daredevil Tattoo in 1997, the year tattooing was re-legal-ized in the city after being banned since 1961. Today, the shop doubles as a museum, with artifacts including a Thomas Edison electric pen that the fi rst electric tattoo machines were based off; signage from Charles Wag-ner’s shop, where he was famous for giving tattoos for a quarter; and plenty of “fl ash” (tattoo designs) from the Bowery’s glory days.

As a tourist attraction itself, Daredevil has always received a steady stream of visitors looking to mark their trip to New York City. Oftentimes, they will pick a design “off the wall,” where the shop has vintage fl ash on

display. Many will go for more predictable images of New York: a linework skyline of the city is a common request. But Myles says that what comes to symbolize New York City varies from person to person. Case in point? Her husband’s New York tattoo depicts a cockroach riding a rat.

A tradition for millenniaOf course, talking only about Europeans and their de-

scendants in the United States traveling around the world and getting tattoos ignores large populations. Indigenous groups across all six inhabited continents have incor-porated tattooing into their traditions for thousands of years. Tattoos told uplifting stories of cultural exchange, like shipwrecked sailors who married into Polynesian families and got the tattoos to mark their new alle-giances, or French fur traders in North America who got tattoos from their indigenous colleagues. But there were far less harmonious interactions, too.

Krutak, for example, talks about an Inuit mother and daughter, both tattooed, who in the 1560s were taken from their home in the Arctic and sent to Belgium to be put on display in taverns. Some time later, a tattooed man from an island that is now part of the Philippines was taken to London to be shown off. He died of smallpox.

“Christian doctrine stated that to mark one’s skin was basically the mark of Cain,” Krutak says. “And so people were fascinated by these individuals.”

Long before the Western narrative of exoticism, some indigenous people were using tattoos to mark their own travels. The word “tattoo” itself comes from Polynesian languages. Krutak points to the Iban “bejalai” tradition in Borneo, for example, wherein young men were sent away from their communities as a rite of passage. As they explored the wilds and neighboring settlements, they received tattoos to mark their journeys.

Krutak believes that those young men were getting tattooed for reasons that aren’t so different from today’s travelers getting a permanent reminder of their jour-neys. “These guys were also taking a souvenir; a story to talk about, of this incredible journey,” Krutak says. “It’s something they can always share with their family and friends.”

The thick blackwork of Iban tattooing became popular around the world with non-Iban travelers in the 1970s, in part because of a few intrepid tattooers who went into Borneo to get tattooed by some of the last remaining masters of the tradition and learned the craft. With that, of course, came questions of appropriation. You only need to go to Venice Beach in Los Angeles for an afternoon to see a plethora of “tribal tattoos,” derivative of Polynesian traditions that go back thousands of years. So when is it OK to mark yourself with a souvenir that might intersect

with the traditions of another culture?

The appropriation considerationFor Indian tattoo artist Moranngam Khaling, who goes

by Mo Naga, it is a question that he grapples with daily. Mo Naga, who splits his time between Delhi and his home state of Manipur in the country’s northeast, has spent the past decade devoted to reviving the traditional tattoo-ing practices of his people, the Naga, a group made up of more than 30 tribes spread across northeastern India and northwestern Myanmar. To do so, he has spent years traveling in the northeastern regions the Naga call home, talking to elders who are the last people to have the tat-toos that were once commonplace.

After years of research, Mo Naga began offering tat-toos that used many of the motifs and symbols of tradi-tional Naga tattooing, something he dubbed “Neo-Naga.” Today, he says, more than 80% of his clients are members of the more than 30 tribes that make up the Naga, but travelers from abroad play a role in reviving a lost art and spreading awareness of its importance.

“I have a very tough job,” Mo Naga says over the phone from his home in Manipur. “But people who come to me are also very conscious about appropriation. They have no idea what they are going to get, and they want to be part of the revival. They know this is something impor-tant.”

Mo Naga says he gets regular requests on social media from people overseas asking for Naga designs they can use in their tattoos, but he always refuses. A big part of his process is the consultation, in which Mo Naga explains the history of Naga tattooing and the intricacies of the tradition to his client, and then they settle on an appropriate design.

“Sometimes that consultation can go on for one whole day — and the actual tattoo might just take an hour,” Mo Naga says.

Some off-limits tattoos, regardless of the tourist, include the tattoos that were once given to headhunters to mark their bravery in battle and those that symbolize family lineage. Instead, Mo Naga often opts for motifs that draw from the natural world, something relevant to both the Naga people and his clients from far away.

Mo Naga, who is in Manipur working on building a Tat-too Village where people would come to learn more about traditional Naga art, hopes that the travelers he tattoos today could lead to more interest in the at-risk tradition.

“When you have a Neo-Naga tattoo on your body, you become a cultural ambassador for my people: you will be telling a story about us to the world,” Mo Naga says. “You’ll be spreading the news of a dying tradition, and maybe you’ll get my people excited and interested in preserving and protecting it.”

TRAVEL

SARAH BLESENER/For The Washington Post

Yoon Park, a tattoo artist at Daredevil Tattoo, works on a client’s leg on a Monday afternoon. Daredevil Tattoo opened in 1997, when tattooing was re-legalized in New York City after being banned since 1961.

Tracing the history of Europeans getting tattoos to mark trips to distant lands brings us much further back than British nobility visiting Japan or even sailors returning from the Pacifi c islands with the bold,

black Polynesian tattoos that are still popular today.


BY MICHAEL THOMSEN

Special to The Washington Post

Pikmin 3 Deluxe opens on a note of exhaustion. The inhabitants of a planet named Koppai have almost run out of food, the opening mono-

logue tells us, due to “a booming population, a booming appetite and a basic lack of plan-ning.” After sending out a fl eet of scout ships to scour the galaxy for planets that haven’t yet depleted their ecosystems, only one shows any promise, the lush and Earthlike PNF-404. With the future of their species at stake, three diminutive astronauts — Brittany, Alph and Captain Charlie — set off in a treehouse-sized spaceship, hoping to fi lch every last piece of fruit they can fi nd on PNF-404’s surface.

The catch is that the Koppaites are too tiny to actually scavenge anything themselves. Instead, they have to rely on Pikmin to do the dirty work for them. Part mandrake and part pack mule, Pikmin are sprout-sized crea-tures with bulging white eyes and no mouths, who spend their days lolling on leaves of grass or burrowing under the PNF-404’s topsoil to nap. They can travel in swarms of up to 100, and come in fi ve varieties: Red Pikmin are fl ame resistant fi ghters; Blue Pik-min can swim underwater; Yellow Pikmin conduct electricity; Pink Pikmin can fl y; and Purple Pikmin are made from an onyx-like material that makes them useful for shat-

tering glass barriers. They’re also capable of pooling their collective strength to pick up and carry the building-sized pieces of fruit scattered across PNF-404 with antlike effi ciency.

Deluxe is a straightforward rerelease of the original Pikmin 3, which arrived on the Wii U in 2013 from makers Eighting Co. Ltd./Nintendo. In addition to the original story mode, the Deluxe version includes two new diffi culty options for experienced players, a two-player co-op mode, and 14 extra side story missions featuring Olimar and Louie, the respective heroes from Pikmin and Pikmin 2 who have ended up on PNF-404 at the same time as the Koppaites. These extra missions sound promising, but they are little more than scrambled combat arenas, mostly set in the same maps used in the main story mode. They’re mildly diverting, but rarely as clever or demanding as the Mission stages that came included in the original game seven years ago.

The most consequential change is the new control scheme to account for the Switch’s input limitations compared to the Wii U, something that feels more like a subtraction than an addition. The original game was tuned for a control setup that initially seemed ludicrous and jumbled, with the Wii remote and Nunchuk used for movement and aiming, while the Wii U gamepad, placed in one’s lap or propped up on a coffee table, displayed a map that players could use to plan out their

days and draw routes for secondary charac-ters (two of the three astronauts that weren’t under direct control).

Switching between the two control layers was cumbersome and confusing, but after a few hours it began to seem like an unexpect-edly elegant design. The precision of the pointer aim gave the game a methodical pace that quietly favored parsimony and careful deployment of just as many Pikmin as were necessary to get the job done and no more. The secondary map screen on the Wii U gamepad would shift the TV to an overhead view that made it possible to compare the actual game world to the map, which let play-ers scout routes in advance, to minimize the chances of an unexpected enemy encounter while controlling another character.

Playing without either of these options in Deluxe somehow feels even clunkier and shallower than the original. In place of point-er aiming, the Deluxe version defaults to a lock-on system that forces players to repeat-edly tap a shoulder button to cycle through targets. In areas with more enemies and objects on screen, cycling through targets creates real confusion and the lock-on often jumps between targets, and I started to feel like I was spending more time overcompen-sating for the interface’s unreliability than I was playing the game. When I fi nally fi nished the game, I was convinced that the ideas behind Deluxe’s control scheme aren’t bad, they just weren’t meant for a game with the kind of level layout and pace of the original Pikmin 3.

Despite the ill-suited controls, Pikmin 3 still has many vestiges of its original charm. There’s a sense of teasing wonderment in the way the Koappites rename each unfamiliar piece of fruit. Cherries are Cupid’s Gre-nades; cantaloupes are Wayward Moons; red grapes become Dusk Pustules; peaches are dubbed Mock Bottoms; and plums, Lesser Mock Bottoms. Likewise, unlocking all the game’s secret nooks and caverns in search of those fruit can often be enchanting. A newly acquired type of Pikmin in one area can be brought back to another to break down an electric fence, or lift up a line of bamboo stakes, opening a path into an area with even more secrets to dismantle. It feels like un-folding an elaborate piece of origami step by step, a sequence of secret creases that show how easily a hummingbird or dragon can become an ordinary piece of paper again.

For me, playing Pikmin 3 Deluxe felt a little bit more like playing with a creased-up piece of paper.

Platforms: Nintendo SwitchOnline: pikmin3.nintendo.com

VIDEO GAMES

Pikmin 3 Deluxeloses some of its

original charm

Nintendo photos

Pikmin 3 Deluxe, an enhanced version of real-time strategy and puzzle game for Nintendo Switch, features cooperative play in the story mode and all downloadable content from the Wii U version.


MOVIES

“Bond came on the scene after the War, at a time when people were fed up with rationing and drab times and utility clothes and a predominantly gray color in life,” Connery, who served in the British Navy as a teenager, told Playboy in 1965. “Along comes this character who cuts right through all that like a very hot knife through but-ter, with his clothing and his cars and his wine and his women.”

Long after achieving fame, Connery contentedly gave it up. He spent his fi nal two decades cheerfully retired in the Caribbean, often playing golf with his wife, unimpressed and little tempted by more modern Hollywood productions. (He said he was “fed up with the idiots.”)

There was irony in that. Connery, as the original cinema Bond, did much to make the style and tone of today’s movie franchises — even if few carry a lick of Connery’s danger. His Bond heir Daniel Craig credited Connery with helping “create the modern block-buster.” It’s hard to imagine the suave secret-service spy would have ever become a cultural force if the franchise hadn’t from the start traded on its star’s brutal charm. Connery crucially added humor to Ian Fleming’s pages, along with a dash of cruelty.

