A hurricane developing near Texas has prompted evacuations and emergency warnings from local officials as the storm was expected to bring flash flooding and life-threatening storm surges to a region badly hit by the novel coronavirus pandemic.Storm Hanna, the first hurricane of the 2020 Atlantic season, was forecast to make landfall on the Texas coast on Saturday, threatening one of the nation's Covid-19 hot spots.
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A federal judge late Friday blocked Seattle’s new law prohibiting police from using pepper spray, blast balls and similar weapons that was passed following confrontations with protesters. The Seattle Times reports that U.S. District Judge James Robart at an emergency hearing granted a request from the federal government to block the new law, which the Seattle City Council passed unanimously last month. The U.S. Department of Justice, citing Seattle’s longstanding police consent decree, argued that banning the use of crowd control weapons could actually lead to more police use of force, leaving them only with more deadly weapons.
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North Korean authorities have imposed a lockdown on the border city of Kaesong after discovering what they say is the country's first suspected coronavirus case, state media reported Sunday. Leader Kim Jong Un convened an emergency politburo meeting on Saturday to implement a "maximum emergency system and issue a top-class alert" to contain the virus, the official Korean Central News Agency said. If confirmed, it would be the first officially recognised case of COVID-19 in North Korea, where medical infrastructure is seen as woefully inadequate to deal with any epidemic.
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A group of heavily armed Black protesters marched through Louisville, Kentucky on Saturday demanding justice for Breonna Taylor, a Black woman killed in March by police officers who burst into her apartment. The Black militia dubbed NFAC want justice for Taylor, a 26-year-old emergency medical technician who died in a hail of gunfire when drug investigators bearing a "no-knock" warrant entered her Louisville home four months ago. One police officer involved in the raid was fired by the city's police department in June.
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Total COVID-19 cases in the Sunshine State rose by 9,300 to 423,855 on Sunday, just one place behind California, which now leads the country with 448,497 cases. New York is in third place with 415,827 cases. On average, Florida has added more than 10,000 cases a day in July while California has been adding 8,300 cases a day and New York has been adding 700 cases.
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Police in Portland, Oregon have declared a riot after protesters breached a fence surrounding a court building where federal officers have been stationed during ongoing protests against police brutality and the presence of militarised law enforcement.A police announcement condemned protesters' "violent conduct" that created a "grave risk of public alarm" after a group of protesters had pulled down a section of fencing around 1.20am on Sunday.
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Hurricane Hanna pummeled the south Texas coast on Saturday night with howling winds and a surging sea that threatened a broad area already contending with an intense spike in coronavirus deaths. Hanna is the first hurricane for the 2020 Atlantic storm season, which is expected to be unlike any other in recent memory. By nightfall, Hanna's blistering winds were ripping up the Texas coast near Corpus Christi.
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A car ploughed into a crowd of Black Lives Matter demonstrators protesting against systemic racism and police brutality and a protester has been shot in Colorado.The Aurora Police Department said the demonstrator who was shot was rushed to hospital in stable condition – adding that a protester shot a weapon which hit at least one person.
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President Vladimir Putin said the Russian navy will get 40 new ships and vessels this year, as he attended a naval parade in St. Petersburg on Sunday marking the Navy Day in Russia. The parade in St. Petersburg and the nearby town of Kronshtadt featured 46 ships and vessels and over 4,000 troops and aimed to “demonstrate the growing power of our navy,” Putin said Friday.
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Hawaii geared up on Saturday to face a hurricane that threatened to pummel the islands with dangerous surf, strong winds and flash floods even as residents grappled with escalating numbers of coronavirus cases. Powerful storms are familiar to many in Hawaii who have spent the past several summers preparing for tropical cyclones. Luke Meyers, the administrator of the Hawaii Emergency Management Agency, urged people get ready by learning about the hazards where they live.
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By a 5-4 vote, the justices denied a request by Calvary Chapel Dayton Valley in rural Nevada for an interim order that would have allowed it to host services for about 90 congregants. Justice Samuel Alito wrote in a dissent that Nevada was discriminating against religious groups in favor of casinos, which under Governor Steve Sisolak's reopening plans do not face the same 50-person limit on indoor gatherings.
