Editor Brian Harrod Provides Comprehensive up-to-date news coverage, with aggregated news from sources all over the world from the Roundup Newswires Network
Activists are calling on the pharmaceutical firm Gilead Sciences to study a drug for the treatment of Covid-19 that showed promise in curing cats of a coronavirus.
The drug, called GS-441524, is chemically related to remdesivir, an antiviral also made by Gilead, and one of the only treatments to successfully shorten the duration of Covid-19 recovery.
Flooding fears as eye of the storm hits the coast with maximum sustained winds of 85mph
Isaias has made landfall in the Carolinas as a category 1 hurricane, bringing with it maximum sustained winds of 85mph (140km/h) and the threat of devastating floods.
The eye of Isaias hit the coast on Monday night near Ocean Isle beach in southern North Carolina, the National Hurricane Center said, hours after being upgraded from a tropical storm.
New York prosecutors argue they are justified in seeking Trump’s tax returns because of public reports of “extensive and protracted criminal conduct at the Trump Organization.”
Expanding on our earlier post, lawyers from the Manhattan district attorney’s office argued that in court on Monday.
Manhattan District Attorney District Attorney Cyrus Vance is seeking eight years of the Republican president’s personal and corporate tax records, but has disclosed little about what prompted him to request the records, other than part of the investigation is related to payoffs made to women to keep them quiet about alleged affairs with Trump.
In their court filing Monday, though, attorneys for Vance said Trump’s arguments that the subpoena was too broad stemmed from “the false premise” that the probe was limited to so-called “hush-money” payments.
Trump just answered questions from reporters at the White House, expanding on his threat to ban Tik Tok, disagreeing with Fauci, and again promoting hydroxychloroquine, even as top administration officials acknowledge that there is no evidence the drug is an effective treatment for the virus.
Responding to a handful of questions on Monday afternoon, Trump said the social media platform Tik Tok must be sold to Microsoft or another company by 15 September or it will be shut down in US. He also said the Treasury should receive payment as a portion of any deal between the social media platform and a US company.
Esther Salas calls for measures to keep judges’ details private following deadly targeted attack by Roy Den Hollander
A federal judge whose son was killed and husband wounded in a shooting by a disgruntled lawyer at her home last month broke her silence on Monday, calling for measures to keep personal information of judges private, amid mounting cyberthreats in her profession.
Federal judge Esther Salas has released an emotional video message in which she describes the day her son was killed and husband shot in an apparent targeted shooting.
Holding back tears at times, Salas described how 20-year-old Daniel was shot by Roy Den Hollander, who was posing as a FedEx driver, in what police believed to have been a targeted attack at their home in New Jersey on 19 July. Hollander was later found dead by suicide.
Salas used her message to call for more protection for people in her position, saying: 'my son's death cannot be in vain', adding: 'The free flow of information from the internet allowed this sick and depraved human being to find all our personal information and target us'
Donald Trump publicly rebuked a second member of the White House coronavirus taskforce on Monday morning, calling Deborah Birx’s assessment of Covid-19’s spread “pathetic” in a tweet.
Birx warned on Sunday that the coronavirus was entering a new phase in the US and infections were now “extraordinarily widespread” across the country, instead of clustering mainly in a clutch of states and big cities.
Here are the main headlines from our global coronavirus coverage so far on Monday:
About 1.5 million Italians - 2.5% of the population of Italy- may have already contracted coronavirus, nationwide antibody tests indicate, according to the Associated Press.
The figure, announced by health officials on Monday, is six times the number of confirmed cases in Italy’s official virus tally. The results — viewed with the country’s overall death toll of close to 35,000 —align with a 2.3% estimated mortality rate of the virus.
Microsoft confirms acquisition plans, hours after US secretary of state says Chinese software companies are feeding data directly to Communist party
Donald Trump will take action in coming days to tackle an array of national security risks presented by TikTok and other Chinese software companies, Mike Pompeo has said, as Microsoft revealed it was pursuing a deal after speaking to the US president.
Microsoft said late on Sunday that - after a conversation between Trump and its CEO, Satya Nadella – it would move quickly on acquisition talks with TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, completing talks no later than 15 September. It pledged to ensure that all private data of American users was transferred to, and remained in, the US.
We’ll be shutting down today’s blog shortly. Here’s a glance at today’s major news items:
The US economy could benefit if the nation were to “lock down really hard” for four to six weeks, a top Federal Reserve official said on Sunday, adding that Congress can well afford large sums for coronavirus relief efforts.
The economy, which in the second quarter suffered its biggest blow since the Great Depression, would be able to mount a robust recovery, but only if the virus were brought under control, Neel Kashkari, president of the Minneapolis Federal Reserve Bank, told CBS’s Face the Nation.
Fire explodes in size as crews battle the flames in triple-digit heat in mountains east of Los Angeles
Thousands of people were under evacuation orders Sunday after a wildfire in mountains east of Los Angeles exploded in size as crews battled the flames in triple-digit heat.
The fire, dubbed the Apple Fire by local firefighters, was straddling Riverside and San Bernardino counties and consumed more than 23sq miles (about 60sq km) of dry brush and timber, according to the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection.
