Editor Brian Harrod Provides Comprehensive up-to-date news coverage, with aggregated news from sources all over the world from the Roundup Newswires Network
If he succeeds in defeating Trump, the Democrat will have to urgently tackle the pandemic and rebuild global relationships
If Joe Biden wins the 2020 US election against Donald Trump next week, the new president-elect will face enormous pressures to implement a laundry list of priorities on a range of issues from foreign policy to the climate crisis, reversing many of the stark changes implemented by his predecessor.
With little more than two weeks to reverse his dismal standing in the polls, and amid a coronavirus resurgence that could sink his pursuit of a second term, Donald Trump has embarked on a tour of battleground states.
His returns examined at last, the president stands exposed as a tax avoider and serial debtor. It raises serious questions – but also, most likely, the passions of his fervent supporters
From the moment he rode down an escalator in the marble-clad, gold-trimmed Trump Tower to declare his candidacy for US president, Donald Trump was selling himself as a successful businessman who could run a successful economy.
Donald Trump’s pick for America’s highest court, Amy Coney Barrett, is an “ideological fanatic” who threatens abortion rights, healthcare and the environment, activists warned on Saturday, before Trump unveiled his third supreme court nominee in the White House Rose Garden.
The revelation that Donald Trump deliberately downplayed the coronavirus pandemic forced key aides on to desperate defence on Sunday, barely 50 days from the presidential election.
New York governor Andrew Cuomo said the state will give voters a chance to correct missing signatures and other clerical errors so their absentee ballots can be counted in anticipation of a wave of mail-in voting for the November election.
Election officials are expecting an even bigger flood of mail-in votes in November than for the June primary, after which results were delayed for six weeks.
Cuomo said late Friday he’d sign yet temporarily tweak legislation that calls for notifying voters about such problems and provides for fixing them.
Under the version that passed the Legislature last month, the voter would have seven business days to file a form to fix the problem after a notice was mailed, in many situations.
The Associated Press has more from Portland, Oregon, where protesters against police brutality and structural racism clashed again with federal agents and law enforcement officers overnight. Such confrontations were the subject of a Trump tweet this morning, in which the president once again expressed his willingness to send in the national guard:
About 200 people marched to a police precinct station on yet another night of violence for Oregon’s largest city.
Demonstrators hurled bottles and rocks at officers and pointed lasers at them, damaging police cars and causing minor injuries for several officers, Portland police said.
Shortly before he departed on Air Force One from Morristown Municipal Airport en route to Washington, Donald Trump announced that he will not be throwing out the ceremonial first pitch before a Red Sox-Yankees game at Yankee Stadium next month due to scheduling conflicts.
“Because of my strong focus on the China Virus, including scheduled meetings on Vaccines, our economy and much else, I won’t be able to be in New York to throw out the opening pitch for the @Yankees on August 15th,” he wrote on Twitter. “We will make it later in the season!”
Because of my strong focus on the China Virus, including scheduled meetings on Vaccines, our economy and much else, I won’t be able to be in New York to throw out the opening pitch for the @Yankees on August 15th. We will make it later in the season!
The news website ProPublica has published a database containing complaint information for thousands of New York City police officers days after a federal judge paused the public release of such records.
The Associated Press reports:
ProPublica posted the database Sunday, explaining in a note to readers that it isn’t obligated to comply with judge Katherine Polk Failla’s temporary restraining order because it is not a party to a union lawsuit challenging the release of such records.
Deputy managing editor Eric Umansky said ProPublica requested the information from the city’s police watchdog agency, the Civilian Complaint Review Board, soon after last month’s repeal of state law that for decades had prevented the disclosure of disciplinary records.
The confrontation between protesters and federal paramilitaries in Portland escalated early on Sunday morning, when demonstrators finally broke down a steel fence around the courthouse after days of trying.
Among real storms blowing around the US today, hurricanes are approaching Texas and Hawaii while a tropical storm heads for the Caribbean. The Associated Press is keeping watch here.
Among other kinds of storm, the kinds that blow themselves out on Twitter, the billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk and his partner, the musician Grimes, appear to have had a public argument about pronouns.
Miami Dade county has now recorded more than 100,000 cases of Covid-19 since the start of the pandemic. According to the Miami Herald, there were 3,424 new cases reported on Saturday. The county’s population is around 2.7 million.
For what it’s worth, Trump seems to be heading out to play golf.
…and welcome to another day of coverage of politics in the US, which means coverage of the presidential campaign, the coronavirus pandemic, tributes to the late John Lewis and more.
Fox News Sunday will this morning broadcast an interview with Donald Trump, his first with a Sunday show in more than a year, which sees the president questioned by Chris Wallace, one of the more incisive interviewers in American television. A clip released on Friday showed Wallace putting Trump right on his claim Joe Biden wants to defund the police – which Biden doesn’t – and Trump not liking it.