Connery’s Bond became etched as an icon of its era, one increasingly distant from today. He was the epitome of a dashing, womanizing, macho image that loomed over the second half of the 20th century. Connery differed from his character in many respects, but not all. In that same Playboy interview, he explained why he believed hitting a

woman with an open fi st was justifi able.Bond is the fi rst word on Connery,

but it’s certainly not the last. Against the pleas of fans, he departed the char-acter at 41 (he was later coaxed back for 1983’s “Never Say Never Again”), refusing to be typecast. His best and most interesting work all came after.

“The Hill” (1965) was the fi rst of fi ve fi lms with Sidney Lumet (the others were “The Anderson Tapes,” “The Offense,” “Murder on the Orient Express” and “Family Business”), and while it’s less seen than many of Connery’s fi lms, it remains possibly the best expression of the actor’s rugged power. He plays a prisoner of indomi-

table strength and defi ance jailed in a sadistic British Army WWII military prison in the scorching Libyan desert.

He was a soldier again a decade later in John Huston’s “The Man Who Would Be King,” based on the Rudyard Kipling short story, playing a military offi cer who’s embraced as a god in Kafi ristan, an impression he struggles to maintain. It’s a perfect role and performance for Connery, whose best work came when he — this former bodybuilder of unimpeachable force and magnetism — was humbled.

Connery’s confi dence came through most dramatically when it was chal-lenged by foes more formidable than a Bond villain. In his Oscar-winning performance in Brian De Palma’s Pro-hibition-era crime fi lm “The Untouch-ables,” he’s alive to Al Capone’s threat, telling Kevin Costner’s Treasury

Department agent: “You see, what I’m saying is, what are you prepared to do?”

Connery aged well as an actor, crafting more diverse and inquisitive portraits of masculinity. He played an aging Robin Hood in “Robin and Mar-ian” (1976), a combustible submarine captain in John McTiernan’s “The Hunt for Red October” and a lovable, play-ful father to Harrison Ford in Steven Spielberg’s “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade” (1989).

Another “Indiana Jones,” Connery said, had been the only thing that really tempted him to come out of retirement. That could be because the glint of mis-chief that accompanied nearly every Connery performance was so present in “The Last Crusade.” Connery always left you feeling if not shaken, then very happily stirred.

BY JAKE COYLE

Associated Press

Writing an appreciation of Sean Connery feels inevitably inadequate compared to experiencing the real thing. To glimpse his magnetism, you might turn to a pho-

tograph of him in a tailored suit, leaning against an Aston Martin. You’d probably get more of his menac-ing charisma by pulling up the “Chicago way” scene from “The Untouchables.”

It might be enough simply to say: The king is dead.

As a lion of movies for half a century, Connery’s talent

was manifest. He was famously cast as James Bond without a screen test. It was that obvious. And from then on, in even the lesser fi lms, Connery, who died Oct. 31 at 90, was never out of place on screen. His presence was absolute. Noting his supreme confi dence, the late fi lm critic Pauline Kael once wrote, “I don’t know any man since Cary Grant that men have wanted to be so much.”

As a more earthy, macho movie-star ideal, Con-nery was so beloved that he was shared, like folklore, between generations. It helped that he never seemed to be appealing to the audience, or to anybody, for any-thing. With raised eyebrows and roguish wisecracks, there was little that Connery (nearly always the lead) didn’t command. And to a certain extent, that cock-sureness shaped his career, too.

Connery, 32 when “Dr. No” came out, had already lived through World War II. Born into poverty in Edinburgh, he left school at age 13 during the war and worked as a laborer and a bricklayer before he donned the tuxedo. He saw Bond, too, as a product of the war.

APPRECIATION

A lion of cinema whose roar went well beyond James Bond

Sean Connery(1930-2020)

AP

AP photos

Connery, as James Bond, poses in an event for the 1965 spy film “Thunderball.”

Connery celebrates his best supporting actor win at the 1988 Oscars.


BY ALLYSON CHIU

The Washington Post

Bubble tents. Domes. Dining pods. Whatever you call them, the clear, igloo-like structures have started popping up in cities where colder weath-er threatens the outdoor dining that restaurants

have turned to in their attempt to stay afl oat during the coronavirus pandemic.

In Seattle, a local restaurant owner told KING-TV he spent thousands of dollars installing two large plastic domes outside his eatery that would hold one table each. Similar enclosures now line the streets of Chicago’s Fulton Market and Randolph Restaurant Row area, Eater Chicago reported, noting that the structures are made out of a material that traps heat and have controls to regulate airfl ow. Tent-style bubbles also have been spotted in New York City: A recent viral video showed groups of diners clustered closely around candlelit tables in individual plastic pods on the sidewalk.

While infectious-disease experts warn that careless use of these bubbles could facilitate transmission of the coronavirus, they also say it is possible for dining in them to be relatively low-risk, as long as certain precautions are taken.

“There is no right answer to this,” said Aditya Shah, an assistant professor of infectious diseases at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., who specializes in infection prevention and control. “But there’s various levels of risk that we have to think of before going to these spaces.”

Here are the safety measures Shah and other experts recommend to lower your chances of contracting or spreading the coronavirus if you decide to go “bubble dining.”

Know the risks and benefitsWhile the bubbles are physically out in the open air,

enclosing people inside may be akin to “creating indoor dining outdoors,” said Wafaa El-Sadr, a professor of epi-demiology and medicine at Columbia University.

The igloo structures and tents “seem to be quite tight,” El-Sadr said. “Therefore, there’s not much cross-ventila-tion that’s happening, and often they even will close the windows or zip up the win-dows and the doors of the enclo-sure.”

That means it is possible for the droplets people pro-duce when they’re talking or breathing to build up inside the bubble, said Linsey Marr, a civil and environmental engineering professor at Virginia Tech who studies the airborne transmission of infectious diseases. The novel coronavirus most commonly spreads through close in-person contact, but can also be transmitted through tiny droplets and particles that hang in the air for extended periods of time, especially in poorly ventilated indoor spaces, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

“So, imagine that someone is smoking a cigarette in one of these tents,” Marr said. “The tent is going to kind of trap the smoke in there for a bit longer than if you are at an open table.”

On the other hand, the bubbles could be an effective way to limit the exposure a group of diners has to others around them, provided it is one table per bubble, said Paul Sax, clinical director of the Division of Infectious Diseases at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston.

“It keeps the group that you’re potentially exposed to while dining out much smaller,” Sax said. “From just a mathematical basis, it’s safer than dining in a restaurant, where you have, potentially, exposure to multiple other people.”

Restaurants have attempted to make indoor dining safer by requiring masks, reducing capacity and spacing out tables, but a growing body of evidence suggests it is still a high-risk activity. A recent CDC study of roughly 300 adults who tested positive for the coronavirus found that they were more than twice as likely to have eaten at a restaurant in the two weeks before getting sick com-pared to people who were not infected.

“The diffi culty is you don’t know the ventilation” inside restaurants and bars, Sax said. “People who are dining and drinking are taking their masks off; they’re having conversations. If the noise level increases, they’re having loud conversations. And all of these things have been shown to increase the risk of spread of the virus.”

These behaviors prob-ably occur inside

dining pods,

too, but the occupants are really only having prolonged, unmasked interactions with the other members of their group, Sax said.

“Clearly small spaces with poor ventilation are high risk,” he said. “But at the same time, limiting the num-bers of people that you’re exposed to reduces the risk, so it’s a trade-off.”

Evaluate who you’re dining withThe level of risk a dining bubble poses largely depends

on its occupants, said Erica Shenoy, associate chief of the Infection Control Unit at Massachusetts General Hospi-tal.

“If you put 20 of your closest friends in an igloo to-gether, then there are 20 opportunities that one person in that group is infectious,” Shenoy said. It is much safer for people to have a meal with their immediate household in a bubble tent, she said, noting that the experience would be similar to eating at home.

Marr agreed. “I would eat with my own family in one of those, but not with anyone else,” she said.

Risk also could be fairly low for people who are dining with members of their pandemic pods, which could in-clude trusted friends who are not part of their household, El-Sadr said. People who form these groups commit to following strict safety protocols, such as mask-wearing and social distancing, when they are in public or interact-ing with others outside their pod.

“It is obviously safer because then you know that the individuals you are with have been also observing the public health measures” and are likely all at lower risk, she said.

Prioritize ventilation and sanitationOnce inside the bubbles, diners should fi nd ways to

make sure there is air fl ow within the space, experts said.“You don’t need to feel a breeze, but it defi nitely

shouldn’t feel stuffy,” Marr said. “Smells shouldn’t build up in there.”

Shah of the Mayo Clinic suggested keeping at least one side of the tent open. He added that experts have consis-tently recommended sitting outside for meals because of the importance of ventilation.

“If there’s no ventilation, then there’s no difference between sitting outside and inside,” Shah said. “If some-

body else is infected there and within six feet of you, and you’ll be breathing stale air, then you do have

a chance of getting infected.”Fans could help with ventilation, but they must be positioned correctly to avoid just

moving contaminated air around the space and potentially keeping the virus

in the air longer, Marr said. She sug-gested that fans be placed facing outward near a tent’s openings.

People should also follow public safety guidelines inside the pods, including practicing good hand hygiene and wearing their masks when they aren’t eating or drinking, experts said.

“As people are talking to each other and socializing, I think keeping a mask on is very, very important,” El-Sadr said. “I do that because I think it’s also im-portant to protect the servers.”

After each group of diners, the surfaces inside the bubbles should be sanitized using soap and water or disinfectant, Shah said. El-Sadr recommended that tents also be aired out for as long as possible, though she said there is not clear guidance on the exact amount of time.

Bursting the outdoor bubbleHealth experts say ‘bubble dining’ has some advantages, but patrons still need to be diligent

HEALTH AND FITNESS

This plastic igloo dome tent has been erected outside a pub in Chorleywood, England, in an attempt to keep diners safe from the coronavirus. iStock

Saturday, November 7, 2020 • S T A R S A N D S T R I P E S • PAGE 17

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BY DANIEL R. DEPETRIS

Special to Stars and Stripes

More than eight months since the U.S. and the Taliban signed an agreement in Doha, Qatar, Afghanistan still remains

at war. With the exception of a weeklong reduction of violence in February and a multiday cease-fire in July, the fighting is as lethal as it has ever been. Recently, Taliban fighters have conducted attacks in 24 of Afghanistan’s 34 provinces.

Nobody should be surprised that the Taliban are escalating operations across the country. Yet some high-profile Afghan watchers, including several former U.S. ambassadors, are now citing the violence as a reason to slow down the ongoing U.S. troop withdrawal. This, however, would be a fundamental mistake. Diving into Af-ghanistan’s domestic problems and tying a U.S. troop departure to the successful com-pletion of intra-Afghan peace talks will do nothing but extend U.S. participation in a civil war that the American public — and U.S. veterans — rightly want to end. This applies no matter whether Donald Trump or Joe Biden ends up sitting in the Oval Of-fice next January once the long vote count-ing process is resolved.

Unfortunately, decisionmakers have not yet arrived at that view. One of the most prevalent arguments against withdrawal is that U.S. troops provide the Afghan gov-ernment with considerable leverage at the negotiating table. Remove those troops, the logic goes, and the Taliban have no reason to compromise. While there is some merit to this argument, it misses the much more important point: While a successful peace negotiation would no doubt be in Af-

ghanistan’s own interest, the United States doesn’t need peace breaking out across Afghanistan to defend the homeland from terrorist attacks.

