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

Trump and Harris host dueling rallies in the Milwaukee area in a final push to win Wisconsin

MILWAUKEE (AP) — Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump will host rallies within 7 miles of each other Friday night in the Milwaukee area as part of a fevered final push for votes in swing-state Wisconsin's largest county.

Milwaukee is home to the most Democratic votes in Wisconsin, but its conservative suburbs are where most Republicans live and are a critical area for Trump as he tries to reclaim the state he narrowly won in 2016 and lost in 2020. One reason for his defeat was a drop in support in those Milwaukee suburbs and an increase in Democratic votes in the city.

“Both candidates recognize that the road to the White House runs directly through Milwaukee County,” said Hilario Deleon, chair of the county's Republican Party.

The dueling rallies — Trump is in downtown Milwaukee and Harris is in a suburb — may be the candidates' last appearances in Wisconsin before Election Day. Both sides say the race is once again razor tight for the state's 10 electoral votes. Four of the past six presidential elections in Wisconsin have been decided by less than a point, or fewer than 23,000 votes.

It was absentee votes from Milwaukee, which typically are reported early in the morning after Election Day, that tipped Wisconsin for President Joe Biden in 2020.

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Early voting reaches such heights that some Georgia polls may be Election Day 'ghost town'

STONE MOUNTAIN, Ga. (AP) — Flags telling people to “Vote Here” fluttered in not only English, but Spanish, Korean, Vietnamese and Chinese at the Mountain Park Activity Building as a steady stream passed through its doors to cast their ballots in the 2024 election.

One by one, the voters who turned out Thursday were adding to what's become a colossal heap of early ballots in the key swing state of Georgia. Early voting, scheduled to end Friday, has been so robust that nearly 4 million ballots could be cast before Election Day dawns on Tuesday.

“I normally try to vote early because I’m a mailman and it’s hard to me to get over here on an election day,” said Mike King of Lilburn, who voted for Trump Thursday before scattering leaves as he departed in his red pickup truck.

Voters like King are part of the reason early vote records have been shattered not only in Georgia and other presidential battlegrounds such as North Carolina but even in states without major contests on the ballot like New Jersey and Louisiana. During the pandemic in 2020, then-President Donald Trump railed against early voting and mail voting, claiming they were part of a plot to steal the election from him. In 2022, after falsely blaming his 2020 loss on early voting, he kept at it.

In both elections, Republicans largely stayed away from voting early, preferring to do it on Election Day. This year Trump has emphasized early voting and his supporters are responding. So far Republicans have flooded the polls in places where in-person early voting is available. Though they've increased their mail voting too, it's been at a much lower rate.

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Voters view one another across partisan divide with increasing animosity

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Joe Biden tried to explain this week that he doesn’t really think Donald Trump’s supporters are “garbage,” but that doesn't mean that other people don't believe the label occasionally fits.

“I would say that some of them are garbage,” said Samantha Leister, 32, who went to see Kamala Harris at a rally in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.

As for the rest of them? Leister, whose parents and father-in-law are backing Trump, says they are “misguided.”

That same day, at Trump's rally in Green Bay, Wisconsin, the idea of voting for Harris was impossible to fathom.

“I just think they are uneducated, and they believe all the lies,” said Shawn Vanderheyden, 44, who went to see Trump with his wife and two young daughters. “It’s unfortunate.”

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Supreme Court allows Pennsylvania to count contested provisional ballots, rejecting Republican plea

DOYLESTOWN, Pa. (AP) — The Supreme Court on Friday rejected an emergency appeal from Republicans that could have led to thousands of provisional ballots not being counted in Pennsylvania as the presidential campaigns vie in the final days before the election in the nation’s biggest battleground state.

The justices left in place a state Supreme Court ruling that elections officials must count provisional ballots cast by voters whose mail-in ballots were rejected.

