It was the same in Bible study nearby, where attendance had dropped from the week before, a couple lamented as they left the gathering, carrying masks in their pockets instead of wearing them. Thousands of church members have been choosing to attend online, a church official said.
With case counts soaring, hospital intensive-care units filling up and a “red alert” declared forHouston last week, only about one-fifth of the usual crowd could be found at Second Baptist on Sunday.
Those who did attend mostly were not wearing masks, and did not seem ill at ease.
The church recommends masksbut does not require them, and it has felt compelled to ask attendees to respect the choice of those who do choose to wear them.
“I’m not sick, we’re not sick,” said Christina Barlow, 43, whose family of 15 children is well known in the congregation. “It’s just a matter of personal choice.”
Attendees old and young, those with children and those without, gathered in family circles or with friends, aware of the anxious swirl of news about the city, but not overly concerned about taking part in a large indoor gathering of the sort that remains banned in many states.
“If you’re uncomfortable, stay home,” said Jonathan Bonck, 33, who attended with his wife. Neither wore masks. “People are smart, they stay apart,” he added. Their 2-year-old spent the service in the church’s child care center with a handful of other young children.
The church took pains to maintain social distancing. Every other row of seats was roped off; ushers enforced spacing between families; there were floor markings by the elevators and bathrooms, and at the church’s well-staffed coffee shop, indicating six-foot spacing. Most of the staff wore masks.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom ordered seven counties, including Los Angeles, to shutter bars on Sunday as coronavirus cases surge in the state.
Newsom, the first governor in the nation to institute a statewide-stay-at-home order in March, also recommended that nine other counties, including the state capital of Sacramento, do the same.
Newsom’s order included several counties in the Central Valley, one of the most productive agricultural regions in the country.
The shutdown came two days after officials in Florida and Texas ordered bars closed amid soaring coronavirus case counts. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis attributed the move to widespread non-compliance with the state’s reopening guidelines.
On Friday, Newsom told reporters that the number of hospitalizations and intensive care unit patients in the state had risen by more than 3 and 4 percent, respectively, over the last 24 hours.
During the same news conference, Newsom said he told officials in Imperial County — a large agricultural area on the Mexican border — to reinstitute a stay-at-home order. Imperial was among the counties ordered to close its bars.
He said the county’s coronavirus positivity rate was nearly 23 percent over the last two weeks, or more than four times the state’s rate of 5.3 percent.
Newsom said county hospitals haven’t been able to handle the influx of patients. Over the last five weeks, 500 had been moved out of the county, he said.
Citing hospital officials in Imperial County, the Associated Press reported that the spike in cases was at least partly due to American citizens who live in Mexico traveling back and forth. The county of roughly 175,000 people is across the border from Mexicali, a city of 1 million.
A county supervisor, Luis Plancarte, told The Associated Press that county officials were as worried as Newsom was.
“We hear loudly the governor’s request,” he said.
Newsom introduced a plan for counties to begin reopening on April 14. They would have to meet several benchmarks, including a stable hospitalization rate and a positivity rate of less than 8 percent over the last week.
San Francisco Mayor London Breed said Friday that barber shops, nail salons and other business would not be allowed to open their doors Monday.
“Yesterday we saw 103 cases,” she said. “On June 15, when we first reopened outdoor dining and in-store retail, we had 20. At our current rate, the number could double rapidly.”
The Chicago Police Department is asking the public to come forward with any details regarding recent shootings that have killed at least three children in the city.
“We ALL need to be outraged by the violence we are seeing in our city,” Superintendent David Brown said in a statement, The Associated Press reported Sunday.
“This baby, and all of our residents, deserve better,” he added, referring to one incident. “This is not just a problem that Englewood needs to solve. This is not just a problem on the South Side or the West Side. We cannot compartmentalize the violence that is tearing families and communities apart.”
Shootings across Chicago over the weekend killed three children, including a 10-year-old girl who was struck in the head by a stray bullet, according to the AP.
Earlier on Saturday, a 1-year-old boy was killed and his mother was injured when a gunman opened fire on their vehicle, and a 17-year-old died at a hospital after he got into an altercation and someone fired shots, the news service noted.
There have been at least 10 shootings since Friday evening, according to the AP.
Mayor Lori Lightfoot (D) also urged the public to assist with public safety efforts.