U.S. troops have been fighting in Af-ghanistan for so long that policymakers and pundits in Washington have conflated U.S. and Afghan interests. It is often taken as fact that what is good for the Afghan gov-ernment must be good for the U.S. In real-ity, this is the type of dangerous thinking that often leads to bad policy. By confusing what we need for U.S. security with what we want, U.S. policymakers set up the U.S. military to fail. In effect, connecting a U.S. troop withdrawal to the intra-Afghan talks provides the Taliban with veto power over U.S. national security policy. It also gives the Afghan government a major incentive to toughen their demands at the negotiat-ing table. If Kabul knows in advance that a breakdown in the peace process will keep U.S. troops and dollars floating into the country, why would it bother to negotiate?

But all of this is beside the point. The truth is that whether Afghans have the ability to make peace with themselves is immaterial to whether the U.S. can protect its people from anti-U.S. terrorist groups. It should be obvious by now that the U.S. retains the most sophisticated, profes-sional, and technically proficient terror-ist-hunting apparatus in the world and has demonstrated on countless occasions over the last decade that its reach extends ev-erywhere. Yemen, for instance, is hardly a nation awash in peace and tranquility, yet this hasn’t stopped the U.S. from utilizing its counterterrorism machinery to find, pinpoint and neutralize high-profile ter-rorists — like a number of senior al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula leaders — who

threaten the homeland. Regardless of whattranspires in Afghanistan or what form ofgovernment the Afghans live under, theU.S. will continue to possess the intelli-gence, surveillance, reconnaissance and quick-strike capability to do precisely thesame thing. None of this is contingent onthe ups and downs of Afghanistan’s inter-nal contest for power.

As the violence spikes, some will makethe claim that the U.S. has a moral duty to ensure Afghanistan doesn’t completely fall apart due to the high sacrifice and largeinvestment Washington has devoted to thecountry over the last two decades. But thisargument is based more on emotionalismthan any sense of cold, hard reality. Con-tinuing to put Americans in uniform inhigh-risk situations and spending money to preserve a failed status quo is hardlyan appealing option. Such a mindset is thesunk-cost fallacy at work, where peoplerefuse to change course simply because somuch time and dollars have already beenspent on the problem. The usual result: The investment grows, but the problem re-mains the same.

One can only hope the Afghan govern-ment and Taliban officials are able to ex-hibit the open-mindedness, fortitude andlong-term vision to end four consecutivedecades of civil war. But U.S. policymak-ers shouldn’t fool themselves: Peace in Af-ghanistan is ultimately the responsibility of the Afghans , not the U.S. military. Asdifficult as it is, the U.S. withdrawal shouldproceed as scheduled until all groundtroops are out of harm’s way. After two de-cades, it is time for Afghans to find a wayto live with each other.Daniel R. DePetris is a fellow at Defense Priorities and a columnist at the Washington Examiner.

BY JOSH ROGIN The Washington Post

Although the presidential election hasn’t yet been settled, the results so far have clarified one thing: The trajectory of U.S. foreign pol-

icy is likely to take two starkly divergent paths, neither of which was the conven-tional wisdom a few days ago. One would lead to a return to a relatively bipartisan, internationalist U.S. approach to the world. The other is “America First” on steroids.

What’s clear already is that predictions of a landslide victory by the Democrats, including a takeover of the Senate, were wrong. If Joe Biden ends up winning the presidency, he will most likely face a Re-publican-led Senate and a weakened Dem-ocratic majority in the House. This will require him to seek help from Republican lawmakers with common interests to as-semble his administration and advance his agenda. Foreign policy is the best opportu-nity for a Biden administration to succeed in getting some Republicans on board.

This could mean a quick return to irrel-evance for the progressive wing of Biden’s own party, which was betting on Demo-crats being so powerful that post-election negotiations over policy and personnel would occur between the two sides of their own caucus. Just before the election, pro-gressive foreign policy officials in Con-gress were publicly airing their plans to bargain for Cabinet positions and agenda items. The vote has changed all of that.

Now, even if Biden wins, he will likely need Republican Senate votes to confirm his team. Biden officials consistently have said they want to work with centrist Re-publicans who share their overall national security vision. But will a GOP that finds it-self back in opposition want to play along?

“It’s really up to the Republicans,” said Rep. Tom Malinowski, D-N.J., a former

State Department official who just won his first reelection. “There are plenty of Democrats including Joe Biden who want to forge that common ground. So the ques-tion is, will the Republicans who actually claim to agree with those principles, who think the McCain-Romney vision for for-eign policy is the right one, help Biden where that vision overlaps with his? He is going to need that help.”

Several GOP foreign policy operatives told me that, if Biden is elected and Repub-licans retain control of the Senate, GOP leaders anticipate having significant lever-age, especially regarding senior level ap-pointments. The idea is to pressure Biden to avoid far-left progressives and former Obama administration officials the Fox News crowd already dislikes.

Take the position of secretary of state, for one example. The short list has includ-ed Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., former National Security Adviser Susan Rice, Sen. Christopher Coons, D-Del., and for-mer Deputy Secretary of State Antony Blinken. Progressives favor Murphy, and Rice has been a political target of conser-vatives since the 2012 Benghazi attacks. Rice threatened to run against Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, and raised money for Collins’ opponent but Collins won reelec-tion. Right or wrong, there’s no way that GOP senators would accept Murphy or Rice. Coons and Blinken, considered cen-trists, are well known and widely accepted among the GOP establishment.

Several GOP senators, including Tom Cotton, of Arkansas; Marco Rubio, of Flor-ida; and Josh Hawley, of Missouri, are eye-ing a run for president in 2024, making any cooperation with a Biden administration politically complicated. But the idea that the GOP can follow Donald Trump foreign policy and still claim the legacy of Ronald Reagan becomes untenable if Trump loses.

And don’t underestimate the willingness of some Republicans to work with Biden for the purpose of pushing back against the populists and isolationists on the left and right, their common enemies.

Some Democratic lawmakers say Biden’sforeign policy was always closer to the tra-ditional GOP approach of alliances, freetrade, overt support for American valuesabroad and robust U.S. engagement on sev-eral continents. If Trump somehow man-ages to squeeze out a reelection victory,they say, it will be a doomsday scenario for internationalists in both parties.

If Trump wins, expect him to purgeall GOP officials who restrained his for-eign policy instincts during his first term.Trump administration officials confirmedto me that an emboldened White House would likely ask almost all political ap-pointees to resign immediately. Trumpwould then replace them with hardcorepolitical loyalists, snubbing career Repub-lican professionals who might try to thwarthis MAGA agenda. On foreign policy, thatcould mean drastic withdrawals of U.S.troops from Europe, South Korea, Iraq andAfghanistan and the further dismantling of the national security bureaucracy manyGOP leaders have long supported.

“Lindsey Graham is going to find a lotmore to like in a Joe Biden presidency than a Trump-John Ratcliffe-Lou Dobbs second term,” Malinowski said, referring to the South Carolina Republican senator.

A Biden administration could be thelast chance to return to a bipartisan, in-ternationalist foreign policy that moder-ate Republicans and Democrats have long championed and that has provided 75 yearsof relative world peace and prosperity. Butfirst, Biden has to win and some Republi-cans have to put country over party.Josh Rogin is a columnist for the Global Opinions section of The Washington Post.

US goals don’t require having troops in Afghanistan

A shift in the politics of US foreign policy either way



SCOREBOARD

Go to the American Forces Network website for the most up-to-date TV schedules.myafn.net

Sports on AFN

College football

Thursday’s scoresFAR WEST

Colorado St. 34, Wyoming 24Nevada 34, Utah St. 9

AP Top 25 scheduleSaturday

No. 1 Clemson at No. 4 Notre DameNo. 3 Ohio State vs. RutgersNo. 5 Georgia vs. No. 8 FloridaNo. 6 Cincinnati vs. HoustonNo. 7 Texas A&M at South CarolinaNo. 10 Wisconsin vs. Purdue, ccd.No. 12 Oregon vs. StanfordNo. 13 Indiana vs. No. 23 MichiganNo. 14 Oklahoma State at Kansas StateNo. 15 Coastal Carolina vs. South Ala-

bamaNo. 16 Marshall vs. MassachusettsNo. 17 Iowa State vs. BaylorNo. 18 SMU at TempleNo. 19 Oklahoma vs. KansasNo. 20 Southern Cal vs. Arizona StateNo. 22 Texas vs. West VirginiaNo. 25 Liberty at Virginia Tech

Pro football

NFL injury reportNEW YORK — The National Football

League injury report, as provided by the league (DNP: did not practice; LIMITED: limited participation; FULL: Full partici-pation):

SUNDAYBALTIMORE RAVENS at INDIANAPOLIS

COLTS — RAVENS: No Data Reported. COLTS: DNP: TE Mo Alie-Cox (knee), DT Sheldon Day (not injury related), WR Ash-ton Dulin (knee), WR T.Y. Hilton (groin), WR Marcus Johnson (knee), DT Tyquan Lewis (not injury related), G Quenton Nelson (not injury related), WR Michael Pittman (not injury related). FULL: S Ju-lian Blackmon (not injury related), TE Trey Burton (not injury related), DE Jus-tin Houston (not injury related), C Ryan Kelly (knee), RB Jonathan Taylor (ankle), RB Jordan Wilkins (groin).

CAROLINA PANTHERS at KANSAS CITY CHIEFS — PANTHERS: No Data Reported. CHIEFS: DNP: T Mitchell Schwartz (back). LIMITED: DE Frank Clark (knee), DT Chris Jones (groin, not injury related), WR Sam-my Watkins (hamstring). FULL: DE Taco Charlton (knee), T Eric Fisher (shoulder), DT Derrick Nnadi (ankle), C Austin Reiter (knee), DT Khalen Saunders (ankle).

CHICAGO BEARS at TENNESSEE TITANS — BEARS: No Data Reported. TITANS: DNP: WR A.J. Brown (knee), LB Jadeveon Clowney (knee), WR Adam Humphries (concussion), T Dennis Kelly (knee), P Brett Kern (wrist), DT Jeffery Simmons (ankle). FULL: S Dane Cruikshank (groin), C Daniel Munyer (hand), CB Kareem Orr (illness), CB Tye Smith (shoulder).

DENVER BRONCOS at ATLANTA FAL-CONS — BRONCOS: No Data Reported. FALCONS: DNP: DE Dante Fowler (ham-string), C Alex Mack (not injury related), T Kaleb McGary (not injury related), DE Takkarist McKinley (groin), CB Jordan Miller (oblique), WR Calvin Ridley (foot). LIMITED: WR Russell Gage (shoulder, knee). FULL: TE Jaeden Graham (knee), CB Kendall Sheffield (concussion, wrist).

DETROIT LIONS at MINNESOTA VIKINGS— LIONS: DNP: WR Jamal Agnew (ribs), G Joe Dahl (back), WR Kenny Golladay (hip), S Tracy Walker (foot). LIMITED: T Taylor Decker (back), LB Christian Jones (knee), CB Darryl Roberts (hip, groin), DT Danny Shelton (wrist), CB Desmond Tru-fant (hamstring), T Halapoulivaati Vaitai (foot). FULL: TE T.J. Hockenson (toe). VIKINGS: DNP: CB Cameron Dantzler (concussion), CB Mark Fields (chest), CB Holton Hill (foot). LIMITED: WR Dan Chisena (hip), CB Harrison Hand (ham-string). FULL: RB C.J. Ham (shoulder), WR Adam Thielen (shoulder).

