If he’s to stay in power, Trump needs to repeat his victory in Wisconsin. But the landscape is very different now – and support is shrinking
Donald Trump claimed to have done so much for African Americans that his campaign decided to open the first ever Republican office in a black neighbourhood of Milwaukee.
Related: White House attacks Fauci as states see record new coronavirus cases – live updates
Continue reading...With Germany at the EU helm, there’s a unique chance for Europe to fill the vacuum left by the retreating US
With Trump’s US missing in action from the global stage, the European Union should be stepping into the vacuum. Germany, which has just taken over the bloc’s rotating presidency, could use the next six months to provide the leadership to boost Europe’s global impact. But is it ready to shake off its traditional reticence?
Immediate economic challenges will dominate EU leaders’ first in-person encounter since the lockdown, on 17 and 18 July. And Berlin is right to prioritise agreement on the EU’s new seven-year budget and a pandemic recovery plan, a task complicated by internal rifts and new forecasts warning of an even deeper recession than expected across the 27-nation bloc. As Angela Merkel said in a recent Guardian interview: “For Europe to survive, its economy needs to survive.”
Continue reading...Travolta says ‘Kelly’s love and life will always be remembered’ after revealing actor’s death after two-year illness
Kelly Preston, who appeared in the hit films Jerry Maguire and Twins, has died, her husband, John Travolta, said. She was 57.
Travolta said in an Instagram post that his wife of 28 years, who was diagnosed with breast cancer two years ago, died on Sunday.
Continue reading...Cases rise by over 230,000 worldwide in 24 hours; Florida cases increase by record total for a US state; Brazil cases near 2m. Follow the latest updates
Mainland China reported eight new Covid-19 cases as of the end of 12 July, up from seven reported a day earlier, the Chinese national health authority said on Monday.
The National Health Commission said in a statement that all of the new cases were imported infection involving travellers from overseas, the same as the seven cases a day earlier. The capital city of Beijing reported no new confirmed cases for the seventh consecutive day.
The Commission also reported six new asymptomatic patients, those who are infected with the coronavirus but have no symptoms, compared with five a day earlier. China does not consider such patients as confirmed cases.
Total number of confirmed Covid-19 cases for mainland China now stands at 83,602, while the death toll remained unchanged at 4,634.
Hong Kong health authorities are continuing to battle its worst virus outbreak yet. It saw a rise in cases in March as people began returning from overseas, prompting increased social distancing measures and restrictions which had started to ease in recent weeks.
On Sunday another 38 new cases were confirmed, including 30 local transmissions. Of the 30, 13 have an unknown source.
Continue reading...Cases rise by over 230,000 worldwide in 24 hours; EU summit ‘may not agree Covid-19 recovery fund’; 130m ‘may go hungry in 2020 because of virus’
An entire hospital in Mexico’s southern Oaxaca state has been put in quarantine after 68% of its remaining staff tested positive, writes Analy Nuño in Guadalajara.
Doctors and nurses at the Macedonio Benítez Fuentes hospital in the town of Juchitán de Zaragoza held protests last week, calling for a lockdown after 120 of their colleagues were put under isolation after positive tests.
The hospital won’t close – we will still deal with urgent cases, and have already analysed our staffing requirements to attend to the community as our colleagues start to return to work.
China has stepped up a travel warning to Australia, telling its citizens of a risk of being searched “arbitrarily” by law enforcement authorities, Agence France-Presse (AFP) reports.
Tensions between the two countries have been escalating on various fronts after Beijing reacted with fury to calls for an independent investigation into the origins and spread of the pandemic, which first surfaced in central China last year.
We urge Australia to change its course and stop interfering in Hong Kong’s affairs and China’s internal affairs in any way, or risk further damage to China-Australia relations.
Continue reading...More than 20 people suffered minor injuries on Sunday after an explosion and fire on board a ship at a naval base in San Diego, military officials said. The blaze was reported shortly before 9am on USS Bonhomme Richard, said Mike Raney, a spokesman for the navy’s Pacific fleet. Four civilians and 17 sailors were taken to hospital with non-life threatening injuries, Raney said.