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CNN anchor Jake Tapper took Assistant Secretary of Health Adm. Brett Giroir to task over the continuing issues with coronavirus testing, asking the coronavirus testing czar if he is “afraid” of bringing these problems up with President Donald Trump.During a contentious 20-minute interview on CNN’s State of the Union on Sunday morning, Tapper repeatedly pressed Giroir on the weeklong delays in coronavirus testing results Americans are experiencing.“Are you happy where testing is right now?” Tapper asked, prompting Giroir to say he’s “never going to be happy” until they have the pandemic under control.While acknowledging that testing is still not where it should be, the HHS official went on to tout the progress the administration has made over the past few months, adding that half of the tests conducted have turnaround times of less than 24 hours.“The delays that most people talk about are at the large commercial labs that perform about half the testing in the country,” he said. “Now, the data are, the average turnaround is 4.27 days.”The CNN anchor brought up former acting White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney’s criticism of the administration’s handling of the pandemic, specifically the poor turnaround times on testing. In an op-ed earlier this month, Mulvaney said the long waits for results were “inexcusable” while citing his own family’s experience.At the same time, Tapper repeatedly grilled Giroir on the president’s promises when it came to testing and getting the virus, which has now killed nearly 150,000 Americans, under control.“In March, President Trump said, falsely, anyone who wants a test can get a test,” the veteran anchor pressed. “At what point will it be true, sir, that anyone who wants a test will be able to get one with a quick turnaround so as to be effective. When will that be true?”Giroir, meanwhile, claimed that it’s “true now” that anyone who “needs a test can get a test,” adding that he’s “highly confident” that turnaround times will decrease this week based on advances they’ve made.Tapper also pushed the public health official on the administration’s use of the Defense Production Act to ramp up production on masks and ventilators, wondering aloud why the White House wasn’t using it more forcefully on testing. This led to the CNN host asking whether this was due to an unwillingness to upset the president.“There seems to be this reluctance to push the president to do what he needs to do to get the testing up to speed,” Tapper declared. “I know that he’s under the misguided impression that more testing is bad and makes him look bad, which as you know is completely false.”“And I’m wondering if you and others are just afraid to do this because you don’t want to upset him, afraid to ask him to do what he needs to do to invoke the DPA to force the federal labs to get up to speed to where we need to be so that we can isolate the virus, as you know,” he added. “Are you afraid to bring this up to President Trump because it will upset him?”Giroir, for his part, denied that this was the case, claiming that tough issues and problems are brought up openly with Trump and the administration.“Everyone of the administration understands the importance of testing,” he claimed. “Nobody in the task force is afraid to bring up anything to the vice president or the president.”“Every time I’ve met with the president, he’s been listening to all the data, he assesses that, he understands it,” Giroir continued. “I meet with the vice president almost every single day. No one is trying to stop testing in this country. No one has ever told me to do that. We want more, we want better, we want quicker.”Read more at The Daily Beast.Get our top stories in your inbox every day. Sign up now!Daily Beast Membership: Beast Inside goes deeper on the stories that matter to you. Learn more.
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South Korea has reported 113 newly confirmed cases of COVID-19 over the past 24 hours — its first daily jump above 100 in nearly four months. The figures released Saturday by South Korea’s Centers for Disease Control and Prevention brought the national caseload to 14,092, including 298 deaths.