HOUSTON TEXANS at JACKSONVILLE JAGUARS — TEXANS: DNP: LB Kyle Eman-uel (concussion). FULL: TE Jordan Akins (ankle, concussion), WR Randall Cobb (illness), LB Peter Kalambayi (ham-string), CB Bradley Roby (knee). JAG-UARS: No Data Reported.

LAS VEGAS RAIDERS at LOS ANGELES CHARGERS — RAIDERS: No Data Report-ed. CHARGERS: No Data Reported.

MIAMI DOLPHINS at ARIZONA CARDI-NALS — DOLPHINS: DNP: RB Matt Breida (hamstring). LIMITED: CB Jamal Perry (foot). FULL: S Kavon Frazier (shoulder), CB Byron Jones (achilles), RB Patrick Laird (ankle), DE Shaq Lawson (shoul-der), S Bobby McCain (ankle), LB Elandon Roberts (elbow), S Eric Rowe (shoulder), TE Adam Shaheen (shoulder), LB Kyle

Van Noy (groin). CARDINALS: No Data Reported.

NEW ORLEANS SAINTS at TAMPA BAY BUCCANEERS — SAINTS: DNP: CB Jus-tin Hardee (groin), DT Sheldon Rankins (knee). LIMITED: QB Drew Brees (right shoulder), WR Michael Thomas (ankle, hamstring). FULL: WR Marquez Callaway (ankle), G Nick Easton (concussion), RB Alvin Kamara (foot). BUCCANEERS: DNP: G Ali Marpet (concussion). LIMITED: S Mike Edwards (groin), WR Chris Godwin (finger), WR Scott Miller (hip, groin), DE Jason Pierre-Paul (knee). FULL: CB Jamel Dean (illness), S Antoine Winfield (shoul-der).

NEW YORK GIANTS at WASHINGTON FOOTBALL TEAM — GIANTS: DNP: CB Ryan Lewis (hamstring). LIMITED: LB Devante Downs (shoulder), RB Devonta Freeman (ankle), LB Blake Martinez (hamstring), S Logan Ryan (hip), WR Sterling Shepard (shoulder, toe). FULL: WR Golden Tate (not injury related). WASHINGTON: DNP: T Geron Christian (knee), WR Dontrelle Inman (hamstring). FULL: DE James Smith-Williams (concussion), DE Montez Sweat (concussion), TE Logan Thomas (ankle), WR Isaiah Wright (shoulder).

PITTSBURGH STEELERS at DALLAS COWBOYS — STEELERS: DNP: DE Tyson Alualu (knee), DE Isaiah Buggs (ankle), G Stefen Wisniewski (pectoral). LIMITED: CB Mike Hilton (shoulder). FULL: S Jordan Dangerfield (quadricep), DT Cameron Heyward (quadricep), C Maurkice Pounc-ey (not injury related), QB Ben Roethlis-berger (not injury related). COWBOYS: DNP: P Chris Jones (abdomen). LIMITED: RB Ezekiel Elliott (hamstring), DE Aldon Smith (knee).

SEATTLE SEAHAWKS at BUFFALO BILLS — SEAHAWKS: No Data Reported. BILLS: DNP: DE Mario Addison (rest), DE Darryl Johnson (knee), RB Taiwan Jones (ham-string), LB Matt Milano (pectoral), C Mitch Morse (concussion), CB Josh Nor-man (hamstring), RB T.J. Yeldon (back). LIMITED: T Cody Ford (knee), QB Jake Fromm (not injury related), DT Quinton Jefferson (knee), TE Dawson Knox (calf), G Brian Winters (knee). FULL: QB Josh Allen (left shoulder), WR John Brown (knee), DT Vernon Butler (groin), DE Jerry Hughes (foot), S Micah Hyde (concus-sion).

MONDAYNEW ENGLAND PATRIOTS at NEW

YORK JETS — PATRIOTS: DNP: DT Carl Davis (concussion), CB Stephon Gilm-ore (knee), DT Lawrence Guy (shoulder, elbow and knee), WR N’Keal Harry (con-cussion), RB J.J. Taylor (illness). LIMITED: LB Ja’Whaun Bentley (groin), LB Shilique Calhoun (knee), S Kyle Dugger (ankle), RB Damien Harris (ankle), TE Ryan Izzo (hamstring), CB J.C. Jackson (knee), TE Dalton Keene (knee), G Shaquille Ma-son (calf), DE John Simon (elbow), T Joe Thuney (ankle), DE Deatrich Wise (knee, hand), T Isaiah Wynn (ankle). JETS:DNP: LB Blake Cashman (hamstring), WR Jamison Crowder (groin), QB Sam Darnold (right shoulder), DT Nathan Shepherd (back), DT Quinnen Williams (hamstring). LIMITED: G Josh Andrews (shoulder), K Sam Ficken (right groin), DE John Franklin (knee), LB Jordan Jen-kins (rib, shoulder), C Connor McGovern (knee), WR Breshad Perriman (concus-sion), WR Vyncint Smith (groin), TE Trev-on Wesco (ankle). FULL: Mekhi Becton (ankle), RB Frank Gore (hand).

Pro soccer

MLSEASTERN CONFERENCE

W L T Pts GF GAx-Philadelphia 13 4 5 44 42 20x-Toronto FC 13 4 5 44 32 24x-Orlando City 11 3 8 41 38 22x-Columbus 11 6 5 38 34 20x-New York City FC 11 8 3 36 33 22x-New England 8 6 8 32 26 23x-New York 8 9 5 29 27 30x-Nashville 7 7 8 29 21 20Montreal 7 13 2 23 30 41Chicago 5 9 8 23 30 35Atlanta 6 12 4 22 22 28Inter Miami CF 6 13 3 21 23 34D.C. United 5 11 6 21 23 38Cincinnati 4 14 4 16 11 34

WESTERN CONFERENCE W L T Pts GF GAx-Portland 11 6 5 38 45 34x-Sporting KC 11 6 3 36 36 25x-Seattle 10 5 6 36 40 22x-FC Dallas 9 5 7 34 28 21x-Los Angeles FC 9 8 4 31 46 38x-Minnesota United 8 5 7 31 33 26x-San Jose 8 8 6 30 34 47x-Colorado 7 6 4 25 30 27Vancouver 8 14 0 24 24 44LA Galaxy 6 11 4 22 27 43Real Salt Lake 5 9 7 22 25 33Houston 4 9 9 21 29 38

Note: For the 2020 season, MLS will determine standings using points per game.

Note: Three points for victory, one point for tie.

Saturday, Oct. 31FC Dallas 3, Houston 0Chicago 1, Nashville 1, tie

Sunday, Nov. 1Columbus 2, Philadelphia 1Atlanta 2, Cincinnati 0New York City FC 5, New York 2Orlando City 1, Montreal 0New England 4, D.C. United 3Minnesota at Sporting Kansas City ppd.Toronto FC 2, Miami 1Colorado 3, Seattle 1Portland 1, Vancouver 0LA Galaxy 2, Real Salt Lake 1Los Angeles FC at San Jose ppd.

Wednesday, Nov. 4Orlando City 2, Columbus 1Chicago 2, Minnesota 2, tieFC Dallas 1, Nashville 0Colorado 1, Portland 0Seattle 1, LA Galaxy 1, tieSan Jose 3, Los Angeles FC 2

Sunday’s gamesNew York City FC at ChicagoAtlanta at ColumbusMontreal at D.C. UnitedCincinnati at MiamiToronto FC at New YorkNashville at Orlando CityNew England at PhiladelphiaColorado at HoustonPortland at Los Angeles FCFC Dallas at MinnesotaSporting Kansas City at Real Salt LakeSan Jose at SeattleLA Galaxy at Vancouver

Tennis

Paris MastersThursday

At Palais Omnisports de Paris-BercyParis

Purse: $3,343,725Surface: Hardcourt indoor

Men’s SinglesRound of 16

Diego Schwartzman (6), Argentina, def. Alejandro Davidovich Fokina, Spain,6-1, 6-1.

Milos Raonic (10), Canada, def. Mar-cos Giron, United States, 7-6 (1), 6-2.

Daniil Medvedev (3), Russia, def. Alex de Minaur (16), Australia, 5-7, 6-2, 6-2.

Ugo Humbert, France, def. Marin Cilic,Croatia, 6-3, 6-7 (4), 6-3.

Pablo Carreno Busta (9), Spain, def.Norbert Gombos, Slovakia, 7-5, 6-2.

Rafael Nadal (1), Spain, def. Jordan Thompson, Australia, 6-1, 7-6 (3).

Alexander Zverev (4), Germany, def.Adrian Mannarino, France, 7-6 (11), 6-7 (7), 6-4.

Stan Wawrinka (12), Switzerland, vs.Andrey Rublev (5), Russia, 1-6, 6-4, 6-3.

Men’s DoublesRound of 16

Michael Venus, New Zealand, and John Peers (7), Australia, def. Franko Skugor, Croatia, and Austin Krajicek, United States, 6-4, 7-6 (4).

Nikola Mektic, Croatia, and WesleyKoolhof (6), Netherlands, def. Casper Ruud, Norway, and Taylor Fritz, UnitedStates, 6-4, 7-6 (1).

Hubert Hurkacz, Poland, and Felix Auger-Aliassime, Canada, def. Robert Farah, Colombia, and Horacio Zeballos(1), Argentina, 6-3, 3-6, 10-6.

Bruno Soares, Brazil, and Mate Pavic(2), Croatia, def. Sander Gille and JoranVliegen, Belgium, 6-4, 7-6 (3).

Nicolas Mahut and Pierre-HuguesHerbert (5), France, def. Matwe Middel-koop, Netherlands, and Marcelo Arevalo-Gonzalez, El Salvador, 6-3, 7-6 (4).

Lukasz Kubot, Poland, and MarceloMelo (4), Brazil, def. Jamie Murray andNeal Skupski, Britain, 6-2, 1-6, 10-6.

Deals

Thursday’s transactionsBASEBALL

Major League BaseballAmerican League

BALTIMORE ORIOLES — Acquired INFs A.J. Graffanino and Greg Cullen from At-lanta to complete the Aug. 30 trade for LHP Tommy Milone.

OAKLAND ATHLETICS — Acquired OF Junior Perez from San Diego to complete the June 30 trade for INF Jorge Mateo.

National LeagueARIZONA DIAMONDBACKS — Acquired

SS Ronny Simon from Chicago Cubs tocomplete the Aug. 31 trade for LHP An-drew Chafin.

PHILADELPHIA PHILLIES — AcquiredRHP Rodolfo Sanchez from Tampa Bay tocomplete the Aug. 18 trade for RHP EdgarGarcia.

BASKETBALLNational Basketball Association

SACRAMENTO KINGS — Announced the hiring of Rex Kalamian as an assin-tant coach.

FOOTBALLNational Football League

BALTIMORE RAVENS — Activated OLB Matthew Judon from the reserve/COVID-19 list.

BUFFALO BILLS — Activated TE DawsonKnox from the reserve/COVID-19 list.

CAROLINA PANTHERS — Activated DE Yetur Gross-Matos from injured reserve.Waived C Sam Tecklenburg.

CLEVELAND BROWNS — Promoted LBElijah Lee to the active roster. Waived CEvan Brown.