The ruling is a victory for voting-rights advocates, who had sought to force counties — primarily Republican-controlled counties — to let voters cast a provisional ballot on Election Day if their mail-in ballot was to be rejected for a garden-variety error.

While the Supreme Court action was a setback for Republicans, the GOP separately claimed victory in a decision by Pennsylvania’s Supreme Court. That court rejected a last-ditch effort by voting rights advocates to ensure that mail-in ballots that lack an accurate, handwritten date on the exterior envelope will still count in this year’s presidential election.

The rulings are the latest in four years of litigation over voting by mail in Pennsylvania, where every vote truly counts in presidential races. Republicans have sought in dozens of court cases to push the strictest possible interpretation for throwing out mail-in ballots, which are predominantly cast by Democrats.

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FBI links video falsely depicting voter fraud in Georgia to 'Russian influence actors'

WASHINGTON (AP) — A video purporting to depict voter fraud in Georgia is fake and the work of “Russian influence actors," U.S. intelligence officials said Friday as they warned that foreign efforts to undermine faith in the integrity of next week's elections may persist long after votes have been cast.

The announcement that the video was fake represented an effort by the FBI and other federal agencies, four days before Tuesday's elections, to combat foreign disinformation by calling it out rather than letting it spread for days unchecked. It follows a similar statement last week that also attributed to Russian actors a widely circulated video falsely depicting mail-in ballots for Donald Trump being destroyed in Pennsylvania.

The 20-second video, which began circulating on the social media platform X on Thursday afternoon, shows someone who describes himself as a Haitian immigrant talking about how he’s intending to vote multiple times in two Georgia counties for Vice President Kamala Harris.

He flashes several purported Georgia IDs with different names and addresses. An Associated Press analysis of the information on two of the IDs confirms it does not match any registered voters in Gwinnett or Fulton counties, the two counties he mentioned.

Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger said Thursday night that the video is “obviously fake” and likely the product of Russian trolls “attempting to sow discord and chaos on the eve of the election."

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Israel pummels Lebanon and Gaza, killing dozens in fresh waves of airstrikes

BEIRUT (AP) — Israel launched dozens of intense airstrikes across Lebanon's northeastern farming villages on Friday, killing at least 52 people and wounding scores more, the Lebanese Health Ministry reported.

In central Gaza, Palestinians recovered the bodies of 25 people killed in a barrage of Israeli aerial attacks that began Thursday, hospital officials said.

The latest violence comes against the backdrop of the Biden administration’s renewed diplomatic push, days before the U.S. election, to reach temporary cease-fire deals. Israel has stepped up its offensive against Hamas’ remaining fighters in Gaza, pulverizing areas in the north and raising fears of worsening humanitarian conditions for civilians still there.

In Lebanon, Israel in recent weeks has broadened its strikes to bigger urban hubs, like the town of Baalbek, home to 80,000 people, after initially targeting smaller border villages in the south, where Hezbollah conducts operations. Iran-backed Hezbollah doubles as a major political party and provider of social services in Lebanon.

Hezbollah began firing rockets, drones and missiles from Lebanon into Israel in solidarity with Hamas immediately after the Hamas-led Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel, which triggered the war in Gaza. The yearlong cross-border fighting boiled over to full-blown war on Oct. 1, when Israeli forces launched a ground invasion of southern Lebanon for the first time since 2006.

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Mud-caked volunteers clean flood debris in a Spanish town as authorities struggle to respond

CHIVA, Spain. (AP) — Mud cakes her boots, splatters her leggings and the gloves holding her broom. Brown specks freckle her cheeks.

The mire covering Alicia Montero is the signature uniform of the impromptu army of volunteers who for a third day Friday shoveled and swept out the muck and debris that filled the small town of Chiva in Valencia after flash floods swept through the region. Spain's deadliest natural disaster in living memory has left at least 205 people dead with untold numbers still missing, and countless lives in tatters.