Continue reading...Patient said: ‘I think I made a mistake, I thought this was a hoax, but it’s not’, according to health official
A 30-year-old patient died after attending a ‘“Covid party”, believing the virus to be a hoax, a Texas medical official has said.
“Just before the patient died, they looked at their nurse and said ‘I think I made a mistake, I thought this was a hoax, but it’s not,’” said Dr Jane Appleby, the chief medical officer at Methodist hospital in San Antonio.
Continue reading...Many of the affected areas are also seeing a coronavirus surge and some experts are anxious heat could increase infections
More than 20 locations across the US were expected to either break or tie previous high temperature records on Sunday as the south of the country bakes in a heatwave.
The National Weather Service had numerous excessive heat warnings in place across a 2,000 mile swath stretching from southern California through to Mobile Bay in Alabama. Potentially record-breaking temperatures are expected in southern California, Arizona, New Mexico and west Texas.
Continue reading...US special counsel defends his investigation into allegations of corruption during 2016 election
The former special counsel Robert Mueller made a rare move on Saturday to publicly defend his two-year investigation into allegations of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia in the 2016 election – and to castigate Donald Trump’s decision to commute Roger Stone’s prison sentence.
Mueller wrote an opinion article for the Washington Post [paywall] published under the headline “Roger Stone remains a convicted felon, and rightly so”.
Continue reading...Infections are accelerating in largely untouched countries and those which hoped they had come through the worst. But there is hope
“Most of the world sort of sat by and watched with almost a sense of detachment and bemusement,” said Helen Clark, appointed to investigate the World Health Organization’s handling of the pandemic. The former New Zealand prime minister was describing the early weeks of the outbreak, and the sense that coronavirus was a problem “over there”. The failure to recognise our interconnection created complacency even as the death toll rose.
It took three months for the first million people to fall sick – but only a week to record the last million of the nearly 13 million cases now reported worldwide. As England emerges from lockdown at an unwary pace, Covid-19 is accelerating globally. The WHO has reported a record surge of a quarter of a million cases in a single day. The death toll is over half a million people and rising fast.
Continue reading...Rise is the biggest in any state since start of the pandemic as its daily average death toll continues to also rise
Florida broke the national record Sunday for the largest single-day increase in positive coronavirus cases in any state since the beginning of the pandemic, adding more than 15,000 cases as its daily average death toll continued to also rise.
According to state Department of Health statistics, 15,299 people tested positive, for a total of 269,811 cases, and 45 deaths were recorded. California had the previous record of daily positive cases 11,694, set on Wednesday. New York had 11,571 on 15 April.
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The grim news from Florida continues: The state reported 15,000 new cases on Sunday. That breaks not only the record for a state in the US in a single day but is also more new cases than any European country has reported in a single day during the pandemic. Only the US, Brazil and India have reported more new cases in a day than Florida did on Sunday.
Related: Florida wrestles with impossible question: when can schools reopen safely?
The row over Goya Foods is spreading to some unlikely places. Last week, Goya Foods CEO Bob Unanue heaped praised on Donald Trump, saying: “We’re all truly blessed at the same time to have a leader like President Trump, who is a builder”.
There was backlash due to the fact that the head of an organization that describes itself as the largest Hispanic-owned food company in America praised a president who has introduced policies that have hurt Latinx people.
Continue reading...In a powerful new book, the journalist and historian reveals how her former friends and colleagues became agents of populism
Anne Applebaum can look at the wreck of democratic politics and understand it with a completeness few contemporary writers can match. When she asks who sent Britain into the unending Brexit crisis, or inflicted the Trump administration on America, or turned Poland and Hungary into one-party states, she does not need to search press cuttings. Her friends did it, she replies. Or, rather, her former friends. For if they are now embarrassed to have once known her, the feeling is reciprocated.
