Archives for February 2021

BUFFALO, Minn. (AP) — An alleged gunman’s addiction to opioid medication was the “driving force” behind last week’s shooting at a Minnesota health clinic that left one person dead and four injured, a veteran investigator said in his application for a search warrant.

Wright County Deputy Patrick Bailey said authorities found a plastic bag containing six oxycodone pills when they searched Gregory Ulrich’s hotel room after the Feb. 9 shooting at an Allina Health clinic in Buffalo, a small city about 40 miles (65 kilometers) northwest of Minneapolis. Bailey also described a video in which Ulrich mentioned taking more than 30 pills at a time.

“It is clear to your affiant that Ulrich has a dependency on opioid style pain medications, and was upset that his legal supply had been stopped,” Bailey wrote in the warrant application, which was obtained by KARE-TV. “Your affiant also believes that Ulrich’s dependency on pain medication is the driving force behind his assault which resulted in the death of Lindsay Overbay and multiple serious injuries to others.”

Ulrich, 67, is charged with murder, attempted murder and other counts in the shooting that left Overby, a 37-year-old medical assistant, dead. According to the charges, Ulrich walked into the clinic and began shooting staff after they asked if they could help him. He shot two people in the reception area and three others in the clinic’s interior. He is also accused of setting off three suspected pipe bombs.

Bailey wrote about Ulrich’s apparent dependency on opioids in an application for a search warrant for Ulrich’s medical records.

KARE-TV reports that Ulrich had back surgery in 2016, and shortly after that, he was taken back to the hospital after overdosing on opioids, which led a doctor at the clinic to cut off his supply of pain medication.

Court documents show that Ulrich threatened a mass shooting at the clinic in 2018. That threat led to a restraining order that barred Ulrich from the clinic and a nearby hospital and ordered him to have no contact with a doctor. Ulrich tried to plead guilty in May 2019 to violating the restraining order, but a judge didn’t accept his plea. A charge of violating the restraining order was dismissed last April when the prosecutor said Ulrich was found “mentally incompetent to proceed.”

“Through training and experience, Your Affiant knows individuals who abuse controlled substances, such as Oxycodone, are often unable to obtain through legal means. Your Affiant also knows that people who obtain Oxycodone legally, rarely store the pills in a sandwich bag,” Bailey wrote.

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U.S. stock indexes ended a choppy day of trading little changed Friday, though the S&P 500 finished with its first weekly loss in three weeks.

The benchmark index slipped 0.2%, extending its losing streak to a fourth day, after wavering between small gains and losses for most of the day. A majority of the companies in the S&P 500 rose, but losses in health care, communication services and other stocks outweighed gains by banks and industrial companies, among others.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average and Nasdaq composite closed essentially flat, while another strong showing by smaller companies pushed the Russell 200 index to a 2.2% gain.

This week’s market pullback, the first downbeat week this month, comes as investors remain focused on the future of the COVID-stricken economy and the potential for more stimulus to fix it. They’ve also begun taking into account the likelihood of higher inflation as the economy continues to climb out of its pandemic-induced recession.

Expectations of higher inflation helped drive bond yields sharply higher this week. The yield on the 10-year Treasury note, which is used to set interest rates on mortgages and other consumer loans, rose to 1.34% Friday, though it’s still low by historical standards.

“It’s a gradual release of pent-up demand that we’re beginning to acknowledge is happening through the U.S. economy,” said Bill Northey, senior investment director at U.S. Bank Wealth Management. “And it’s occurring against a backdrop of rising interest rates and inflation.”

The S&P 500 fell 7.26 points to 3,906.71. The index hit an all-time high just a week ago. The Dow closed essentially unchanged, with a gain of 0.98 points, or less than 0.1%, at 31,494.32. The Nasdaq composite added 9.11 points, or 0.1%, to 13,874.46.

The Russell 2000 small-caps index climbed 48.30 points to 2,266.69. The rally in smaller companies is a sign that investors were anticipating more economic growth.