“It’s on all of us to double down on our all-hands-on-deck public safety efforts with police officers, street outreach teams, trauma support workers, community and faith-based partners. We must ask ourselves: ‘What are we each doing to make this a season of bounty, not tragedy?’” she tweeted on Saturday.
We all have a role in this fight for the safety of our communities. I ask that anyone with information on these incidents please come forward or submit a tip anonymously at https://t.co/Tt6O9g49ZD.
— Mayor Lori Lightfoot (@chicagosmayor) June 27, 2020
Lightfoot also acknowledged the recent childhood fatalities.
“The pain of losing a child never goes away. Today, we lost more young people to the gun violence epidemic: a 17-year-old in Humboldt Park and a 1-year-old in Englewood. As a mother, I am tired of the funerals. I am tired of burying our children,” Lightfoot tweeted.
Father Mike Pfleger says that with every death of a child, we are burying our future. He’s right and we must do better. It’s on all of us. It’s on all of us to find the courage to be a part of the solution.
— Mayor Lori Lightfoot (@chicagosmayor) June 27, 2020
“Your lack of leadership on this important issue continues to fail the people you have sworn to protect,” Trump wrote, citing a Chicago Sun-Times article from June 8 about recent violence and murders in the city.
It is a response to the toppling of statues and monuments in recent weeks after the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis prompted protests for police reform and social justice.
But the order offers little in the way of new authority. It directs federal law enforcement officials to prosecute “to the fullest extent permitted” people who violate existing federal laws that already make it a crime to damage or destroy a monument or statue.
The order also urges prosecution of anyone who is caught “attacking, removing or defacing depictions of Jesus or other religious figures or religious artwork.”
Protesters across the country have knocked down monuments, mostly of Confederate generals. In Raleigh, N.C., the statues of two Confederate soldiers were torn down. And in San Francisco, a crowd toppled a bust of Ulysses S. Grant, despite the fact that he was a Union general who beat the Confederate Army. (Protesters noted that he was also a slave owner.)
In Washington, protesters knocked over a statue of Albert Pike, the only Confederate general honored in the city, and they tried — unsuccessfully — to take down a statue near the White House of Andrew Jackson, the nation’s seventh president.
President Donald Trump promoted a video on Twitter Sunday morning showing a man in a golf cart with Trump campaign gear shouting “white power.”
The video, which Trump said was from the Florida retirement community known as The Villages, featured a parade of golf carts, some with pro-Trump signs, driving past anti-Trump protesters who were shouting curses at them. The man who is heard shouting “white power” was responding to protesters shouting “racist.”
The tweet was removed from his feed hours later.
“Thank you to the great people of The Villages,” Trump had written. “The Radical Left Do Nothing Democrats will Fall in the Fall. Corrupt Joe is shot. See you soon!!!”
In a statement to reporters, White House deputy press secretary Judd Deere said Trump “is a big fan of The Villages. He did not hear the one statement made on the video. What he did see was tremendous enthusiasm from his many supporters.”
Speaking on CNN’s “State of the Union,” Sen. Tim Scott, R-S.C., said of Trump’s promotion “there’s no question he should not have retweeted it.”
“He should just take it down,” Scott said, adding he thinks the video is “indefensible.”
“We should take it down,” he said. “That’s what I think.”
Elsewhere on “State of the Union” on Sunday, Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar said “obviously neither the president, his administration nor I would do anything to be supportive of white supremacy or anything” of the like.
“I’ve not seen that, and so I don’t want to comment further on that,” Azar said after CNN’s Jake Tapper played the video on air. “But obviously the president and I and his whole administration would stand against any acts of white supremacy.”
The president has a history of problematic retweets dating back years, like when he promoted an account with the handle “WhiteGenocideTM” during the 2016 campaign and during recent months where he has increasingly retweeted accounts supportive or promoting the QAnon conspiracy theory.
Trump has also been accused of appearing sympathetic to white supremacists. In 2017, Trump famously said that there were “very fine people” among a group of white nationalists in Charlottesville, Virginia.
Trump has remained steadfast in his opposition to renaming military bases and removing statues honoring members of the Confederacy even as members of his own party express openness to doing so
On Saturday, Trump that a vote for him will be a vote to protect “our Heritage, History and LAW & ORDER!”