DENVER BRONCOS — Promoted DB Kevin Toliver to the active roster.

GREEN BAY PACKERS — Promoted SHenry Black, CB Stanford Samuels and RB Dexter Williams to the active rosteras COVID-19 replacements. PromotedG Ben Braden to the active roster frompractice squad.

LAS VEGAS RAIDERS — Activated CB Damon Arnette to return from injured re-serve. Placed OT Trent Brown on the re-serve/COVID-19 list. Promoted RB Theo Riddick to the active roster.

MIAMI DOLPHINS — Placed RB Myles Gaskin on injured reserve.

SAN FRANCISCO 49ERS — PromotedG Tony Bergstrom and RB Austin Walter from the practice squad to the activeroster. Activated WRs River Cracraft and Kevin White, S Johnathan Cyprien, TE Daniel Helm to the active roster. Signed DT Josiah Coatney to the practice squad.Released WR Chris Finke. Activated TE Jordan Reed from injured reserve. PlacedQB Jimmy Garoppolo and TE George Kit-tle on injured reserve.

MIAMI DOLPHINS — Placed RB Myles Gaskin on injured reserve.

TAMPA BAY BUCCANEERS — Re-signed WR Cyril Grayson to the practice squad.Released WR John Hurst.

TENNESSEE TITANS — Signed LS Matt Orzech from the Miami practice squad.

WASHINGTON FOOTBALL TEAM —Signed LB Justin Phillips to the practicesquad.

HOCKEYNational Hockey League

WINNIPEG JETS — Signed F MarkoDano to a one-year, two-way contract.

COLLEGENCAA — Announced approval of trans-

fer and eligibility for F Logan Padgett from Stanford University to University of New Mexico.

Auto racing

Season Finale 500 lineupMonster Energy NASCAR Cup Series

Race SundayAt Phoenix Raceway

Avondale, Ariz.Lap length: 1 mile

(Car number in parentheses) 1. (9) Chase Elliott, Chevrolet. 2. (22) Joey Logano, Ford. 3. (2) Brad Keselowski, Ford. 4. (11) Denny Hamlin, Toyota. 5. (12) Ryan Blaney, Ford. 6. (88) Alex Bowman, Chevrolet. 7. (1) Kurt Busch, Chevrolet. 8. (18) Kyle Busch, Toyota. 9. (14) Clint Bowyer, Ford.10. (10) Aric Almirola, Ford.11. (4) Kevin Harvick, Ford.12. (21) Matt DiBenedetto, Ford.13. (19) Martin Truex Jr., Toyota.14. (20) Erik Jones, Toyota.15. (41) Cole Custer, Ford.16. (42) Matt Kenseth, Chevrolet.17. (95) Christopher Bell, Toyota.18. (3) Austin Dillon, Chevrolet.19. (6) Ryan Newman, Ford.20. (47) Ricky Stenhouse Jr., Chevrolet.21. (8) Tyler Reddick, Chevrolet.22. (13) Ty Dillon, Chevrolet.23. (43) Bubba Wallace, Chevrolet.24. (37) Ryan Preece, Chevrolet.25. (24) William Byron, Chevrolet.26. (48) Jimmie Johnson, Chevrolet.27. (38) John Hunter Nemechek, Ford.28. (32) Corey LaJoie, Ford.29. (34) Michael McDowell, Ford.30. (96) Daniel Suarez, Toyota.31. (17) Chris Buescher, Ford.32. (27) JJ Yeley, Ford.33. (66) Timmy Hill, Toyota.34. (00) Quin Houff, Chevrolet.35. (15) Brennan Poole, Chevrolet.36. (53) James Davison, Chevrolet.37. (51) Joey Gase, Ford.38. (77) Josh Bilicki, Ford.39. (7) Garrett Smithley, Chevrolet.

Desert Diamond CasinoWest Valley Top 200 lineup

NASCAR Xfinity SeriesRace Saturday

At Phoenix RacewayAvondale, Ariz.

Lap length: 1 mile(Car number in parentheses)

1. (7) Justin Allgaier, Chevrolet. 2. (98) Chase Briscoe, Ford. 3. (22) Austin Cindric, Ford. 4. (11) Justin Haley, Chevrolet. 5. (20) Harrison Burton, Toyota. 6. (9) Noah Gragson, Chevrolet. 7. (10) Ross Chastain, Chevrolet. 8. (19) Brandon Jones, Toyota. 9. (18) Riley Herbst, Toyota.10. (1) Michael Annett, Chevrolet.11. (39) Ryan Sieg, Chevrolet.12. (02) Brett Moffitt, Chevrolet.13. (51) Jeremy Clements, Chevrolet.14. (68) Brandon Brown, Chevrolet.15. (21) Myatt Snider, Chevrolet.16. (92) Josh Williams, Chevrolet.17. (44) Tommy Joe Martins, Chevrolet.18. (8) Daniel Hemric, Chevrolet.19. (13) Timmy Hill, Toyota.20. (4) Jesse Little, Chevrolet.21. (36) Alex Labbe, Chevrolet.22. (0) Jeffrey Earnhardt, Chevrolet.23. (08) Joe Graf, Jr., Chevrolet.24. (26) Mason Diaz, Toyota.25. (15) Colby Howard, Chevrolet.26. (90) Donald Theetge, Chevrolet.27. (78) BJ McLeod, Toyota.28. (6) Ryan Vargas, Chevrolet.29. (07) David Starr, Chevrolet.30. (52) Kody Vanderwal, Chevrolet.31. (47) Kyle Weatherman, Chevrolet.32. (5) Matt Mills, Toyota.33. (74) Bayley Currey, Chevrolet.34. (61) JJ Yeley, Toyota.35. (93) CJ McLaughlin, Chevrolet.36. (99) Jesse Iwuji, Chevrolet.37. (66) Stan Mullis, Toyota.

Golf

Houston OpenPGA TourThursday

At Memorial Park Golf CourseHouston, Texas

Purse: $7 millionYardage: 7,432; Par: 72

First Round Suspended for Darkness (nine players DNF)

Brandt Snedeker 32-33—65 -5Cameron Davis 31-36—67 -3Michael Thompson 32-35—67 -3Scottie Scheffler 32-35—67 -3Harold Varner III 31-36—67 -3Carlos Ortiz 32-35—67 -3Jason Day 30-37—67 -3Adam Long 33-35—68 -2Kevin Streelman 35-33—68 -2Sam Burns 35-33—68 -2Talor Gooch 34-34—68 -2Sepp Straka 32-36—68 -2Scott Piercy 34-34—68 -2Adam Scott 31-37—68 -2Greg Chalmers 35-33—68 -2Matt Jones 35-34—69 -1Russell Henley 35-34—69 -1Denny McCarthy 34-35—69 -1Shane Lowry 35-34—69 -1Tony Finau 35-34—69 -1Corey Conners 34-35—69 -1Patton Kizzire 33-36—69 -1Pat Perez 34-35—69 -1Mark Hubbard 34-35—69 -1Graeme McDowell 35-34—69 -1Russell Knox 34-35—69 -1Scott Brown 34-35—69 -1Dylan Frittelli 36-34—70 EHideki Matsuyama 36-34—70 EFabian Gomez 35-35—70 EJ.T. Poston 33-37—70 EMartin Trainer 36-34—70 ESatoshi Kodaira 36-34—70 EAaron Wise 35-35—70 EScott Harrington 33-37—70 EKeegan Bradley 36-34—70 EViktor Hovland 36-34—70 EMackenzie Hughes 32-38—70 EFrancesco Molinari 33-37—70 EKevin Chappell 35-35—70 EAndrew Landry 33-37—70 E

Cameron Tringale 33-37—70 ECharley Hoffman 35-36—71 +1Si Woo Kim 34-37—71 +1Hudson Swafford 33-38—71 +1Austin Cook 36-35—71 +1Padraig Harrington 34-37—71 +1Sean O’Hair 37-34—71 +1James Hahn 35-36—71 +1Maverick McNealy 36-35—71 +1Erik Barnes 34-37—71 +1Doc Redman 32-39—71 +1Brian Harman 35-36—71 +1Erik van Rooyen 36-35—71 +1Luke List 33-38—71 +1Tom Lewis 36-35—71 +1Tyrrell Hatton 37-34—71 +1Branden Grace 35-36—71 +1Henrik Stenson 37-35—72 +2Lanto Griffin 34-38—72 +2Brooks Koepka 36-36—72 +2Stewart Cink 37-35—72 +2Martin Laird 35-37—72 +2Charl Schwartzel 34-38—72 +2Robby Shelton 35-37—72 +2Kelly Kraft 35-37—72 +2Dustin Johnson 34-38—72 +2C.T. Pan 34-38—72 +2David Hearn 34-39—73 +3Jhonattan Vegas 35-38—73 +3Lucas Glover 34-39—73 +3Jordan Spieth 33-40—73 +3Nate Lashley 36-37—73 +3Jason Dufner 37-36—73 +3Tom Hoge 34-39—73 +3Vaughn Taylor 33-40—73 +3John Huh 37-36—73 +3Jamie Lovemark 34-39—73 +3Chris Kirk 37-36—73 +3Brian Stuard 37-36—73 +3Zach Johnson 34-39—73 +3Danny Lee 34-40—74 +4

Did not finish first roundKristoffer VenturaJustin HardingDawie van der WaltIsaiah SalindaPatrick RodgersSam FidoneWill GordonBen WillmanKyle Hogan

Pro baseball

Gold Glove winnersAmerican League

P — Griffin Canning, Los AngelesC — Roberto Perez, Cleveland1B — Evan White, Seattle2B — Cesar Hernandez, Cleveland3B — Isiah Kiner-Falefa, TexasSS — J.P. Crawford, SeattleLF — Alex Gordon, Kansas CityCF — Luis Robert, ChicagoRF — Joey Gallo, Texas

National LeagueP — Max Freid, AtlantaC — Tucker Barnhart, Cincinnati1B — Anthony Rizzo, Chicago2B — Kolten Wong, St. Louis3B — Nolan Arenado, ColoradoSS — Javier Baez, ChicagoLF — Tyler O’Neill, St. LouisCF — Trent Grisham, San DiegoRF — Mookie Betts, Los Angeles

AP sportlightNov. 7

1943 — The Detroit Lions and New York Giants play the last scoreless tie in the NFL.

1968 — Red Berenson scores six goals, including four in the second period, to lead the St. Louis Blues to an 8-0 victory over Philadelphia.

1974 — South Africa is awarded the Davis Cup against India. India refuses to play in the final because of its oppo-

nent’s apartheid policy. It’s the first time the final is not played.

1985 — Rubin “Hurricane” Carter, the former middleweight boxer convicted twice of a triple murder in 1966 and the hero of a Bob Dylan song, is released af-ter 19 years in prison. Carter, 48, is freed after a federal judge rules the boxer and a co-defendant were denied their civil rights by prosecutors during trials in 1967 and 1976.

PAGE 20 • S T A R S A N D S T R I P E S •

BY JENNA FRYER

Associated Press

AVONDALE, Ariz. — Kevin Harvick was a sure bet to make the NASCAR finale and likely close out one of the most domi-nant seasons of the decade.

Instead, he’s been eliminated and the hyped head-to-head matchup between Harvick and Denny Ham-lin has been scrapped. For better or worse, NASCAR’s title-decid-ing format knocked the strongest team this season from contention for Sunday’s winner-take-all final four at Phoenix Raceway.