Applebaum’s latest book, Twilight of Democracy: The Failure of Politics and the Parting of Friends, opens with a scene a novelist could steal. On 31 December 1999, Applebaum and her husband, Radosław Sikorski, a minister in Poland’s then centre-right government, threw a party. It was a Millennium Eve housewarming for a manor house in the western Poland they had helped rebuild from ruins. The company of Poles, Brits, Americans and Russians could say that they had rebuilt a ruined world. Unlike the bulk of the left of the age, they had stood up against the Soviet empire and played a part in the fall of a cruel and suffocating tyranny. They had supported free markets, free elections, the rule of law and democracies sticking together in the EU and Nato, because these causes – surely – were the best ways for nations to help their people lead better lives as they faced Russian and Chinese power, Islamism and climate change.
Continue reading...Donald Trump wore a face mask in public for the first time during a visit to a military hospital on Saturday evening.
'When you’re in a hospital, especially … I think it’s expected to wear a mask,' the US president said as he left the White House in a helicopter to visit the Walter Reed national military medical centre in suburban Washington DC to meet wounded service members and healthcare providers caring for Covid-19 patients.
Coronavirus cases have surged to record levels in the US, with guidelines recommending the wearing of face masks in certain circumstances to stop the spread of the virus
Continue reading...Americans told to be very cautious following the imposition of the national security law in Hong Kong
The US has warned its citizens in China to “exercise increased caution” because of a heightened risk of arbitrary detention and exit bans that prevent foreign citizens leaving the country.
Citizens could face prolonged spells in jail, without US consular support, or access to details of any alleged crime, the state department said. The warning, sent in an email to US citizens in China, comes after Beijing passed a national security law for Hong Kong, with the legislation drafted to cover people “from outside [Hong Kong]”, including non-residents.
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We’ll be shutting down the blog shortly. Here’s a look at today’s top news lines:
Donald Trump was wearing a black mask as he walked down the entryway of Walter Reed medical center accompanied by hospital staff, marking the first time he has been seen wearing a protective face covering in public.
The president did not stop to take questions from the White House pool before turning down a hallway. His meeting with injured troops and staff is closed to the press.
Continue reading...President wears face covering during visit to military hospital as cases of coronavirus surge across the United States
Donald Trump wore a mask in public for the first time during a visit to a military hospital a short helicopter ride from the White House on Saturday evening. The president’s decision to wear a mask came as cases of coronavirus surged to record levels in the US and after aides and experts urged Trump to follow his own government’s guidelines on face coverings.
Trump flew to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in suburban Washington DC to meet wounded service members and health care providers caring for Covid-19 patients.
Continue reading...Outrage is growing among opponents of Donald Trump’s decision to commute the prison sentence of his longtime friend and notorious Republican fixer Roger Stone. Special counsel Robert Mueller weighed in on Saturday night, declaring that “Roger Stone remains a convicted felon, and rightly so.”
The president commuted Stone’s sentence on Friday despite the US attorney general previously having declared Stone’s conviction “righteous”.
Continue reading...Indian cases pass 800,000; Johannesburg struggles to find vital equipment; Texas warns ‘worst is yet to come’
India reported a record spike in coronavirus cases on Saturday, taking the national total to more than 800,000 and pushing several states to bring back lockdowns, despite the punitive economic cost.
Now the world’s third-worst affected country by case load, it reported a spike of 27,114 cases on Saturday, although mortality rates have been lower than in other badly affected countries with confirmed death toll now 22,123.
Continue reading...Chinese telecom firm stockpiles 500,000 pieces of equipment but fears wider ban
Huawei believes it can supply 5G hardware unaffected by White House sanctions to the UK for the next five years, sidestepping the expected conclusion of an emergency review on Tuesday next week.
The company has stockpiled 500,000 pieces of kit but fears a wider ban on its equipment will be unveiled to placate Conservative rebel MPs, who say the Chinese supplier represents a national security risk.
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