Donald Trump has deleted a tweet he sent featuring video of a Trump supporter shouting, “White power! White power!” after an outpouring of grief and outrage at racist language flowing directly from the White House once again.
The tweet was deleted after it drew fierce criticism from across the political spectrum, including from Tim Scott of South Carolina, the sole African American Republican in the Senate.
“There’s no question that he should not have retweeted it and he should just take it down,” Scott told CNN’s “State of the Union” program.
“It was so profanity laced, the entire thing was offensive. Certainly, the comment about the white power was offensive. It’s indefensible. We should take it down.”
Trump had left the tweet, featuring video of arguments among residents of The Villages, a predominantly white and conservative retirement community in Florida, posted on his Twitter feed for nearly four hours.
“Thank you to the great people of The Villages,” Trump tweeted about the footage, which begins with a white man driving a golf cart with a “Trump 2020” sign spouting racist rhetoric at white anti-Trump protesters.
White House deputy press secretary Judd Deere claimed that Trump had not heard the man screaming “white power” at the start of the video he tweeted.
“President Trump is a big fan of The Villages,” Deere said in the statement. “He did not hear the one statement made on the video.”
Cody Keenan, a former speechwriter for Barack Obama, said the tweet was part of Trump’s re-election strategy.
“How ‘bout we just skip past the kabuki where White House staff emails reporters anonymously to say they had nothing to do with it, every [Republican] senator pretends they haven’t seen it, and just accept that they’re all part of the Trump 2020 white power Covid rally ‘til the end,” Keenan tweeted.
Trump sent the tweet as he faces a difficult re-election bid, which in part involves a struggle to shore up support among his base of white and evangelical Christian voters. Polls indicate that a majority of that demographic has supported protests over the killing last month of George Floyd, an African American man, by a white police officer in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
The Floyd protests have launched what could be a moment of reckoning for racial justice, on issues ranging from unaccountable police killings to Confederate monuments to criminal justice reforms to the legacy of slavery to reparations.
Yet Trump has leaned into his opposition to the protests, threatening to deploy the US military in American cities, promising stiff penalties for defacing statues, tweeting “when the looting starts, the shooting starts” – a phrase famously used in the 1960s by a Miami police chief long accused of bigotry – and declaring himself the president of “law and order”.
On Sunday Trump, who is also facing a growing scandal over his handling of the coronavirus crisis, and intelligence indicating a Russian plot against American soldiers in Afghanistan, once again sought to stoke racial tensions.
Following his retweet of footage from The Villages, Trump sent a tweet in all caps that said, “the vast silent majority is alive and well!!” The phrase “silent majority” is associated with Richard Nixon’s political strategy to inflame racial anxiety to win votes.
In a separate appearance on CBS New’s Face the Nation, vice-president Mike Pence refused to use the phrase “Black Lives Matter”.
“So you won’t say ‘black lives matter?’” host John Dickerson asked Pence.
Challenged on Trump’s rhetoric Sunday morning in a separate CNN appearance, health secretary Alex Azar said he had not seen the most recent tweet – but asserted that Trump is not supportive of white supremacy.
“I’ve not seen that video or that tweet, but obviously neither the president, his administration nor I would do anything to be supportive of white supremacy or anything that would support discrimination of any kind,” Azar said. “[O]bviously, the President and I and his whole administration would stand against any acts of white supremacy.”
But many critics of the president see him as one of the most powerful proponents of white supremacy in the country’s history.
Andrew Stroehlein, European media director of Human Rights Watch, said Trump’s tweet was “not surprising for a man who’s called neo-Nazis “very fine people” and hired white nationalists to work in the White House, but still, immensely dangerous.
“With his poll numbers falling, he wants a race war,” Stroehlein tweeted.
“Our racist president, who retweeted a ‘white power’ video today, got caught covering up that Putin, who got him elected, was paying bounties for murdering American soldiers,” wrote Walter Shaub, former director of the office of government ethics, on Twitter. “His response is to lie, attack the press, and take no action against Putin. Trump is at war with America.”
President Trump denied Sunday that he’d ever been briefed on bounties Russia reportedly offered to Taliban-linked fighters to kill coalition forces in Afghanistan.
Alex Brandon/AP
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Alex Brandon/AP
President Trump denied Sunday that he’d ever been briefed on bounties Russia reportedly offered to Taliban-linked fighters to kill coalition forces in Afghanistan.