Wall Street continues to look to Washington for direction, as Democrats move forward with their $1.9 trillion stimulus plan to combat the coronavirus. Incremental moves were made this week, with the Biden administration signaling it would drop its call for a $15-an-hour minimum wage in this stimulus plan in order to get support from moderate Democratic senators.

The stimulus plan would include $1,400 checks to most Americans, additional payments for children, and billions of dollars in aid to state and local governments as well as additional aid to businesses impacted by the pandemic.

Much of the recent economic data has shown the U.S. economy could benefit from additional stimulus. Wall Street got a weekly jobless claims report Thursday that showed 861,000 Americans filed for unemployment last week, a rise from the previous week and higher than Wall Street had forecast. The Federal Reserve, in the minutes from its January meeting, also laid out the case for why additional stimulus would be necessary and not cause the economy to overheat.

Of particular note is investors’ concerns about inflation. The yield of the 10-year note has risen 0.14 percentage points this week alone, a significant rise in such a short period of time. Rising bond yields can indicate that investors are hopeful for more economic growth in the future, but it can also signal potential inflation coming down the road.

In other economic news, sales of previously occupied U.S. homes rose again last month, a sign that the housing market’s strong momentum from 2020 may be carrying over into this year.

Existing U.S. home sales rose 0.6% in January from the previous month to a seasonally-adjusted rate of 6.69 million annualized units, the National Association of Realtors said Friday. Sales rose 23.7% from a year earlier. It was the strongest sales pace since October. Homebuilder shares were broadly higher. Beazer Homes USA led the sector, climbing 4.3%.

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THE HAGUE, Netherlands (AP) — Dutch senators late Friday approved hastily drawn up legislation underpinning the country’s coronavirus curfew, ensuring that it will remain in force at least until early March despite a court order on Tuesday that it be scrapped.

The vote — nearly an hour after the 9 p.m. start of the curfew — was a victory for the government in its two-pronged battle to ensure the measure remains in force amid fears that more transmissible COVID-19 variants will reverse a weeks-long decline in infections.

Several opposition parties joined government senators in approving the legislation by a 45-13 vote, after a debate with Justice Minister Ferd Grapperhaus that lasted several hours.

Earlier Friday an appeals court said it will take a week to decide whether to overturn the ban on the curfew that was imposed by a judge, in an injunction filed by a group called Viruswaarheid, or Virustruth, that opposes the national lockdown. Their decision was rendered largely irrelevant by the senate vote.

A clear majority of lawmakers in the lower house of parliament, including a number of opposition parties, approved the legislation Thursday.

The 9 p.m. to 4:30 a.m. curfew sparked rioting when it was introduced last month but is broadly supported and adhered to.

In a summary judgment Tuesday, a judge in The Hague rejected the legal basis for the curfew, saying that the situation was not urgent enough for the government to use a law allowing it to act swiftly in acute emergencies such as a major breach of the dikes that protect the low-lying Netherlands from high water.

In court Friday, government lawyer Reimer Veldhuis used the dikes as a metaphor for the coronavirus pandemic that has caused more than 15,000 confirmed deaths in the country.

“Just before the introduction of the curfew, the water was splashing against the dike,” he told the appeals panel.

He said the government’s scientific advisors warned it of a “third wave bearing down on the Netherlands” swelled by the more transmissible variant of the virus first discovered in Britain.

“In those circumstances, the Cabinet believed it had to take emergency measures in the form of a curfew,” Veldhuis said. “To remain in the metaphor, the water level had to be reduced as quickly as possible to make room for the new wave approaching us.”

However, Viruswaarheid lawyer Gerben van de Corput told the court that the initial ban was correct and should be upheld because the government did not need to use the emergency legislation.

Citing one of the government’s advisors who has called the looming threat of more contagious variants a “dark cloud,” Van de Corput told the judges, “a dark cloud is clearly something different to a dike breach.”

The Netherlands has been in a tough lockdown since mid-December, sending infection numbers slowly lower.