But in talks over the weekend, administration officials instead pushed to zero out the funding for testing and for the nation’s top health agencies, and to cut the Pentagon funding to $5bn.
The suggestions infuriated several Republicans on Capitol Hill, who saw them as tone deaf.
Houston mayor Sylvester Turner has appeared on CBS’s Face The Nation to discuss the Covid-19 outbreak in his city. He says staffing at the city’s hospital is a particular problem.
“If we don’t get our hands around this virus quickly, in about two weeks our hospital system could be in serious, serious trouble,” he says. “... We can always provide additional beds, but we need the people, the nurses and everybody else, the medical professionals to staff those beds. That’s the critical point right now.”
New Jersey’s Democratic governor, Phil Murphy, has appeared on NBC’s Meet The Press. New Jersey has been one of the worst-hit states in the US during the early stages of the coronavirus pandemic, and he says a national strategy is needed to combat Covid-19.
“This thing is lethal,” he says. “New Jersey’s paid an enormous price. We’ve [had] 13,000 confirmed fatalities from Covid-19. We’re starting to see small spikes in reinfection from folks coming back from places like Myrtle Beach and as well as in Florida, other hotspots.
Bobby Rush, an Illinois congressman and a Civil Rights era leader who co-founded the Illinois chapter of the Black Panthers in 1967, responded to Trump’s Rose Garden address with this:
The Episcopal bishop of DC told The Washington Post that she was “outraged” after the officers cleared peaceful protestors gathered near the White House with tear gas and rubber bullets, to clear the way for Donald Trump to take photos outside St. John’s Church.
The Episcopal bishop of DC – who oversees the DC church Trump just stopped at – tells the @washingtonpost she is "outraged" and that neither she nor the rector was asked or told… “that they would be clearing with tear gas so they could use one of our churches as a prop.." 1/3
"We so disassociate ourselves from the messages of this president. We hold the teachings of our sacred texts to be so so grounding to our lives and everything we do and it is about love of neighbor and sacrificial love and justice." @Mebudde Bishop Mariann Budde 3/3
In one of the rare expressions of empathy that Donald Trump has displayed during the course of the coronavirus pandemic, he talked earlier this month about the disease claiming so many lives it was “filling up Yankee Stadium with death”.
Now the death toll from Covid-19 stands at almost twice the capacity of the Yankees’ home stadium, and has reached another booming landmark: 100,000 deaths.
After Donald Trump said on Friday that he believes places of worship should be deemed as essential services, Minnesota’s Democratic governor, Tim Walz, issued an executive order addressing the issue. Places of worship in the state will now be able to open at 25% of capacity. Individuals or households in the buildings must maintain six feet distance.
Walz said he still encouraged citizens to worship remotely. “I am under no illusion whatsoever: Every move we make that loosens up increases the risk,” Walz said.
With coronavirus occupying people’s attention, the Trump administration is giving handouts to big business, appointing judges and rolling back regulations
The last time America was facing a possible economic depression, Rahm Emanuel, Barack Obama’s chief of staff, observed: “Never allow a good crisis go to waste. It’s an opportunity to do the things you once thought were impossible.”
It is advice Donald Trump and his Republican allies appear to have taken to heart.
Federal judge issues temporary stay after Oregon hearing
Litigator says ban would separate families
A federal judge in Portland, Oregon, has put on hold a Trump administration rule requiring immigrants to prove they will have health insurance or can pay for medical care before they can get visas.
US district judge Michael Simon granted a temporary restraining order that prevented the rule from going into effect Sunday. It was not clear when he would rule on the merits of the case.
Democratic congresswoman hosts event in New York district
Tells crowd Trump ‘sent me back to Queens’ with racist attack
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez called for a “9/11-style commission” to investigate child separation on the border with Mexico on Saturday, and said the US government has a life-long responsibility to children it severed from their parents, to provide them with mental health support.
Despite fears stoked by Trump, fewer migrants are arriving at the border than in past years – but most are now children headed to facilities that are ill-equipped to receive them
At a border patrol processing facility in McAllen, Texas on 11 June, a group of lawyers and doctors met a 17-year-old girl from Guatemala. She was in a wheelchair and she held her tiny one-month-old daughter, who was swaddled in a gray sweatshirt so dirty it was almost black.
Andrés Manuel López Obrador hints at concession to US
Talks over US president threat in Washington next week
Mexico’s president hinted on Saturday that his country could tighten migration controls in order to defuse Donald Trump’s threat to impose tariffs on Mexican goods. Andrés Manuel López Obrador also said he expected “good results” from talks in Washington next week.