“I’m not going to view if we win it any different whether he was in or out,” Hamlin said Thursday.

No one denies Harvick de-served a chance at the title. He won a series-high nine times, had a whopping 20 top-five finishes and led nearly every statistical category this year. It was a back-and-forth between Harvick and Hamlin that most assumed would

go down to the finale.But Harvick had a poor third

round of the playoffs and his season collapsed. He’s out of the way and Hamlin will race Chase Elliott, Brad Keselowski and Joey Logano for the Cup Series championship.

It’s a much cleaner path to the title since Harvick is a nine-time winner at Phoenix, which is host-ing NASCAR’s championship weekend for the first time.

Out of the mix, he might still be in contention for the race win.

“They’ve got a chip on the shoulder and if they’ve got a fast car, they are going to give the guys in the championship a whole lot of trouble,” said NBC Sports analyst Dale Earnhardt Jr. “I think Harvick might hustle up in there and just not care.”

Hamlin, a seven-race winner this season, believes the cham-pion has to win Sunday. But he also knows Harvick has nothing to lose.

“I still think I’m going to have to race him,” Hamlin said. “I would think they probably come loaded and ready to go out and show that they should be cham-pions, right? I don’t expect him to waffle around and just kind of let all four of us go race for it.”

Hamlin has had conversations with Harvick and some of his

Stewart-Haas Racing crew since Harvick’s dramatic elimination. Hamlin appreciates the season his rival has put together in the pandemic-altered season, when there was no practice or qualify-ing, and Harvick and crew were good every week with the car brought straight from the shop.

Harvick was so focused on winning a second Cup title that he homeschooled his 8-year-old to minimize health risks. The No. 4 team was locked in on the cham-pionship and everyone expected them at Phoenix.

“In my mind he was deserving of racing for a championship, but didn’t earn it because of the sys-tem,” Hamlin said. “I understand their pain.”

There’s a balance, though, in commiserating with Harvick and exulting over the opportunity

ahead. Keselowski won a series-high six races in 2014 but didn’t make it to the final four that sea-son, the year Harvick won his only title.

Now Keselowski is in the cham-pionship round with a chance at his own second crown.

“It’s a helpless feeling. It’s a frustrating feeling. But it’s what the format is,” Keselowski said. “I do feel those sympathies for him. In a selfish way, I’m glad that I won’t have to compete against him.”

Logano raced his way into the finale as the only playoff driver with a third-round victory. Since clinching his berth three weeks ago, his Team Penske crew has been focused on a plan for Phoe-nix and doesn’t much care about Harvick’s fate.

“I honestly as a competitor

don’t have many feelings for oth-ers,” Logano said. “When I’mcompeting, it’s about my team.”

Elliott, racing in the final fourfor the first time in his career, has somewhat shielded himselffrom the dramatics of the seasonand focused only on his HendrickMotorsports effort. He’s taken abreak from social media over theclosing months of the season anddidn’t focus on Harvick’s season.

“For us to sit here and talkabout others, or the other three guys in it, or who’s not in it, whosomebody thinks the favorite isor isn’t, is just very unproductivein my eyes,” Elliott said. “I’m justreally thinking about us, beingselfish in a lot of ways this week, trying to put emphasis on thethings that are going to make usgo fast. Me ranking Kevin’s sea-son is not one of them.”


NASCAR/NBA

BY TIM REYNOLDS

Associated Press

The National Basketball Players Asso-ciation voted Thursday to support the no-tion of starting this coming season on Dec. 22, the date that the league has been tar-geting in its talks about how and when to get teams back on the floor for a planned 72-game season.

The vote, conducted by the NBPA’s board — which has a player rep from each team, entrusted to speak on behalf of his team-mates — is just another part of a lengthy process. Among the primary matters still to be determined: how much escrow will be taken from player salaries because of the shorter-than-usual season, and how the league and the players will navigate test-ing and other health and safety issues amid the ongoing coronavirus pandemic.

All that has to be worked out before the plans for next season truly become official.

“Additional details remain to be negoti-ated and the NBPA is confident that the parties will reach agreement on these re-maining issues relevant to the upcoming season,” the union said in a statement.

Talks between the NBA and NBPA on those and other topics are continuing,

though there is obvious urgency to final-ize things. The NBA Draft is scheduledfor Nov. 18 and the plan presented to play-ers — and now approved by the team reps— calls for training camps to begin on Dec. 1.

Free agency would almost certainlyhave to be wedged between the draft and the start of those camps, the league yearwould have to open, trades would have tobecome permissible again and some play-ers need to be presented with deadlines by which they will have to either accept or de-cline options for this coming season.

The NBA wanted the Dec. 22 start dateover a mid-January notion for many rea-sons, revenue being foremost among them.A 72-game season, by league estimates,would allow for $500 million more in rev-enue than a season of no more than 60 games — the mid-January option — wouldhave provided.

The Dec. 22 start also means that theNBA’s traditional Christmas schedule of games will be possible, something theleague and its broadcast partners wanted.The season is also expected to conclude before the start of next summer’s TokyoOlympics, meaning NBA player participa-tion in those games remains possible.

NBPA approves plan to start season on Dec. 22

Despite dominant season, Harvickisn’t in running for NASCAR crown

Path to victoryclear for last 4

MARK J. TERRILL/AP

The Los Angeles Lakers’ LeBron James, left, and Anthony Davis celebrate after the Lakers defeated the Miami Heat 106-93 in Game 6 of the NBA Finals on Oct. 11 in Lake Buena Vista, Fla. The NBA players association approved the league’s plan to start the upcoming season on Dec. 22 and play a 72-game season.

Harvick

STEVE HELBER/AP

Denny Hamlin, left, and Kyle Busch come through a turn during a NASCAR Cup Series race on June 10 in Martinsville, Va. Hamlin was anticipating racing Kevin Harvick for the championship. But despite winning nine races this season, Harvick missed out on the chance to race for the championship.


SPORTS BRIEFS/COLLEGE FOOTBALL

Source: Red Soxset to rehire Cora

Associated Press

BOSTON — The Boston Red Sox will rehire Alex Cora as man-ager, a person with knowledge of the decision told The Associated Press, restoring him to the dugout less than a year after letting him go because of his role in the Hous-ton Astros cheating scandal.

The person spoke to the AP on the condition of anonymity on Friday because the sides were still finalizing terms of the agree-ment and the move was not ready to be announced.

The decision came about a week after Cora finished serving a one-season suspension assessed by Commissioner Rob Manfred for Cora’s cheating while bench coach of the Houston Astros dur-ing their run to the World Series championship in 2017. Cora joined the Red Sox in November 2017 and led Boston to the 2018 World Series title after a franchise-re-cord 108 regular-season wins.

Boston finished third in 2019, and Cora was identified by Man-fred last Jan. 13 as the ringlead-er in the Astros’ sign-stealing scheme, with his penalty held off until Manfred ruled on sign stealing allegations against Bos-ton. An infielder on Boston’s 2007 champions, Cora was mentioned 11 times in Manfred’s decision on the Astros.

The fallout from the Astros in-vestigation also cost newly hired New York Mets manager Carlos Beltran his job. Beltran was a player on the 2017 Astros.

Manfred absolved Cora of mis-conduct while with the Red Sox in his report on April 22 and sus-pended Cora through the World Series. Roenicke was let go after the salary-shedding Red Sox stumbled to a last-place finish in the AL East.

In other baseball news:� Trevor Bauer’s agent says

the pitcher is rejecting the Cin-cinnati Reds’ $18.9 million quali-fying offer.

The right-hander, who turns 30 in January, was given the offer on Sunday and had until Nov. 11 to make his decision.

Bauer was 5-4 with a National League-leading 1.73 ERA, strik-ing out 100 and walking 17 in 73 innings. Acquired from Cleve-land on July 31, 2019, he had a $17.5 million, one-year contract that resulted in $6,481,481 in prorated pay. He would earn a $92,593 bonus for winning the NL Cy Young Award, prorated from an original $250,000.

Falcons cancel practice after staffer’s positive

ATLANTA — The Atlanta Falcons canceled practice and worked virtually Friday after a member of the football staff test-ed positive for COVID-19.

The Falcons said the move was “out of an abundance of caution” while contact tracing is used to determine if anyone else might have been exposed.

The team expects to play Sun-

day’s game against the Denver Broncos.

“The whole reason we’re doing it is to get guys to the game,” coach Raheem Morris said. “We want to make sure we go through all the precautionary measures to play the game. Everybody wants to play the game. ”

The Falcons already have expe-rience in dealing with the league’s most intensive protocols.

The team worked virtually three days before an Oct. 18 game at Minnesota. The players were able to return to the train-ing facility in suburban Flowery Branch the next day to complete their preparations.

The Falcons hope to reopen their facility on Saturday to do their final walkthrough for the game.

In other NFL news:� Pittsburgh Steelers coach

Mike Tomlin has been fined $100,000 and the club $250,000 because coaches improperly wore facial coverings last Sunday, a person with knowledge of the fines told The Associated Press.

The person, who spoke on con-dition of anonymity because the fines have not been announced publicly, said Friday that Tomlin and the Steelers were disciplined because members of the coach-ing staff were “not wearing face coverings at all times on the side-lines.” Tomlin was cited among the coaches not following proto-cols during the victory over the Baltimore Ravens.

Snedeker takesHouston Open lead

HOUSTON — Brandt Snedeker found a lot of fairways and greens at difficult Memorial Park, top-ranked Dustin Johnson returned from the coronavirus, and fans were back, too, Thursday at the Houston Open.

Snedeker shot a 5-under 65 in the afternoon to take a two-stroke lead in the last event before the Masters. He’s one of 37 players in the field this week set to play at Augusta National.

The tournament — at public Memorial Park for the first time since 1963 — is limiting ticket sales to 2,000 a day. It’s the first domestic PGA Tour event to have fans since The Players Champi-onship on March 12.

Johnson had a 72 — bogeying five of the last seven holes on his front nine — in his return after a positive coronavirus test knocked him out of the CJ Cup at Shadow Creek and the Zozo Champion-ship at Sherwood.

Jason Day was tied for second with Scottie Scheffler, Harold Varner III, Carlos Ortiz, Michael Thompson and Cameron Davis.

Brooks Koepka also had a 72. He’s playing for the second time since a two-month layoff to heal injuries. Player partner Lanto Griffin, the winner last year at Golf Club of Houston, also shot 72. Jordan Spieth rounded out the morning threesome with a 72.

Big 12 probably alreadyout of playoff contention

BY STEPHEN HAWKINS

Associated Press

The Big 12 made it to November with every team at least halfway through its reduced regular-season schedule, five-time defend-ing conference champion Oklahoma finally

on a roll — and the league probably already out of playoff contention.

Even before the Pac-12 starts play this weekend and with the Big Ten only two games in after its de-layed start in this pandemic-affected season.

No. 14 Oklahoma State (4-1, 3-1 Big 12) is the only Big 12 team without at least two losses, even though none has played more than six games. Every team has lost in league play, and the only three non-con-ference losses were all to opponents from the Sun Belt — no fun for a Power Five league.

While the Big 12 made some schedule revisions and kicked off the season in September like the SEC and ACC, the 10-team league that has had only Oklahoma make the College Football Playoff in the past has already cannibalized its chances of getting one of the four playoff spots.