Alex Brandon/AP
President Trump is denying a New York Times report that he was briefed on an alleged Russian effort to pay bounties to Taliban-linked militants to kill Western forces — including U.S. troops — in Afghanistan.
Citing unnamed officials, the Times report, published Friday, details how U.S. intelligence officials reached the conclusion about the secret payments and then briefed the president in March. The White House National Security Council conferred an inter-agency meeting that same month to discuss the matter, according to the report. The finding was also included in the President’s Daily Brief, according to the Times.
President Trump denied the report in a series of tweets on Sunday, saying he was never briefed on the intelligence assessment.
“Nobody briefed or told me, @VP Pence, or Chief of Staff @MarkMeadows about the so-called attacks on our troops in Afghanistan by Russians, as reported through an “anonymous source” by the Fake News @nytimes Everybody is denying it & there have not been many attacks on us….,” Trump said.
…Nobody’s been tougher on Russia than the Trump Administration. With Corrupt Joe Biden & Obama, Russia had a field day, taking over important parts of Ukraine – Where’s Hunter? Probably just another phony Times hit job, just like their failed Russia Hoax. Who is their “source”?
The president followed-up the denial by saying “Nobody’s been tougher on Russia than the Trump Administration.” He went on to criticize former President Obama, the Times, presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden and his son Hunter.
“With Corrupt Joe Biden & Obama, Russia had a field day, taking over important parts of Ukraine – Where’s Hunter? Probably just another phony Times hit job, just like their failed Russia Hoax. Who is their ‘source’?” Trump tweeted.
The White House denied on Saturday that the president had been briefed on the matter, but as the Times notes, press secretary Kayleigh McEnany did not push back on the substance of the intelligence assessment.
A statement Saturday by John Ratcliffe, the director of national intelligence, also denied that the president was briefed on the issue, but also did not refute that Russia had offerred bounties in exchange for attacks on U.S. forces.
The Times, in its reporting, does not specify how many troops may have been killed by insurgents seeking monetary reward, but does say officials were confident that Russian operatives offered and paid bounties to militants for killing Americans. In a separate report by CNN, an unnamed European intelligence official said Russia also offered bounties for the killing of soldiers from the U.K.
According to the Times, U.S. officials have concluded that the bounty operation was orchestrated by the G.R.U., an arm of Russian military intelligence that has been linked to assassination attempts and other cloak and dagger operations, including the 2018 nerve agent poisoning of a former Russian spy in Salisbury, England.
The G.R.U. is the same unit that U.S. intelligence has implicated in efforts to sway the 2016 presidential election.
The Russian embassy in Washington denied the Times report in a tweet on Saturday, calling the report “fake news.” A spokesman for the Taliban told the newspaper the report was “baseless.”
Critics of President Trump called the reporting further evidence that the president has failed to adequately curb the influence of Russia, and instead sought to foster a cozy relationship with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Speaking from a virtual town hall on Saturday, former Vice President Biden said that if the the story was correct, then it was a betrayal to U.S. forces to fail to protect them in a war zone.
“Not only has he failed to sanction or impose any kind of consequences on Russia for this egregious violation of international law, Donald Trump has continued his embarrassing campaign of deference and debasing himself before Vladimir Putin,” Biden said.
In another tweet Sunday, Trump responded by calling his likely 2020 opponent corrupt and his comments on the Times story, “obviously written by his handlers.”
Pelosi said on ABC’s “This Week” that Trump “wants to ignore any allegation against Russia” after the White House denied a Friday New York Times report that he and Vice President Pence were briefed on the bounties. The president in a tweet early Sunday also denied he had been told about the reported bounties.
The Times report, citing White House officials, said Trump and Pence were briefed that Russian operatives offered payments to Taliban-linked militants in Afghanistan to kill coalition forces, including U.S. troops. It also said the National Security Council held a meeting on the subject in March.
“This is as bad as it gets, and yet the president will not confront the Russians on this score, denies being briefed,” Pelosi said on Sunday.
“I don’t know what the Russians have on the president, politically, personally, financially or whatever it is, but he wants to ignore, he wants to bring them back to the [Group of Eight] despite the annexation of Crimea and invasion of Ukraine,” she added.