Experts find hundreds of errors in the writer’s works, mostly made by editors and typesetters
Ernest Hemingway’s published writings are riddled with hundreds of errors and little has been done to correct them, according to a forthcoming study of the legendary writer’s texts.
Robert W Trogdon, a leading scholar of 20th-century American literature, told the Guardian that Hemingway’s novels and short stories were crying out for editions that are “as accurate to what he wrote as possible” because the number of mistakes “ranges in the hundreds”. Although many are slight, he said, they were nevertheless mistakes, made primarily by editors and typesetters.
Coronavirus infections in the Philippines surged past 100,000 Sunday in a troubling milestone after medical groups declared that the country was waging a losing battle against the virus and asked the president to reimpose a lockdown in the capital.
The Department of Health reported a record-high daily tally of 5,032, bringing the total confirmed cases in the country to 103,185, including more than 2,000 deaths, the Associated Press news agency reports.
In the UK, where police have broken up several large dance parties since the lockdown began earlier this year, a warning has been issued to people to stay away from an area in south-west England, where they have been forced to break up a rave attended by a “large volume” of partygoers.
Gloucestershire police sent out this tweet this morning:
Police are currently in the Forest of Dean near to Speculation Car Park dispersing a rave. People are advised not to attend the area due to safety and Covid risks. This will likely take some time to resolve this issue. pic.twitter.com/rtYrXSqWb3
Trump’s 2017 reversal of Obama’s order allowed county sheriff to acquire vehicle by answering questionnaire, documents show
A sheriff’s department in a remote rural California county with only 18,000 people, no incorporated cities, few sworn officers and almost no crime, was able to obtain a second military-grade MRAP armored vehicle in 2017 by giving brief answers to a simple questionnaire, according to documents obtained under freedom of information requests.
MRAP stands for mine-resistant ambush protected, though the prospect of encountering mines or being ambushed would seem to be unlikely in even the toughest US police precincts.
The Australian state of Victoria has declared a state of disaster and placed Melbourne, the country’s second biggest city, under nighttime curfew as it grapples with hundreds of “mystery cases” of coronavirus.
As countries around the world including the US, the UK and Spain reimpose varying degrees of lockdowns, the Victorian premier announced that the state had to impose the highest level of restrictions in order to overcome a stubbornly high number of cases that cannot be traced.
In a modern first, the press will not be present when the GOP votes to renominate Donald Trump for president
The media will be barred from the Republican national convention where Donald Trump is set to be renominated as presidential candidate later this month, a spokeswoman said on Saturday, citing coronavirus restrictions.
While Trump called off the public components of the convention in Florida last month, citing spiking cases of the virus across the country, 336 delegates are scheduled to gather in Charlotte, North Carolina, on 24 August to formally vote to make Trump the GOP standard-bearer once more.
President again contradicts his own health expert after doctor highlights troubled US response to virus
Donald Trump launched an extraordinary attack on his own top infectious disease expert, Dr Anthony Fauci, arguing against the doctor’s claim that high rates of infection in the US stem from a less aggressive reaction to the virus in terms of economic shutdowns and stay-at-home orders.
“Wrong!” countered the president as he retweeted a video of Fauci making the point in recent congressional testimony.
Raúl Grijalva condemns colleagues for failing to take crisis seriously as they ‘strut around the Capitol with no mask’
A Democratic congressman diagnosed as positive for the coronavirus has condemned Republican politicians for their carelessness around Congress and blamed them for spreading the virus.
The Arizona Democrat Raúl Grijalva tested positive for the coronavirus, it was revealed on Saturday, and has immediately quarantined, though he is asymptomatic and feeling well, his office said. But Grijalva issued a fiery condemnation of Republicans and their behavior around the halls of Congress.
Analysis: as the former president eulogized a civil rights hero, his beleaguered successor seemed intent on undermining faith in democracy
Join us for a live digital event with the former US attorney general Eric Holder to discuss voter suppression in the 2020 election, Thursday at 5pm ET. Register now
They were six hours that defined two Americas as well as exposing the magnitude of the decision facing voters in November.
At 8.30am on Thursday, the US government announced that gross domestic product had suffered the biggest decline on record because of a coronavirus-induced shutdown. Minutes later, Donald Trump warned on Twitter that “2020 will be the most INACCURATE & FRAUDULENT Election in history” – and suggested that it should be postponed.
Amid all the noise of an election involving Donald Trump – all the inflammatory tweets and shadowy Facebook posts – one set of ads has somehow managed to break through.
There’s the one of the US president shuffling down a ramp that declares that the president “is not well”. There’s the whispering one about Trump’s “loyalty problem” inside his White House, campaign and family.
Coronavirus cases remain high in Florida, one of the US hotspots for the virus. On Saturday, the state’s health department reported 9,591 new cases of the disease and 179 new deaths. It is the fifth day in a row the state has reported more than 9,000 new cases, although it is down from the recent period when more than 10,000 new daily cases were regularly reported.
Florida’s Agency for Health Care Administration says 7,942 people are currently in hospital with the virus, down from the just over 8,000 people last weekend. Florida’s department of health says 7,022 people have now died from Covid-19 in the state.