“You know we debate that every year anyway. So it’s a mess with where we’re at,” Oklahoma State coach Mike Gundy said of comparing the leagues. “How it’s all going to end up, I’ve got no idea how they’ll come to that conclusion. We all signed up for the same policies to start the season. So we’ve got to kind of get in line and take what medicine they give us.”

After starting 0-2 in the Big 12 for the first time since 1998, Oklahoma (4-2, 3-2) has won its last three games. The Sooners won in four overtimes against Texas in a strange scene at the State Fair of Texas, then won by 19 points over TCU and 34 points over Texas Tech while not playing a game in Norman in the month of October.

Oklahoma has to keep winning just to make the Big 12 championship game and have a chance to win its sixth conference title in a row.

The latest ESPN playoff predictor gives the Soon-ers only a 1% chance of being in the CFP for the fifth time in six seasons. That is only slightly below the 1.2% chance given to Oklahoma State. Two Pac-12 teams that haven’t even played a game are given at least a 15% chance.

“I just never get caught up in that,” Sooners coachLincoln Riley said. “We’ve got a good league, a lotof strong teams in the league right now. This year isdifficult to judge anybody, I think, based on all that’sgoing on. But maybe more difficult than in a normalyear.”

Oklahoma State or Kansas State (4-2, 4-1), whoplay Saturday, will go from no Big 12 losses to two in that many games. They were the last teams unbeat-en in conference play, until the last day of Octoberwhen the Cowboys lost in overtime to No. 22 Texasand the Wildcats with their freshman quarterback fell 37-10 at West Virginia.

After an open date, Oklahoma State then faces theBedlam game against the Sooners in Norman on the same day that Kansas State goes to No. 17 Iowa State(4-2, 4-1).

While Baylor and TCU weren’t able to play their scheduled non-conference games because ofCOVID-19 issues, there has been only one game al-tered since the Big 12 got into conference play Sept.26.

The Big 12 pushed back Baylor’s home game Oct.17 against Oklahoma State to Dec. 12 because of anoutbreak of positive tests in the Bears program. Thatwas a tentative date for the Big 12 title game, whichwill likely get moved to the following weekend.

MARK ROGERS/AP

Oklahoma running back Seth McGowan carries during last week’s game against Texas Tech in Lubbock, Texas. The Sooners are the five-time defending Big 12 champions have already suffered two losses.

BRODY SCHMIDT/AP

Oklahoma State head coach Mike Gundy and the Cowboys are the only team in the Big 12 without at least two losses. Oklahoma State suffered its first loss last week in overtime to Texas.


COLLEGE FOOTBALL

BY KEN MCMILLAN

The Times Herald-Record (Middletown, N.Y.)

WEST POINT — The COVID-19 pandemic has claimed another Army football game, and this is a big one.

An outbreak of the coronavirus at the U.S. Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, Colo., has forced the postponement of the Commander-in-Chief’s Trophy game at West Point on Saturday morning. A sellout in non-COVID years, no fans other than West Point cadets were going to be per-mitted inside Michie Stadium. The game was going to be tele-vised by CBS.

“We are disappointed to post-pone this game,” said Air Force director of athletics Nathan Pine, “but the health and safety of our cadets, staff and the community continues to be our number one priority at the Academy. Due to the upward trends in our COVID numbers across the campus, we have paused all intercollegiate team activities.”

Pine said efforts are being made to re-schedule the contest but that appears very unlikely this fall due to the unavailability of open dates.

The Colorado Springs Gazette was reporting that as many as seven Air Force players would be unavailable for the contest. A source said the Pentagon called the game off, despite pleas to play from officials of both schools.

A source told the Times Herald-Record there are 110 cadets quar-antined on the West Point post due to COVID tracing of other in-dividuals but with no cadets test-ing positive. Another source said players have already been moved out of the barracks and to a local hotel in order to socially distance — the Army football team has for years sequestered at hotels on Friday nights in advance of Sat-urday home games but this is dif-ferent, the source said.

Lt. Col. Chris Ophardt, a West Point spokesman, confirmed that the football team began seques-tering at a hotel on Friday.

The Commander-in-Chief’s Trophy series has been contested since 1972 when the three service academies agreed to meet annu-ally. The winner of two games between Army, Navy and Air Force takes possession of the tro-phy. Air Force beat Navy, 40-7, on Oct. 3. With a win over Army, the Falcons would have claimed the Trophy for the 21st time and first since 2016.

This is a crushing blow for all involved. Army coach Jeff Monk-en has been quoted regularly throughout his seven seasons of the critical importance of win-ning the Commander-in-Chief’s Trophy, and this week was no different.

“Obviously, this week is a big game for us,” Monken said at his

Tuesday press conference. “We haven’t had a bigger game this year than the one we’re going to play this weekend. I know our guys are excited for the opportu-nity and certainly what’s at stake when we play the academy games to earn the Commander-in-Chief’s Trophy. It’s always a great game and always a tremendous battle and hopefully we’ll play well enough this Saturday that we can make it a battle again.”

Rescheduling the Air Force game may be near impossible, again due to COVID. The pan-demic originally led Mountain West Conference officials to can-cel the fall 2020 season, though Air Force — like Army and Navy — remained committed to the Commander-in-Chief series and agreed to retain the service acad-emy dates.

Like the Big Ten, Pac 12 and Mid-America conferences, the Mountain West reversed course on Sept. 25 and announced it would play a league schedule starting Oct. 24. As a result, that left Air Force with no open dates between Oct. 24 and Dec. 3, removing the possibility of re-scheduling with Army on Nov. 28 or Dec. 5. Army will likely play a Pac 12 Conference team in the In-dependence Bowl in Shreveport, La., on the evening of Dec. 26, so the Dec. 19 date is also highly doubtful.

The only other option would be playing the Air Force game in the spring, and that would be highly unlikely.

Air Force has played Army since 1959 and Navy since 1960 but not every season until 1972.

Army athletic director Mike Buddie said he received word from Pine at 10:45 a.m. Buddie engaged in talks with Superin-tendent Lt. Gen. Darryl Williams about finding solutions but none could be found.

“We exhausted every oppor-tunity to play this, we exhausted every possibility,” Buddie said. “It all went away in two hours.”

Buddie said West Point offered testing and lodging and even of-fered to play in Colorado.

Buddie said there is still an op-portunity to find an open date but Air Force would have to work out a deal with the Mountain West Conference to move games to make it happen.

“Hopefully we find a way to get it done but we don’t want to en-danger the Navy game, which is our crown jewel,” Buddie said.

Army coach Jeff Monken was very disappointed over the can-cellation and questioned the mo-tives behind it.

“They felt they didn’t have enough guys, whether it be COVID or not having enough guys due to injury,” Monken said.

Monken said, like him, the play-ers were “disappointed and ticked off” when the broke the news.

BY RALPH D. RUSSO

Associated Press

The final major college football conference to begin its season gets going Saturday.

The Pac-12 kicks off at noon ET (9 a.m. PT) with Arizona State at No. 20 Southern California. Instead of Pac-12 after dark it’s Pac-12 for lunch.

The Trojans are the favorites in the South Division, with each league team scheduled to play six games against division rivals plus one crossover game.

The favorite in the North is No. 12 Oregon, which kicks off in primetime.

Of course, nothing is certain anywhere this season and one of the biggest games on the docket won’t even be played after a Cali-fornia player tested positive for COVID-19. The Golden Bears’ home game Saturday against Washington was canceled and will be declared a no-contest.

California doesn’t have the minimum number of scholarship players available as a result of the positive test and the need for other players to isolate under con-tact tracing protocols, the Pac-12 said in a statement.

The rest of the nation’s schedule is highlighted by top-10 match-ups, with No. 1 Clemson at No. 4 Notre Dame, and No. 8 Florida vs. No. 5 Georgia.

There is a lot going on.

Best gameNo. 5 Georgia vs. No. 8

Florida at Jacksonville: Hard to choose between this and the top-five matchup in the Atlantic Coast Conference (Reminder: Notre

Dame is playing in the ACC this season), but Bulldogs-Gators gets the nod.

The Gators are sixth in the country in offense at 7.50 yards per play. The Bulldogs are 14th in yards per play allowed (4.53), but it should be noted that is skewed heavily by one game against Alabama. The Crimson Tide averaged 7.42 yards per play in beating Georgia.

Heisman watchTrevor Lawrence, QB, Clem-

son: Lawrence has been ruled out for the top-ranked Tigers against Notre Dame, so what we’ll be watching is him on the sideline watching freshman quarterback DJ Uiagalelei lead Clemson.

Lawrence has been considered the Heisman Trophy co-favorite with Ohio State’s Justin Fields. But missing two games, including Clemson’s biggest regular-sea-son matchup, has got to hurt his chances.

Unless, of course, Clemson loses with an uneven perfor-mance from Uiagalelei. Does that open a path to Lawrence coming back to save the Tigers’ season and make a Heisman claim as college football’s MVP?

Numbers to know0-5 — Notre Dame’s record

against top-five opponents in 10 seasons under coach Brian Kelly.

24 — No. 23 Michigan’s win-ning streak against Indiana. The 13th-ranked Hoosiers host the Wolverines as a slight underdog.

31 — No. 9 BYU’s margin of victory in its undefeated start. The Cougars’ toughest game is Friday

night at No. 21 Boise State.No. 15 — The ranking of

Coastal Carolina, the best ever fora Sun Belt team. The Chanticleers face South Alabama at home, try-ing to remain unbeaten.

2000 — The last year Iowastarted 0-3. The Hawkeyes will try to avoid that in this uniqueconference-only season at home against Michigan State.

Under the radarArkansas State at Louisiana:

Before Coastal Carolina became the hot Sun Belt team, it was Lou-isiana knocking off Iowa State and getting ranked.

The Ragin’ Cajuns then lost to Coastal and have slipped off theradar. But they are still quite goodand could end up in the confer-ence title game. Arkansas Statealso had a marquee upset early in the season, beating Kansas State. The Red Wolves have stumbledsince with a defense that can’tseem to stop anyone.

Hot SeatScott Frost, Nebraska: With

the caveat that Frost is not get-ting fired, this one against North-western seems to be another very interesting mental health game for Cornhuskers fans.

Nebraska has not played sincegetting pounded by Ohio State, which was not surprising. Nebras-ka’s home game against Wiscon-sin was canceled because of theBadgers’ COVID-19 outbreak.

Northwestern enters unbeatenand favored by about a field goal.In nine meetings since Nebraskajoined the Big Ten, the Huskersare 5-4.

Trojans favored as Pac-12 season finally set to begin

Week 10 preview

Army-Air Force game postponed; West Point quarantines 110 cadets

MARCIO JOSE SANCHEZ/AP

Southern California head coach Clay Helton, left, smiles at quarterback Kedon Slovis after a 52-35 win over UCLA last season in Los Angeles. With both Helton and Slovis — now a sophomore — returning, the Trojans are favored to win the Pac-12’s South Division.

• S T A R S A N D S T R I P E S • PAGE 23

BY JOSH DUBOW

Associated Press

The Las Vegas Raiders and coach Jon Gruden have been fined a total of $650,000 and docked a sixth-round draft pick for repeated violations of the NFL’s COVID-19 protocols.