If U.S. intelligence officials were aware of the bounties and Trump was not briefed, “what does that say about the concern that those who briefed the president have about not going anywhere near the Russia issue with this president?” Pelosi asked
“Whether he is or not, his administration knows,” Speaker Pelosi says as White House denies Trump was briefed.
When pressed on her claims that Russia has information on the president, she said, “How … else would you explain his refusal to even — to ignore again and again the intelligence that puts right at the Russian doorstep?”
“Now he’s saying this is fake news,” she added. “Why would he say that? Why wouldn’t he say, let’s look into it and see what this is?”
Pressed by @GStephanopoulos on her comments and whether she believes the Russians “have” something on President Trump, Speaker Nancy Pelosi refuses to deny it: “How else would you explain his refusal to even — to ignore again and again the intelligence.” https://t.co/rq4b7S2nbPpic.twitter.com/8OTw9ULZdg
The mayor of St. Louis is facing backlash for reading aloud during a public briefing the full names and street addresses of protesters who are calling on the city to defund the police department.
Democratic Mayor Lyda Krewson was answering questions during a Facebook Live briefing Friday afternoon, which she has held regularly during the coronavirus pandemic, when someone asked about a meeting she had with demonstrators outside City Hall earlier in the day.
But protesters had given her written outlines of their proposals for how the city could better allocate money that now goes to the police department, and Krewson stepped away from the camera to grab the papers from her desk as the briefing was still streaming live.
The mayor started reading the suggestions out loud, including giving out the first and last names of the writers, as well as the streets where they live. In some instances, she gave people’s exact addresses, KSDK reported. Many of the proposals suggested that the city should budget zero dollars for the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department.
During the Facebook Live video, which has since been deleted, Krewson said multiple times that she is against defunding the police, according to KSDK.
Her reading aloud protesters’ names and addresses prompted a wave of criticism, some calling her actions “shocking” or comparing them to doxxing, which is the broadcasting online of private or identifying information about an individual or organization.
St. Louis Alderwoman Megan Ellyia Green slammed Krewson, tweeting that it is “not cool to doxx my constituents who support #DefundThePolice on your FB live today. It’s a move designed to silence dissent, and it’s dangerous.”
“No leader should resort to intimidation of the residents they were elected to represent. Period,” tweeted Cara Spencer, another St. Louis alderwoman.
The ACLU of Missouri also condemned Krewson’s actions.
“It is shocking and misguided for Mayor Lyda Krewson of St. Louis, to broadcast the addresses of those who dare to express a different viewpoint on an issue of public concern. It serves no apparent purpose beyond intimidation,” said Sara Baker, ACLU of Missouri’s policy director, in a statement. “The chilling of debate should bother everyone, no matter whether they agree or disagree with the mayor on this particular issue.”
As of Saturday, at least 15,000 people had signed a Change.org petition calling for Krewson’s resignation, contending that she “directly endangered the lives of protesters by releasing their names and addresses.”
On Friday night, Krewson apologized in a statement “for identifying individuals who presented letters to me at City Hall as I was answering a routine question during one of my updates earlier today.”
“While this is public information, I did not intend to cause distress or harm to anyone. The post has been removed,” the statement said.
For some, such as Green, the apology is not enough.
“It’s not about intent. It’s about impact. The apology takes no responsibility for actions and no commitment to do differently in the future. @LydaKrewson put our residents at risk and needs to resign,” Green tweeted in response to the mayor’s statement.
Minutes later, an officer arrived and exchanged gunfire with the gunman.
“I’m told it was quite a bit of gunfire,” she said.
Another officer arrived on scene shortly after, and the gunman was shot at 3:48 p.m. The authorities did not publicly identify the man, saying they had not yet been able to reach next of kin.
Lieutenant Borden identified the victim as Martin Haro-Lozano, a Walmart employee.
She said the sheriff’s office had not yet identified a motive for the shooting. She said Walmart shooting was not connected to one earlier in the day in Shingletown, Calif., in which three people were killed.
A Walmart employee, Scott Thammakhanty, told The Record Searchlight, a newspaper in Redding, Calif., that he had heard gunshots and had seen people on the ground as he and other employees ran. He said that the gunman looked familiar but that he did not know his identity.
A number of employees barricaded themselves in the back of the distribution center, according to police radio transmissions at the time.
