The groundbreaking American writer and tireless activist for gay rights and a national effort to tackle the HIV/Aids crisis, Larry Kramer, has died in New York.
Related: Coronavirus US live: cases still increasing in two dozen states amid push to reopen
Continue reading...Police have clashed with protesters on the streets of Minneapolis amid outrage over the death of an unarmed black man in police custody. George Floyd died after an officer knelt on his neck for several minutes. Large crowds gathered in the city on Tuesday night and police in riot gear fired teargas and rubber bullets at demonstrators
Jeffrey Epstein: Filthy Rich synthesizes legal information with first-person testimony of the billionaire’s abuse and bought immunity into a shocking watch
It’s difficult to watch Jeffrey Epstein: Filthy Rich, a four-hour Netflix series on the now-deceased convicted sex offender without a choking sense of outrage. How many girls had to suffer to get attention? How perversely twisted is the American justice system that a Gatsby-esque billionaire, friends with such powerful figures as Bill Clinton, Prince Andrew and Donald Trump, a longstanding donor to Harvard and MIT, could buy his way out of an almost certain life sentence for child sex abuse and trafficking?
Filthy Rich arrives, of course, less than a year after Epstein, 66, died, officially by suicide, in a New York jail last August. “There’s no justice in this,” Shawna Rivera, speaking publicly for the first time about Epstein’s alleged abuse starting when she was 14, says in the final episode. “There was just so much more to be said that will never be said.”
Continue reading...Donald Trump has threatened to “strongly regulate” or close down social media platforms that do not meet his standards for ideological balance, a day after Twitter, for the first time, slapped a warning label on a pair of Trump tweets spreading lies about mail-in voting.
Related: George Floyd killing: sister says police officers should be charged with murder
Continue reading...Longest official mourning period in Spain’s democracy; unrest grows in UK PM’s party over Dominic Cummings lockdown breach; WHO says Americas are new Covid-19 epicentre. Follow the latest updates
There have now been 118,000 confirmed cases of coronavirus across the 54 nations of Africa, according to the World Health Organization’s regional office for the continent.
So far, about 48,000 people in Africa who have tested positive for the virus have recovered, while 3,500 have died, according to the latest updated from WHO African region on Wednesday morning.
Over 118,000 confirmed #COVID19 cases on the African continent - with more than 48,000 recoveries & 3,500 deaths. View country figures & more with the WHO African Region COVID-19 Dashboard: https://t.co/V0fkK8dYTg pic.twitter.com/W1hbvugno1
Hi, this is Damien Gayle taking the reins of the live blog now, bringing you the latest headlines and stories, and the best of the Guardian’s coverage, from the coronavirus pandemic around the world.
If you have any comments, tips or suggestions for coverage please drop me a line, either via email to damien.gayle@gmail.com, or via Twitter direct message to @damiengayle.
Continue reading...Qatar Covid-19 app ‘exposed 1m people’s personal details’; WHO sounds alarm over surge of Covid-19 cases in Latin America
Tom McCarthy writes that one of the key problems facing American efforts to emerge from the Covid-19 crisis is the population’s aversion to vaccines.
Only about half of Americans say they would get a Covid-19 vaccine if available, according to a poll, as a top US government scientist tempered claims by Donald Trump that the United States would be able to invent, manufacture and administer hundreds of millions of vaccine doses by the end of the year.
Related: Just half of Americans plan on getting Covid-19 vaccine, poll shows
Further to our story at 20.29, data from Johns Hopkins University shows that the United States has recorded more than 100,000 deaths from Covid-19, moving past a grim milestone even as many states relax mitigation measures to stop the spread of the novel coronavirus.
The US has recorded more deaths from the disease than any other country in the pandemic, and almost three times as many as the second-ranking country, Britain, which has recorded more than 37,000 Covid-19 deaths.
Related: US passes 100,000 coronavirus deaths as states relax lockdown measures
Continue reading...Loved ones pay tribute to those they have lost to the coronavirus pandemic, from a grandmother of seven to a 16-year-old
The worst pandemic in a century has claimed victims across the US.
Some groups have been particularly vulnerable, with those over 65 making up a large proportion of the fatalities, though all generations have been affected.
Continue reading...Photographer Jordan Gale was curious to see how New Yorkers would adapt to a post Covid-19 summer. What he found was a combination of resilience, resourcefulness and joy – exhibited through socially distant block parties, community service, and people from all walks of life soaking up the sun
Continue reading...Hundreds of protesters gathered on Tuesday evening to demand justice for George Floyd, an African American man who died after a white police officer knelt on his neck as he lay on the ground during an arrest. Footage of the incident showed Floyd shouting ‘I cannot breathe’ and ‘Don’t kill me’
Continue reading...Shrimpers have a long and proud cultural tradition in the US – one that is now under threat from all sides
Captain Wynn Gale – a fifth-generation Georgia shrimper – is on the side of the road on an April morning, selling shrimp at the same street corner where his dad sold shrimp.
“How’s the pandemic treating you?” I ask.
Continue reading...Kayleigh McEnany offered a straight-faced defence of Trump’s wildest conspiracy theories during a Tuesday briefing
“I will never lie to you,” declared Kayleigh McEnany on her debut as the White House press secretary at the start of the month. “You have my word on that.”