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Climate activists and scientists have generally received former Vice President Joe Biden's plan to eliminate U.S. carbon emissions by 2035 warmly, but there will likely be some backlash ahead, especially regarding a potential reliance on wind and solar alternatives, The Guardian reports.David Keith, a climate and energy expert at Harvard University who co-authored research in 2018 that found America's transition to solar and particularly wind would require up to 20 times more land area than previously thought, said windmills certainly shouldn't be abandoned moving forward, but suggested they could be limited. "You should tilt the energy system toward low land footprints, which means focusing on solar, nuclear, and carbon capture and storage, with wind at the margins," he told The Guardian.Keith added that if the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee defeats President Trump, the incoming Biden administration will need to "admit there will be tradeoffs for a shared national goal" and that "there will be local decisions people don't like" en route to an emission-free future.But while there are concerns about the effect renewable energy systems can have on land and biodiversity, Melissa Lott, a senior research scholar at Columbia University's Center on Global Energy Policy, said the side effects of renewables are unequivocally worth getting to zero carbon. Read more at The Guardian.More stories from theweek.com Jared Kushner has reportedly refused to aid the House GOP's election wing America is coming apart. Europe is coming together. Longtime TV host Regis Philbin dies at 88
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The case of a missing Arizona State University professor who vanished in March took a dark turn on Friday as police announced the discovery of his remains in a landfill, allegedly dumped by two Louisiana teenagers.Junseok Chae, associate dean for research at ASU’s School of Engineering, was reported missing March 25 when he didn’t return home from work at the university. Authorities began searching a dump in Surprise, Arizona on May 11, but only discovered his body on July 17 after a weeks-long manhunt that involved dozens of people working 15-hour shifts and cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. Police say they also found related evidence in the landfill.Two teenagers, Javian Ezell, 19, and Gabrielle Austin, 18, were arrested in Shreveport, Louisiana after allegedly being caught driving the professor’s car. They face charges of first-degree murder, vehicle theft, and armed robbery. Police say the two allegedly killed Chae before leaving his body in a dumpster, which was then emptied out in the landfill. The motive and means of the alleged murder were not immediately clear, and police have not disclosed what relation, if any, the two teens had to the professor. Each is being held on a $1 million bond after extradition to Arizona. Chae, who received his undergraduate degree in South Korea, had worked at ASU researching and teaching electrical engineering and computer science since 2005. He held four patents, had published more than 150 academic papers, and authored a book, according to ASU’s website.A university spokesperson said in a statement, “We are saddened by the loss of ASU community member Junseok Chae. Our condolences go out to professor Chae’s family and friends.”Read more at The Daily Beast.Get our top stories in your inbox every day. Sign up now!Daily Beast Membership: Beast Inside goes deeper on the stories that matter to you. Learn more.
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Iranian officials on Friday slammed the interception of an Iranian passenger plane by a U.S. fighter jet in the skies over Syria the previous day as “illegal,” threatening action against Washington over the incident. Iran had said that one of its airliners, flying from Tehran to Beirut on Thursday, was “harassed” by fighter jets, but later landed safely in Lebanon. A U.S. official confirmed a U.S. jet had passed by the Iranian airliner, but at a safe distance.
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Tens of thousands of people marched Saturday across Russia's Far East city of Khabarovsk on the border with China to protest the arrest of the regional governor on murder charges, continuing a two-week wave of protests that has challenged the Kremlin. Sergei Furgal has been in a Moscow jail since his arrest on July 9, and Russian President Vladimir Putin has named an acting successor. Protesters in Khabarovsk see the charges against Furgal as unsubstantiated and demand that he stand trial at home.
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Fox & Friends host Brian Kilmeade stood up for his network’s polling operation on Friday morning, rebuking Trump campaign spokesperson Hogan Gidley for calling most polls “fake.”A bevy of new polls showed former Vice President Joe Biden with massive leads in key battleground states that President Donald Trump has to win in order to secure re-election. Fox News’ latest survey, for instance, found Biden comfortably beating the president in Michigan, Minnesota, and Pennsylvania. Appearing Friday on the president’s favorite morning show, Gidley tried to boast about the so-called enthusiasm gap between Trump and Biden voters by outrightly dismissing polls showing the ex-veep trouncing the president.“You touched on some polls. Most of those are fake,” Gidley declared. “They oversample Democrats.”The Trump spokesman would go on to talk up Trump’s social-media views and clicks in comparison to Biden’s to assert that the president has more support nationwide.Kilmeade, however, took that opportunity to defend his network’s pollsters.“I know the people that do the polls. They don’t do it fake—they do a really good job,” he exclaimed. “They might not be accurate in the end, I don’t know.”While Gidley acknowledged that “the people are great,” he once again questioned the accuracy of the polls.“I’m not saying they’re Nostradamus. But I am just saying they’re math, and they’re professionals,” Kilmeade retorted. “So don’t call the Fox News pollsters ‘fake.’”A somewhat flustered Gidley, meanwhile, tried to find common ground with the pro-Trump hosts, saying: “Well, the methodology is flawed, at the very least, how’s that?”“That is what the president has said before,” co-host Steve Doocy replied. “He has complained that they have a smaller sample of Republicans that is not indicative of the number of people who voted last time. And so that is where that comes from.”Gidley’s dismissal of Fox News polls comes days after one of the network’s own anchors publicly admitted to not trusting Fox’s surveys, which are considered among the best in the industry. After claiming on-air that she deliberately misleads pollsters, host Melissa Francis was asked whether she believes Fox’s polls are “garbage.”“I don’t trust any polling at all based on my personal experience,” she responded.Fox News Host Confronts Kellyanne Conway on Trump’s Sudden Mask EmbraceRead more at The Daily Beast.Get our top stories in your inbox every day. Sign up now!Daily Beast Membership: Beast Inside goes deeper on the stories that matter to you. Learn more.