Scott Pope, a Walmart spokesman, said the company was deeply saddened by the incident.
“Our focus is on supporting our associates, as well as their families and co-workers in the facility,” he said in a statement. “This is an active police investigation and we will continue to work with Tehama County Sheriff’s Office and assist in their investigation in any way possible.”
Lacie Miller, the 37-year-old assistant manager of a nearby convenience store, said employees who had gathered outside of the building said that the vehicle crash had caused a fire at the distribution center.
The flag of the state of Mississippi flies in front of the Mississippi State Capitol dome on Jan. 10, 2019. Lawmakers have cleared the way for legislation to remove and replace the flag.
Brandon Dill/The Washington Post via Getty Images
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The flag of the state of Mississippi flies in front of the Mississippi State Capitol dome on Jan. 10, 2019. Lawmakers have cleared the way for legislation to remove and replace the flag.
Brandon Dill/The Washington Post via Getty Images
Lawmakers in Mississippi cleared the way to remove the Confederate battle emblem from the state flag on Saturday.
The state House and Senate both approved a resolution to suspend legislative deadlines and introduce a bill to have a commission redesign the 126-year-old state flag. Debate on that is expected on Sunday and it’s expected to pass.
Republican Gov. Tate Reeves says he’ll sign it into law.
“The argument over the 1894 flag has become as divisive as the flag itself and it’s time to end it,” Reeves wrote in a Facebook post on Saturday. “If they send me a bill this weekend, I will sign it.”
Reeves had long opposed the idea of changing the state symbol, which bears the Confederate battle flag at the top left corner, unless it was voted on by Mississippians. In 2001, voters in the state had just that chance, but they ultimately voted to keep the flag as it was designed.
“By changing our flag, we don’t abandon our founding principles,” Republican Speaker Pro Tempore Jason White said ahead of the vote, according to The Washington Post. “We embrace them more fully by doing what is right. We’re not moving further away from our Founding Fathers’ visions. We’re moving closer to them. We’re not destroying our heritage; we’re fulfilling it.”
The resolution calls for the immediate removal of the current flag and for a commission to design a new flag in which all Confederate symbols will be removed and the words “In God We Trust” will be added. The new design will be put to a public vote in November. If voters reject it, the commission will try again.
“Change is hard,” Republican House Speaker Philip Gunn said on Saturday, according to the Mississippi Clarion-Ledger. “People are going to resist initially, but I think over time it’s going to be proven that this was the right decision. We’re poised to reach our full potential now.”
“We should not be under any illusion that a vote in the Capitol is the end of what must be done — the job before us is to bring the state together and I intend to work night and day to do it,” Reeves wrote on Facebook on Saturday.
“It will be harder than recovering from tornadoes, harder than historic floods, harder than agency corruption, or prison riots or the coming hurricane season — even harder than battling the Coronavirus.”
The number of confirmed coronavirus cases worldwide surpassed 10 million Sunday, with the U.S. leading the way, according to data collected by Johns Hopkins University.
Roughly a quarter of the cases — 2,510,323 — are in the U.S., followed by Brazil at 1.3 million, Russia at just over 633,500 and India with around 528,800 as of Sunday morning ET. The disease’s global death count is closing in on half a million, at 499,124, according to JHU’s latest figures, again led by the U.S., which has reported 125,539 deaths.
Florida, Arizona and Nevada have all recorded daily highs for new coronavirus infections, highlighting the worsening spread of the outbreak in several southern and western states, which has prompting some local governments to roll back reopening plans.
Florida on Saturday morning reported 9,585 new infections in the last 24 hours, setting a record for new cases for a second-straight day. Meanwhile, Arizona recorded 3,591 new cases of COVID-19, the illness caused by the coronavirus, matching its prior record on June 23, while Nevada disclosed 1,099 new cases, double its previous high.
The surge in cases has been most pronounced in a handful of southern and western states that reopened earlier and more aggressively than other states, serving as a warning to the potentially illusory nature of any perceived progress in controlling the virus.
The new numbers come after the US, on Friday, recorded its largest daily case count of the pandemic, while Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease expert, said the government’s current strategy for finding and isolating infected people was “not working,” partly due to significant asymptomatic spread.