A person familiar with the pun-ishment said Thursday the team has been fined $500,000, Gruden has been docked $150,000 and the draft pick has been stripped because of how the team handled Trent Brown’s positive coronavi-rus test last month. The person spoke on condition of anonymity because no announcement had been made.

Yahoo first reported the punishments.

The Raiders have been penal-ized several times already this season for violating coronavirus protocols with the punishments leading to a total of $1,215,000 for the team, Gruden and players.

While several teams have been fined so far this season, the Raid-ers are the first to be penalized a draft pick following multiple violations.

The latest punishment stems from Brown’s positive test last month when the Raiders were already supposed to be in “inten-sive” protocols following team-mate Damon Arnette’s positive test.

At a practice on Oct. 19 a day before Brown tested positive,

he was not wearing a mask as required and didn’t socially dis-tance with teammates. That led to four other starting offensive line-men to be placed on the COVID-19 list as “high-risk” contacts. They missed the rest of the prac-tice week before returning the morning of a 45-20 loss to Tampa Bay on Oct. 25.

Safety Johnathan Abram was forced to miss that game because he spent time with Brown the fol-lowing day and wasn’t cleared to return until Oct. 26.

Brown was activated from

the COVID-19 list last week but missed the game at Cleveland after a reported mishap with an IV sent him to the hospital before the game. Brown went back on the COVID-19 list Thursday when he had more symptoms.

Gruden had the coronavirus in July and has praised the team’s handling of the issue despite re-peated violations.

Gruden was fined $100,000 and the team docked $250,000 after the coach didn’t wear his mask properly during a Week 2 win over New Orleans. The team also

was fined $50,000 for allowingan unauthorized employee in thelocker room after the game.

Tight end Darren Waller wasfined $30,000 and nine team-mates, including quarterbackDerek Carr, were fined $15,000 for attending an indoor charityevent held by Waller’s foundation that violated local coronavirusprotocols. Players were seen atthe event not wearing masks or social distancing.

The team didn’t immedi-ately respond to a request forcomment.


NFLScoreboard

American ConferenceEast

W L T Pct PF PABuffalo 6 2 0 .750 198 199Miami 4 3 0 .571 188 130New England 2 5 0 .286 136 167N.Y. Jets 0 8 0 .000 94 238

SouthIndianapolis 5 2 0 .714 198 136Tennessee 5 2 0 .714 208 184Houston 1 6 0 .143 166 217Jacksonville 1 6 0 .143 154 220

NorthPittsburgh 7 0 0 1.000 211 142Baltimore 5 2 0 .714 203 132Cleveland 5 3 0 .625 206 237Cincinnati 2 5 1 .313 194 214

WestKansas City 7 1 0 .875 253 152Las Vegas 4 3 0 .571 187 203Denver 3 4 0 .429 147 183L.A. Chargers 2 5 0 .286 179 185

National ConferenceEast

W L T Pct PF PAPhiladelphia 3 4 1 .438 186 205Washington 2 5 0 .286 133 165Dallas 2 6 0 .250 185 266N.Y. Giants 1 7 0 .125 145 199

SouthTampa Bay 6 2 0 .750 247 165New Orleans 5 2 0 .714 206 197Carolina 3 5 0 .375 179 193Atlanta 2 6 0 .250 209 224

NorthGreen Bay 6 2 0 .750 253 204Chicago 5 3 0 .625 161 166Detroit 3 4 0 .429 177 206Minnesota 2 5 0 .286 183 214

WestSeattle 6 1 0 .857 240 199Arizona 5 2 0 .714 203 146L.A. Rams 5 3 0 .625 193 152San Francisco 4 5 0 .444 225 207

Thursday’s gameGreen Bay 34, San Francisco 17

Sunday’s gamesBaltimore at IndianapolisCarolina at Kansas CityChicago at TennesseeDenver at AtlantaDetroit at MinnesotaHouston at JacksonvilleN.Y. Giants at WashingtonSeattle at BuffaloLas Vegas at L.A. ChargersMiami at ArizonaPittsburgh at DallasNew Orleans at Tampa BayOpen: Cincinnati, Cleveland, L.A.

Rams, PhiladelphiaMonday’s game

New England at N.Y. JetsThursday, Nov. 12

Indianapolis at TennesseeSunday, Nov. 15

Houston at ClevelandJacksonville at Green BayPhiladelphia at N.Y. GiantsTampa Bay at CarolinaWashington at DetroitBuffalo at ArizonaDenver at Las VegasL.A. Chargers at MiamiCincinnati at PittsburghSan Francisco at New OrleansSeattle at L.A. RamsBaltimore at New EnglandOpen: Kansas City, N.Y. Jets, Atlanta,

DallasMonday, Nov. 16

Minnesota at Chicago

ThursdayPackers 34, 49ers 17

Green Bay 7 14 10 3—34San Francisco 3 0 0 14—17

First quarterGB—D.Adams 36 pass from Rodgers

(Crosby kick), 11:42.SF—FG Gould 22, :47.

Second quarterGB—Lewis 1 pass from Rodgers (Cros-

by kick), 7:01.GB—Valdes-Scantling 52 pass from

Rodgers (Crosby kick), 1:53.Third quarter

GB—Valdes-Scantling 1 pass from Rodgers (Crosby kick), 7:17.

GB—FG Crosby 19, 2:01.Fourth quarter

GB—FG Crosby 53, 6:15.SF—James 41 pass from Mullens

(Gould kick), 5:00.SF—McKinnon 1 run (Gould kick), :04.A—0.

GB SFFirst downs 21 17Total Net Yards 405 337Rushes-yards 31-111 17-55Passing 294 282Punt Returns 0-0 1-13Kickoff Returns 1-5 6-135Interceptions Ret. 1-17 0-0Comp-Att-Int 25-31-0 22-35-1Sacked-Yards Lost 1-11 1-9Punts 3-51.3 4-54.8Fumbles-Lost 0-0 1-1Penalties-Yards 5-45 4-33Time of Possession 36:30 23:30

INDIVIDUAL STATISTICSRUSHING—Green Bay, Jones 15-58,

Ervin 8-24, Taylor 1-9, Williams 2-8, Rodg-ers 1-7, Lovett 3-6, Boyle 1-(minus 1). San Francisco, McKinnon 12-52, Hasty 4-3, Mullens 1-0.

PASSING—Green Bay, Rodgers 25-31-0-305. San Francisco, Mullens 22-35-1-291.

RECEIVING—Green Bay, D.Adams 10-173, Jones 5-21, Ervin 4-48, Valdes-Scant-ling 2-53, Tonyan 1-5, Shepherd 1-3, Lewis 1-1, Sternberger 1-1. San Francisco, James 9-184, Dwelley 3-52, McKinnon 3-16, Cracraft 2-13, Hasty 2-10, T.Taylor 1-9, Juszczyk 1-4, Reed 1-3.

FROM BACK PAGE

title game.The rematch looked nothing like those

games in part because the Niners were miss-ing almost all their key pieces from the game because of injuries and a positive coronavirus test for receiver Kendrick Bourne that also sidelined three of his teammates for “high risk” contacts.

That left San Francisco without quarter-back Jimmy Garoppolo (ankle), All-Pro tight end George Kittle (foot), NFC title game star running back Raheem Mostert (ankle), re-ceivers Deebo Samuel (hamstring) and Bran-don Aiyuk (COVID-19 list), left tackle Trent Williams (COVID-19 list) and key defenders Nick Bosa (knee), Dee Ford (back) and Rich-ard Sherman (calf).

“We knew it was going to be a challenge,” 49ers coach Kyle Shanahan said. “We knew at the start of the week it would be a challenge. Losing those three guys yesterday would be a bigger challenge. I still thought we could have a game. ... I know we could have done better.”

Rodgers and the Packers, who were miss-ing three players on the COVID-19 list, took advantage of the opportunity.

Rodgers capped the opening drive with a 36-yard shot to Adams, who made an acrobat-ic catch over Emmanuel Moseley in the end

zone for his league-leading eighth TD recep-tion of the season.

Nick Mullens had an apparent TD throw toRiver Cracraft wiped out on replay for San Francisco and then threw an interception toRaven Greene after backup left tackle JustinSkule got beat for a pressure from PrestonSmith.

That mistake led to Rodgers’ 1-yard throwto Lewis and the Packers took control when Valdes-Scantling got behind the defense forthe 52-yard catch late in the first half.

“I know they were missing some creatureson both sides of the ball, but that’s one of the better defenses I think that we’ve played de-spite missing some of those guys,” Packerscoach Matt LaFleur said. “On offense it’s always difficult going against Kyle and that staff.”

Rodgers added a second TD pass to Valdes-Scantling and the rout was on.

Adams finished with 10 catches for 173yards, making him the first Packers player with three 150-yard receiving games sinceDonald Driver in 2006.

“We’re definitely in a groove right now,”Adams said. “I don’t have much to say aboutit, I don’t want to sound conceited or noth-ing, sound bad, but obviously when you startgetting in a rhythm like that, it does get a loteasier.”

Overwhelm: Packers take advantage of hobbled Niners

Source: Raiders hit hard for violationsTeam, coach fined, docked draft pick for breaches of league’s COVID-19 protocols

RON SCHWANE/AP

Las Vegas Raiders head coach Jon Gruden has been fined $150,000 and the franchise’s sixth-round draft pick has been stripped for repeated violations of the NFL’s COVID-19 protocols.

JED JACOBSOHN/AP

Green Bay wide receiver Davante Adams catches a pass in front of San Francisco 49ers cornerback Jamar Taylor during Thursday’s game in Santa Clara, Calif. The Packers won 34-17.

S T A R S A N D S T R I P E S Saturday, November 7, 2020

SPORTSNFL

Rogers’ four TDs lead Green Bay rout of undermanned San Francisco BY JOSH DUBOW

Associated Press

SANTA CLARA, Calif.

Aaron Rodgers took advantage of the undermanned San Francisco 49ers rather than sympathizing with the team that dominated his Green

Bay Packers twice last season.Rodgers threw for 305 yards and

four touchdowns and the Packers over-whelmed the depleted 49ers 34-17 on Thursday night.

“They’re a different team on paper for sure,” Rodgers said. “They’ve had some tough injuries to some really key players,

but no one’s feeling sorry for anybody in this league. That’s the way it goes. No-body’s feeling sorry for us. We’re dealing with injuries.”

Rodgers connected on deep shots to Davante Adams and Marquez Valdes-Scantling, and a short toss to Marcedes Lewis in the first half to get the Packers

(6-2) out to a 21-3 lead over the Niners (4-5).

It was quite a reversal from the two meetings last season when San Francisco outscored Green Bay by a combined 50-0 in the first halves on the way to lopsid-ed wins in the regular season and NFC

SEE OVERWHELM ON PAGE 23

Green Bay Packers wide receiver Marquez Valdes-Scantling, bottom left, and quarterback Aaron Rodgers, center, celebrate after connecting on a touchdown passalongside center Corey Linsley during the second half of Thursday’s game against the San Francisco 49ers in Santa Clara, Calif.

TONY AVELAR/AP

Sloppy shopNFL docks Raiders draft pick, fi ne

Gruden for protocol violations » Page 23

Players approve plan to start new season on Dec. 22 » NBA, Page 20

Red Sox reportedly to re-hire Cora as manager » Sports Briefs, Page 21

Virus outbreak at AFA puts Army-Air Force game on hold » Page 22

The tension builds - Stars and Stripes

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