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Virginia has removed from its iconic state capitol the busts and a statue honoring Confederate generals and officials. Virginia House Speaker Eileen Filler-Corn, a Democrat, quietly ordered the Lee statue and busts of generals J.E.B. Stuart, Stonewall Jackson, Confederate President Jefferson Davis, and others removed from the historic Old House Chamber.
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A Chinese researcher who took refuge from U.S. authorities at China's consulate in San Francisco is now in American custody and is expected to appear in court on Monday, U.S. Justice Department officials said. According to court filings in U.S. District Court in San Francisco this week, Juan Tang, who worked at the University of California, Davis, falsely claimed on her visa application that she had not served in the Chinese military.
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Florida on Saturday reported more than 12,000 new coronavirus infections within the previous 24-hour period, bringing the the state's total number of confirmed cases since the start of the pandemic to 414,511. On the other side of the Sun Belt, Arizona is seeing daily infections decline, seemingly without experiencing an elevated plateau, but the death rate -- a lagging indicator -- is increasing.With its latest tally, Florida has surpassed New York -- which has reported 411,200 cases -- as the state with the second highest number of confirmed infections behind California, which, like Florida, has seen cases surge over the last several weeks. New York has yet to see another major uptick since it mostly contained the virus after a significant epidemic in March, April, and May.Florida also reported 124 new resident deaths from COVID-19, bringing the total number of fatalities to 124. As of Saturday morning, nearly 9,000 people were hospitalized with COVID-19 across the state.In Arizona, meanwhile, the fatality increase over the past week to the point where if the U.S. had an equivalent rate, around 25,000 people would have been reported dead this week. > ARIZONA has reported *556* COVID deaths in the past 7 days.> > For scale, if the entire USA had Arizona's rate of deaths, about ***25,000*** would be reported dead this week alone.> > Chart of death, normalized by population last 8 weeks. (Note EU, Canada at the bottom) pic.twitter.com/fP2n6dPcsA> > -- Steven Dennis (@StevenTDennis) July 25, 2020More stories from theweek.com Jared Kushner has reportedly refused to aid the House GOP's election wing America is coming apart. Europe is coming together. Longtime TV host Regis Philbin dies at 88
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Charlamagne Tha God has hit out at Democratic presidential contender Joe Biden for branding Donald Trump the “first” racist president.Mr Biden had criticised Mr Trump for what he called “his spread of racism” on Wednesday, calling him the “first” racist to be elected president.
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New York mayor Bill de Blasio quoted Karl Marx when outlining the relationship he wanted his office to have with the city's business community, in an appearance on The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC.Host Brian Lehrer asked de Blasio how the mayor was approaching businesses for help with recovery from the coronavirus pandemic. Lehrer said that the mayor was not known for extensive outreach to the business community given his focus on issues of wealth inequality."There’s an underlying truth in the fact that my focus has not been on the business community and the elite,” de Blasio said. “I am tempted to borrow a quote from Karl Marx here…”“They’ll love that on Wall Street,” Lehrer interjects.“Yes they will," de Blasio laughs. "There's a famous quote that ‘the state is the executive committee of the bourgeoisie,’ and I use that openly to say no, I read that as a young person and thought, well, that’s not the way it’s supposed to be.”The quote comes from the first chapter of Marx's Communist Manifesto, in which Marx outlines his theory of the progressive advancement of the class of the bourgeoisie at the expense of the proletariat.The mayor continued in the interview, “We need to work with the business community, we will work with the business community, but the city government represents the people, represents working people….A lot of folks have just sort of hit a wall when I say guys, you’re gonna have to pay more taxes, and we’re gonna have policies that favor working people more."De Blasio ended by saying he knows that many businesses want to help with a "comeback" for the city, and that his administration "really appreciate[s] that."The interview was not the first time de Blasio has quoted a communist figure. In 2019, the mayor apologized after quoting communist revolutionary Che Guevara at a rally of striking airport workers in Miami."I did not know the phrase I used in Miami today was associated with Che Guevara & I did not mean to offend anyone who heard it that way. I certainly apologize for not understanding that history," de Blasio wrote on Twitter after backlash from Miami's Latino community, many of whom are Cuban exiles.