As police and emergency workers continue the grim search for bodies, authorities appear overwhelmed by the enormity of the disaster, and survivors are relying on the esprit de corps of volunteers who have rushed in to fill the void.

While hundreds of people in cars and on foot have been streaming in from Valencia city to the suburbs to help, Montero and her friends are locals of Chiva, where at least seven people died when Tuesday’s storm unleashed its fury.

“I never thought this could happen. It moves me to see my town in this shape,” Montero tells The Associated Press. “We have always had autumn storms, but nothing like this.”

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Top House Republicans seeking documents regarding Biden's 'garbage' comment

WASHINGTON (AP) — Top House Republicans called on the White House to produce all documents and internal communications regarding President Joe Biden's statement earlier this week in which he appeared to take a swipe at supporters of Donald Trump.

White House press officials altered the official transcript of Biden's statement, drawing objections from the federal workers who document such remarks for posterity, according to two U.S. government officials and an internal email obtained Thursday by The Associated Press.

The lawmakers said they question whether the decision to create “a false transcript and manipulate or alter the accurate transcript” produced for the National Archives and Records Administration was a violation of federal law.

Rep. James Comer, the Republican chair of the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability, and House Republican Conference Chairwoman Elise Stefanik demanded the White House produce the records. They're also calling for the White House to make available for a briefing the top supervisor of the White House Stenography's Office.

“The White House cannot simply rewrite President Biden’s rhetoric,” Comer and Stefanik wrote. “...We are concerned with the latest reporting of the White House’s apparent political decision to protect the Biden-Harris Administration, instead of following longstanding and proper protocols.”

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An Idaho health department isn't allowed to give COVID-19 vaccines anymore. Experts say it's a first

A regional public health department in Idaho is no longer providing COVID-19 vaccines to residents in six counties after a narrow decision by its board.

Southwest District Health appears to be the first in the nation to be restricted from giving COVID-19 vaccines. Vaccinations are an essential function of a public health department.

While policymakers in Texas banned health departments from promoting COVID vaccines and Florida's surgeon general bucked medical consensus to recommend against the vaccine, governmental bodies across the country haven't blocked the vaccines outright.

“I'm not aware of anything else like this,” said Adriane Casalotti, chief of government and public affairs for the National Association of County and City Health Officials. She said health departments have stopped offering the vaccine because of cost or low demand, but not based on “a judgment of the medical product itself.”

The six-county district along the Idaho-Oregon border includes three counties in the Boise metropolitan area. Demand for COVID vaccines in the health district has declined — with 1,601 given in 2021 to 64 so far in 2024. The same is true for other vaccines: Idaho has the highest childhood vaccination exemption rate in the nation, and last year, the Southwest District Health Department rushed to contain a rare measles outbreak that sickened 10.

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South Carolina executes Richard Moore despite broadly supported plea to cut sentence to life

COLUMBIA, S.C. (AP) — South Carolina put Richard Moore to death by lethal injection Friday for the 1999 fatal shooting of a convenience store clerk, despite a broad appeal for mercy by parties that included three jurors and the judge from his trial, a former prison director, pastors and members of his family.

Moore, 59, was pronounced dead at 6:24 p.m.

Moore was convicted of killing James Mahoney, the Spartanburg clerk, in September 1999 and sentenced to death two years later. Moore went into the store unarmed, took a gun from the victim when it was pointed at him and fatally shot him in the chest as the victim shot him with a second gun in the arm.

Moore’s lawyers asked Republican Gov. Henry McMaster to reduce his sentence to life in prison without parole because of his spotless prison record and willingness to be a mentor to other inmates. They also said it would be unjust to execute someone for what could be considered self-defense and unfair that Moore, who was Black, was the only inmate on the state’s death row convicted by a jury without any African Americans.

But McMaster refused to grant clemency. In a letter, he did not give a reason why but said he reviewed all the items submitted by Moore’s lawyers and spoke to the victim’s family.

The Associated Press