In Other News: Remembering John Lewis, rights icon and ‘American hero’; Not Real News: A look at what didn’t happen last week

Published 12:11 pm Monday, July 20, 2020

Editor’s note: “In Other News” is a list of state, national and global headlines compiled by Daily Citizen-News staff from Associated Press stories. Click on the headlines below to read the full stories.

Not Real News: A look at what didn’t happen last week

A roundup of some of the most popular but completely untrue stories and visuals of last week. None of these are legit, even though they were shared widely on social media. The Associated Press checked them out.

Remembering John Lewis, rights icon and `American hero’

WASHINGTON — People paid great heed to John Lewis for much of his life in the civil rights movement. But at the very beginning — when he was just a kid wanting to be a minister someday — his audience didn’t care much for what he had to say. A son of Alabama sharecroppers, the young Lewis first preached moral righteousness to his family’s chickens. His place in the vanguard of the 1960s campaign for Black equality had its roots in that hardscrabble Alabama farm and all those clucks. Lewis, who died Friday at age 80, was the youngest and last survivor of the Big Six civil rights activists who organized the 1963 March on Washington, and spoke shortly before the group’s leader, Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., gave his “I Have a Dream” speech to a vast sea of people.

Trump not ready to commit to election results if he loses

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump is refusing to publicly commit to accepting the results of the upcoming White House election, recalling a similar threat he made weeks before the 2016 vote, as he scoffs at polls showing him lagging behind Democrat Joe Biden. Trump says it’s too early to make such an ironclad guarantee. “I have to see. Look … I have to see,” Trump told Chris Wallace during a wide-ranging interview on the Fox News Channel. “No, I’m not going to just say ‘yes.’ I’m not going to say ‘no,’ and I didn’t last time, either.”

Can a pregnant woman spread the coronavirus to her fetus?

It’s possible, but it seems to be relatively rare and scientists think they know why that is. Many viruses can cross the placenta and infect a fetus in the womb, and evidence has been growing that the coronavirus sometimes can too. Researchers in Italy studied 31 women with COVID-19 who delivered babies in March and April and found signs of the virus in several samples of umbilical cord blood, the placenta and, in one case, breast milk. But this sort of testing can just detect bits of genetic material — it doesn’t mean there is virus capable of causing infection in those places.