Over the past two weeks, the 7-day rolling average of daily new infections edged lower from 22.98 to 21.39 new infections per 100,000 people.

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Follow all of AP’s pandemic coverage at https://apnews.com/hub/coronavirus-pandemic, https://apnews.com/hub/coronavirus-vaccine and https://apnews.com/UnderstandingtheOutbreak

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WASHINGTON (AP) — President Joe Biden used his first address before a global audience Friday to declare that “America is back, the transatlantic alliance is back,” after four years of a Trump administration that flaunted its foreign policy through an “America First” lens.

Speaking to the annual Munich Security Conference virtually, Biden ticked through a daunting to-do list — salvaging the Iran nuclear deal, meeting economic and security challenges posed by China and Russia and repairing the damage caused by the coronavirus pandemic — that he said would require close cooperation between the U.S. and its Western allies.

Without mentioning Donald Trump’s name once in his speech, Biden mixed talk of a reinvigorated democratic alliance with a rebuke of his predecessor’s approach, a message warmly received by Western allies.

’I know the past few years have strained and tested the transatlantic relationship,” Biden said. “The United States is determined to reengage with Europe, to consult with you, to earn back our position of trusted leadership.”

The president also participated Friday in a virtual meeting of the Group of Seven industrialized nations, where leaders managed to work Biden’s campaign theme into their closing joint statement, vowing to “work together to beat COVID-19 and build back better.”

“Welcome back, America,” said European Council President Charles Michel, effectively summing up the mood of the Munich conference.

But while such happy talk conveyed the palpable sense of relief among allies at Biden’s full-throated commitment to mending frayed U.S.-Europe relations, plenty has changed over the past four years in ways creating new challenges.

China has cemented its place as a fierce economic competitor on the continent as the U.S. has reconsidered long-held national security and economic priorities embedded in the transatlantic alliance. Populism has grown through much of Europe. And other Western countries have, at moments, sought to fill the vacuum left as America stepped back from the world stage.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel noted that some differences between the U.S. and Europe remain “complicated.” Europe sees China’s economic ambitions as less of an existential threat than the U.S. does and has its own strategic and economic concerns that are not always in sync with Biden on Russia as well.

Still, Merkel, who had a strained relationship with Trump, didn’t hide her preference for an American foreign policy informed by Biden’s world view.

“Things are looking a great deal better for multilateralism this year than two years ago, and that has a lot to with Joe Biden having become the president of the United States of America,” Merkel said. “His speech just now, but also his administration’s first announcements, have convinced us that this is not just talk but action.”

Biden made his address to a global audience as his administration this week took steps to reverse key Trump administration policies.

He said that the U.S. stands ready to rejoin talks about reentering the 2015 multilateral Iran nuclear deal abandoned by the Trump administration. The Biden administration announced Thursday its desire to reengage Iran, and it took action at the United Nations aimed at restoring policy to what it was before Trump withdrew from the deal in 2018.

Biden also spoke out about the two-decade war in Afghanistan, where he faces a May 1 deadline to remove the remaining 2,500 U.S. troops under a Trump administration negotiated peace agreement with the Taliban. He also called for cooperation in addressing economic and national security challenges posed by Russia and China and identified cyberspace, artificial intelligence and biotechnology as areas of growing competition.

“We must prepare together for long-term strategic competition with China,” Biden declared.

His message was girded by an underlying argument that democracies — not autocracies — are models of governance that can best meet the challenges of the moment. The president urged fellow world leaders to show together that “democracies can still deliver.”

At the G-7, administration officials said, Biden focused on what lies ahead for the international community as it tries to extinguish the public health and economic crises created by the coronavirus pandemic. He announced the U.S. will soon begin releasing $4 billion for an international effort to bolster the purchase and distribution of vaccine to poor nations, a program that Trump refused to support.

Biden’s turn on the world stage came as the U.S. officially rejoined the Paris climate agreement, the largest international effort to curb global warming. Trump announced in June 2017 that he was pulling the U.S. out of the landmark accord, arguing that the pact would undermine the American economy.