That would be a welcome change, reasoned critics of Donald Trump, but their hopes of a change in the way his administration communicates have been dashed.
Continue reading...Video platform blames deletion of criticisms on an error in its automated systems
YouTube is investigating the apparently automatic removal of comments critical of the Chinese Communist party amid complaints of censorship.
The company said the filtering appeared to be “an error” amid a greater reliance on automated systems during the coronavirus pandemic because its human reviewers have been sent home.
Continue reading...Protesters clash with police, who deploy teargas and stun grenades, following death of black man at hands of white officer
Police and protesters clashed in Minneapolis on Tuesday evening following a demonstration at the intersection where George Floyd was killed in an altercation with several police officers the day before.
Hundreds of protesters gathered in the city on Tuesday evening to demand justice after Floyd, who was African American, was killed when a white Minneapolis police officer knelt on his neck as he lay on the ground during an arrest. Footage of the incident showed Floyd shouting “I cannot breathe” and “Don’t kill me!”
Continue reading...President rails against decision after his tweets on mail-in voting are marked with message: ‘Get the facts’
Twitter for the first time took action against a series of tweets by Donald Trump, labeling them with a warning sign and providing a link to further information.
Since ascending to the US presidency, Trump has used his Twitter account to threaten a world leader with war, amplify racist misinformation by British hate figures and, as recently as Tuesday morning, spread a lie about the 2001 death of a congressional aide in order to smear a cable news pundit. Throughout it all, Twitter has remained steadfast in its refusal to censor the head of state, even going so far as to write a new policy to allow itself to leave up tweets by “world leaders” that violate its rules.
Continue reading...As the US coronavirus death toll approached 100,000, Kayleigh McEnany praised Donald Trump’s response to the pandemic, saying the death toll could have been much higher. The White House press secretary repeatedly cited a scientific report suggesting up to 2.2 million Americans could die of coronavirus if the government didn’t take action to limit the spread of the virus
Critics say data proves New York’s liability shield is linked to higher nursing home death rates during the pandemic
As Governor Andrew Cuomo faced a spirited challenge in his bid to win New York’s 2018 Democratic primary, his political apparatus got a last-minute boost: a powerful healthcare industry group suddenly poured more than $1m into a Democratic committee backing his campaign.
Less than two years after that flood of cash from the Greater New York Hospital Association (GNYHA), Cuomo signed legislation last month quietly shielding hospital and nursing home executives from the threat of lawsuits stemming from the coronavirus outbreak. The provision, inserted into an annual budget bill by Cuomo’s aides, created one of the nation’s most explicit immunity protections for healthcare industry officials, according to legal experts.
Continue reading...Most employees will continue to work remotely; those who return will be required to wear face masks and practice social distancing
The New York Stock Exchange’s famous Wall Street trading floor opened on Tuesday for the first time in more than two months, having closed in March due to the spread of Covid-19.
Governor Andrew Cuomo rang the opening bell while wearing a face mask, signaling that while New York state may be starting to open up, things will be far from normal for some time yet.
Continue reading...As he releases Quickies, an LP of minature gems, the master songwriter contemplates a pop song’s perfect length – and whether Covd-19 has ended his career
Stephin Merritt has just spent six weeks confined to his Manhattan apartment after contracting coronavirus. He was ill for 10 days, then recovered. He’s usually a crazily prolific songwriter – two of his band’s most celebrated albums, 50 Song Memoir and 69 Love Songs, obviously contain 119 songs between them – but he hasn’t come up with any new numbers since he got ill. The problem is that he can only write songs in bars. And not just any bar – it needs to be “one-third full of cranky old gay men gossiping over thumping disco music”. Plus he needs a glass of cognac, to be slowly sipped, and a corner with a light so he can see his notebook.
Fortunately, before the outbreak, he was able to find a place that fulfilled these conditions and the result is the Magnetic Fields’ latest album. Like most of Merritt’s records, there’s a concept – on this one, titled Quickies, all the songs but one are two minutes 15 seconds or less. However, that’s not an unusual length for a Magnetic Fields tune – as Merritt points out over the phone, one-third of the songs on 69 Love Songs would qualify.
Continue reading...Elon Musk’s SpaceX, in partnership with Nasa, to launch Falcon 9 rocket from Florida carrying two American astronauts
In a historic moment a decade in the making, the skies above Florida will light up on Wednesday when the launch of a rocket born from a groundbreaking public-private partnership returns the United States to the business of human spaceflight.
Not since the retirement of Nasa’s space shuttle fleet in 2011 has the US possessed the capability to send its own astronauts into orbit, and the success of this week’s mission, formally known as SpaceX Demo-2, is likely to shape the direction of the space agency’s near-Earth ambitions for a generation.
Continue reading...US president Donald Trump marked the Memorial Day weekend with visits to Arlington National Cemetery, Fort McHenry and his Trump National Golf Club. Trump delivered a speech at Fort McHenry thanking those serving in the military as the country battles the 'invisible enemy', Covid-19. The president also returned to the golf course for the first time since early March on the same weekend US coronavirus deaths closed in on 100,000
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