Changing geography of the outbreak
The worsening contagion in the south and west comes as northern states, notably New York and its neighbours, which were hit hardest initially, have reported declining cases and have begun to forge ahead with reopening plans.
Earlier this week New York, New Jersey and Connecticut imposed a 14-day mandatory quarantine on travellers from states with high infection rates like Texas and Florida, where some 13 percent of those tested on Friday came back positive.
Florida officials told bar owners on Friday to immediately stop serving alcohol on their premises, after permitting bars to reopen in early June.
While Texas Governor Greg Abbott, in a reversal of his early moves to relax restrictions, on Friday ordered bars across the state to close and required restaurants to limit indoor seating capacity to 50 percent.
The announcement came as Texas continued a 15-day streak of record hospitalisations across the state for COVID-19, with more than 5,100 people being treated for the disease on Friday, according to the Texas Tribune.
In an interview broadcast on Friday night, Abbott expressed remorse for the initial pace of reopening bars, which began in phases on May 22.
“If I could go back and redo anything, it probably would have been to slow down the opening of bars, now seeing in the aftermath of how quickly the coronavirus spread in the bar setting,” Abbott told the KVIA news station in El Paso.
Taking executive action to contain the spread of #COVID19.
But despite the skyrocketing case numbers, both Abbott and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis have refused to issue statewide mandates on mask-wearing, opting instead to leave that decision to local municipalities.
At a briefing on Friday, DeSantis blamed the spike in infections on young people interacting more in the last few weeks, adding that they faced a lower risk of dying than older people.
However, DeSantis acknowledged that those young people, even if they do not become hospitalised themselves, could transmit the virus to the elderly or people with conditions like diabetes which make them susceptible to severe outcomes with COVID-19.
Senator Lindsey Graham, the South Carolina Republican who is an outspoken supporter of Mr. Trump but sometimes tries to push him to more hawkish positions — such as opposing his plan to pull out of Syria — said on Twitter that he wanted the administration to take the intelligence assessment seriously and brief Congress on the matter.
“I expect the Trump Administration to take such allegations seriously and inform Congress immediately as to the reliability of these news reports,” Mr. Graham wrote.
The United States concluded months ago that the Russian intelligence unit, which has been linked to assassination attempts and other covert operations in Europe intended to destabilize the West or take revenge on turncoats, had covertly offered rewards for successful attacks last year.
In response to the intelligence assessment, senior administration aides developed an array of potential options — starting with making a diplomatic complaint to Moscow and a demand that it stop, along with an escalating series of sanctions and other more aggressive possible responses, according to officials familiar with internal deliberations.
But the White House has yet to decide on taking any step, the officials said in recent days.
Islamist militants, or armed criminal elements closely associated with them, are believed to have collected some bounty money, the officials said. Twenty Americans were killed in combat in Afghanistan in 2019, but it was not clear which killings were under suspicion.
The officials familiar with the intelligence did not explain the White House’s delay in deciding how to respond to the intelligence about Russia.
Afghanistan has been the site of proxy battles between Washington and Moscow before. In the 1980s, while the Soviet Union was mired in its own bloody war in the country, it was the United States that covertly helped arm the mujahedeen to fight against the Red Army in one of the last major confrontations of the Cold War.
After the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, Russia was largely supportive of the American effort to destroy Al Qaeda and topple the Taliban government. Russia declared the Taliban a terrorist organization in 2003, but recently their relationship has been warming, with Taliban leaders traveling to Moscow for peace talks.
Fatima Faizi contributed reporting from Kabul, Afghanistan.
Florida, Arizona and Texas are among a handful of states halting reopening plans amid the recent coronavirus surge. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and Texas Gov. Greg Abbott reimposed some restrictions on Friday, including shuttering bars. Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey stopped short of ordering new restrictions but said the state would slow plans to reopen.
All three states were among the first to lift the orders even as cases continued to climb nationwide.
Vice President Mike Pence is postponing campaign events in Florida and Arizona this week amid the virus spike, a Trump campaign spokesperson confirmed Saturday.
The U.S. set a single-day record of more than 40,000 new cases on Thursday, according to the most recent figures released by the Centers for Disease Control, and the number of people hospitalized with coronavirus continues to climb.
In a coronavirus task force briefing on Friday, Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said certain areas of the country are facing a “serious problem.”