Biden announced the U.S. intention of rejoining on the first day of his presidency, but he had to wait 30 days for the move to go into effect. He has said that he will bake considerations about climate change into every major domestic and foreign policy decision his administration faces.

“This is a global existential crisis,” Biden said.

Biden also encouraged G-7 partners to make good on their pledges to COVAX, an initiative by the World Health Organization to improve access to vaccines, even as he reopens the U.S. spigot.

Trump had withdrawn the U.S. from WHO and refused to join more than 190 countries in the COVAX program. The Republican former president accused WHO of covering up China’s missteps in handling the virus at the start of the public health crisis that unraveled a strong U.S. economy.

Biden urged greater international cooperation on vaccine distribution amid growing calls for his administration to distribute some U.S.-manufactured vaccine supplies overseas.

French President Emmanuel Macron has called on the U.S. and European nations to allocate up to 5% of current vaccine supplies to developing countries — the kind of vaccine diplomacy that China and Russia already are deploying.

Biden, who announced last week that the U.S. will have enough vaccine by the end of July to inoculate 300 million people, remains focused for now on making sure every American is vaccinated, administration officials say. Macron on Friday again pressed the U.S. and Europe to do more.

“It is up to Europeans and Americans to allow all the poor and emerging countries in the world to get access to vaccines as fast as possible,” he said.

Allies were listening closely to what Biden had to say about a looming crisis with Iran.

Iran informed the International Atomic Energy Agency this week that it would suspend voluntary implementation next week of a provision in the 2015 deal that allowed U.N. nuclear monitors to conduct inspections of undeclared sites in Iran at short notice unless the U.S. rolled back sanctions by Feb. 23.

“We must now make sure that a problem doesn’t arise of who takes the first step,” Merkel told reporters. “If everyone is convinced that we should give this agreement a chance again, then ways should be found to get this agreement moving again.”

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Associated Press writers Darlene Superville in Washington, Geir Moulson in Berlin and Angela Charlton in Paris contributed to this report.

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INDIANAPOLIS (AP) — The NCAA will allow a limited number of fans to attend all rounds of its men’s basketball tournament in Indiana and later rounds of its women’s tournament in Texas.

The governing body said Friday it is permitting 25% capacity at the men’s tournament venues to allow for social distancing. That figure will include all participants and essential staff along with the family members of team players and coaches.

On the women’s side, the NCAA will allow a capacity of up to 17% at each venue from the Sweet 16 to the Final Four. Games taking place for the first two rounds will limit attendance to team guests.

In each case, attendees must wear face coverings, while cleaning and disinfecting efforts will be emphasized at venues in keeping with COVID-19 safety protocols. The NCAA said it acted in conjunction with local health officials for each tournament.

NCAA chief medical officer Brian Hainline said the decision for the men’s tournament also followed conversations with the organization’s medical advisory group and will rely on testing and monitoring services from the Indiana University Health system.

“The No. 1 priority for decisions around the tournament continues to be the safety and well-being of everyone participating in the event,” Hainline said.

The NCAA had previously announced the 68-team tournament will be played entirely in Indiana because of the pandemic, with most games in Indianapolis. The tournament will begin with First Four games on March 18 at home arenas for Big Ten Conference schools Purdue and Indiana, with those venues located about a one-hour drive — in opposite directions — from downtown Indianapolis.

At Indiana, the school said it will allow up to 500 fans for tournament games at Assembly Hall with some seats reserved for local medical workers and first responders who have been vaccinated.

The Final Four takes place in Indianapolis on April 3. The national championship game follows two days later.

For the women, the 64-team tournament is being held in the San Antonio region, with first-round games beginning March 21. The Final Four will be held in the Alamodome in San Antonio on April 2, followed by the national championship game on April 4.

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More AP college basketball: https://apnews.com/hub/College-basketball and http://www.twitter.com/AP_Top25

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