AP News in Brief at 5:58 a.m. EDT

To be sure, Obama attends numerous fundraisers of his own. And Romney has spent significant time at public campaign events in swing states, and he will do so many times again before Nov. 6.

But the amount of time Romney is devoting to private fundraisers in noncompetitive states is notable. Even when he is in swing states, he sometimes attends only a fundraiser, without mingling with nondonors or appearing before local TV cameras, as he did Wednesday in Charlotte, N.C.

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Romney is pouring time into fundraisers even though he has outdistanced Obama on that front for months. The former Massachusetts governor reported raising more than $101 million along with the Republican National Committee in July. Obama’s campaign and Democratic National Committee raised $75 million for the month.

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Official says South Africa police killed more than 30 attacking miners in Lonmin PLC strike

JOHANNESBURG — South African police officers killed more than 30 miners who charged them at a Lonmin PLC platinum mine, authorities said Friday, as a national newspaper warned that a time bomb ticking over poor South Africans has exploded.

Thursday’s shootings are one of the worst in South Africa since the end of the apartheid era, and came as a rift deepens between the country’s governing African National Congress and an impoverished electorate confronting massive unemployment and growing poverty and inequality.

They “awaken us to the reality of the time bomb that has stopped ticking — it has exploded,” The Sowetan newspaper said in an editorial. “Africans are pitted against each other ... fighting for a bigger slice of the mineral wealth of the country. In the end the war claims the very poor African -- again.”

Police ministry spokesman Zweli Mnisi told The Associated Press on Friday that more than 30 people were killed on Thursday in the police volleys of gunfire during the strike, now a week old. The Star, a Johannesburg newspaper, said another 86 people were wounded. People were gathering at hospitals in the area, hoping to find missing family members among the wounded.

Makhosi Mbongane, a 32-year-old winch operator, said mine managers should have come to the workers rather than send police. Strikers were demanding salary raises from $625 to $1,563. Mbongane vowed that he was not going back to work and would not allow anyone else to do so either.

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With Assange asylum decision, Ecuador’s president seeks to stake claim to moral high ground

LIMA, Peru — Rafael Correa is a committed leftist and former lay missionary whose first run at elected office was his successful 2006 election as Ecuador’s president.

He is also a U.S.- and European-educated economist who tempers his trademark impulsiveness with high calculation. His decision to grant WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange asylum Thursday was anything but an emotional roll of the dice.

Correa, 49, knew he would likely deeply offend the United States, Britain and Sweden and likely the European Union. He also knew he would be inviting commercial and political retaliation that might hurt his small petroleum-exporting nation of 14 million people.