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Journalists covering protests in the United States should be permitted to do their jobs without fear of attack or arrest, the United Nations human rights office said on Friday.A mounting crackdown on reporters by authorities has been seen in recent weeks as the Trump administration has deployed federal agents to several cities where demonstrators are calling for racial justice.
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New York judge orders documents unsealed after Maxwell’s lawyers had tried to keep them secretAn extensive collection of “extremely personal” documents in civil litigation against British socialite Ghislaine Maxwell can be unsealed, a Manhattan federal court judge ruled on Thursday.The documents relate to Maxwell’s deposition in this litigation, as well as her early 2015 correspondence with her longterm associate, the disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein.Maxwell was arrested earlier this month and charged over her alleged involvement with Epstein’s sex trafficking of minors. Maxwell pleaded not guilty on 14 July, and remains in jail while awaiting trial.In the civil lawsuits, Maxwell’s lawyers had pushed to keep these records secret, claiming previously “this series of pleadings concerns [attempts] to compel Ms Maxwell to answer intrusive questions about her sex life” that are “extremely personal, confidential and subject to considerable abuse by the media”.The Manhattan federal court judge ruled on Thursday that they could be unsealed, though Maxwell’s attorneys plan to appeal the decision.“The court finds that the countervailing interests identified fail to rebut the presumption of public access,” judge Loretta Preska said during a telephone proceeding. “Accordingly, those papers shall be unsealed.”The decision over these records stems from Epstein accuser Virginia Giuffre’s 2015 civil lawsuit against Maxwell. Giuffre has alleged that Maxwell recruited her to work as Epstein’s masseuse at 15 years old, when she worked as a locker-room attendant in Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club in south Florida.In this litigation, which has been settled, Giuffre alleged Maxwell had defamed her by saying that she was a liar in accusing Epstein and Maxwell of sexual misconduct.Following Preska’s decision, one of Maxwell’s attorneys asked for two weeks to appeal this decision, given the new criminal case.Preska said Maxwell’s team had one week to file the appeal motion, and asked to be informed if the appeals court didn’t rule within one week. She asked the attorneys to nonetheless continue working on preparing these papers for the release in the interim.A large tranche of documents in this lawsuit was also released last August; they contained both sensational claims and denials that world leaders were involved in Epstein’s sex trafficking.They were released shortly after Epstein’s arrest last July for sex trafficking. Epstein killed himself in prison in August.
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A new DNA study published Thursday sheds fresh light on the horrors of the transatlantic slave trade, from the legacy of rape that can be seen in today's genetics to how disease likely decimated some groups forced to work in deadly conditions. The grim results from a paper, which appeared in the American Journal of Human Genetics, compiled genetic data from 50,000 consenting research participants from both sides of the Atlantic. It cross-referenced these with detailed records from slave ships that transported 12.5 million men, women and children between 1515 and 1865.
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Donald Trump said he often regrets some of his tweets and admitted to not always paying much attention to who he retweets to his 84 million followers.“It’s not the tweets, it’s the retweets that get you in trouble," he said Friday in an interview with Barstool Sports at the White House.
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Malaysia’s government said Friday it has reached a $3.9 billion settlement with Goldman Sachs in exchange for dropping criminal charges against the bank over bond sales that raised money for the 1MDB sovereign wealth fund, which was looted of billions of dollars in a massive scandal. Malaysian and U.S. prosecutors had alleged that the bond sales organized by Goldman Sachs provided one of the means for associates of ex-Prime Minister Najib Razak to steal billions over several years from a fund that was ostensibly set up to accelerate Malaysia’s economic development.
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Tucker Carlson is only capable of two facial expressions. One is a deeply furrowed brow that narrows his eyes to a point at which they almost disappear, not dissimilar to the face a child makes when they are hangry, or lost, or both. He uses this expression when he is describing the point of view of someone with whom he disagrees. The other is a wide-eyed look of pleading which sends his eyebrows rising at least an inch in the other direction. It is an expression meant to portray logic and reason, of why-do-you-hate-America indignity. He uses it chiefly when describing his own views and solutions to the problems facing the country.All of this is to say that if eyes are windows to the soul, Carlson’s spirit is black and white. He is a binary man whose whole career has been defined by his opposition to, and his apparent hatred of, other people and ideas. And at a time when America is more polarised than ever, he is having a moment.
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