“What goes on in one area of the country, ultimately could have an effect on the other areas of the country,” Fauci said.
Sheriff Wayne Ivey of the Brevard County Sheriff’s Office gives tips on how to survive an active shooter situation. He uses the 4 As: awareness, avoidance, arm and attack. Video provided by Brevard County Sheriff’s Office.
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Two are dead, including the suspect, and four are hurt after a shooting at the Red Bluff Walmart distribution center, the Tehama County Sheriff’s Office confirmed Saturday. The victim killed — an employee at the facility — has been identified as Martin Haro-Lozano, 45, of Orland.
Allison Hendrickson, a spokeswoman for Dignity Health North State, said four patients were in fair condition at St. Elizabeth Community Hospital in Red Bluff and two had died. She wasn’t immediately sure whether there were other victims at another hospital.
Little on the investigation has come out so far, but Tehama County Assistant Sheriff Phil Johnston said deputies have determined the shooter circled the parking lot four times before crashing into the building and opening fire with a semiautomatic long gun.
At least one person was struck by the suspect’s car, Johnston said. He said the shooter was able to enter the facility, where he shot at random. Johnston couldn’t provide details on when and where during the attack people were injured.
The shooter’s multi-round magazine held more than 10 rounds, making it illegal in California, Johnston said.
There also was a fire at the location, and the suspect appears to have rammed a vehicle into the building, officials said. Johnston could not say whether the fire started from the crash or if it was intentionally lit.
Johnston said later in the evening that the suspect and one victim, an employee, were dead. The suspect, a 31-year-old who still hasn’t been identified, also has a history with the workplace, Johnston said. He added that it has been about a year and a half since then. The motive still hasn’t been determined, he said.
Red Bluff police engaged in gunfire with the suspect shortly after, and he underwent surgery for a gunshot wound, Johnston said.
“I would estimate 20 to 30 rounds exchanged,” he said, noting that there were so many bullets fired the investigators did not yet have an accurate count.
Chief Kyle Sanders said the officers fired after the suspect first fired at them “multiple times.” The two officers who fired the shots are on paid administrative leave pending a routine investigation into the shooting of the suspect, Sanders said.
Meanwhile, officials initially said they hadn’t figured out whether the shooting is related to one earlier in the day in Shingletown, but Johnston later said they were separate incidents. Shasta County Sheriff’s officials have not responded to multiple requests for information about the Shingletown incident, and California Highway Patrol spokespeople referred all questions about it to the sheriff.
Scott Thammakhanty, an employee at the facility’s receiving center who unloads trucks, said he heard the shooter fire from what he judged to be a semi-automatic weapon.
“It went on and on — I don’t even know how many times he fired,” Thammakhanty said. “I just know it was a lot.”
Thammakhanty and others started running for their lives, and he saw people lying on the ground as he went, he said.
The shooter looked familiar to Thammakhanty, but he didn’t know his identity.
Vince Krick was waiting outside because his wife and son work at the facility. They weren’t hurt, but Krick was anxiously waiting to be reunited with them.
“It was real crazy, because, you know, you can’t do nothing,” Krick said.
Krick was on the way to pick up his wife when he saw the flames, he said. His wife texted that she was OK, but told him not to come to the front entrance.
The shooting happened right when a new group of workers starts their shift, he said.
Krick’s wife, a manager, was able to get some employees out the back of the building, he said.
Dispatchers reported at least one person had been shot, though the extent of injuries wasn’t immediately clear. A man had also reported his leg being run over when the shooter rammed a vehicle into the facility.
A woman was reportedly bleeding after jumping over a barbed-wire fence to escape.
“We need to get these people out of here,” a dispatcher said.
Dispatchers said they needed all units to respond to the facility on Highway 99 south of Red Bluff.
The suspect was described as being in a white vehicle that had wedged into the building and had what dispatchers believed was an assault-style weapon. The shooter was in the middle of the parking lot, dispatchers said.
Deputies said a fire had broken out by the time the suspect was detained and they couldn’t get into the building because of the blaze. Johnston said it wasn’t clear whether the suspect started the fire on purpose or the crash caused it.
The extent of any fatalities or injuries was not yet clear.
In an email, Walmart director of national media relations Scott Pope said the company is “aware of the situation” and working with law enforcement to investigate.
“We are deeply saddened by this tragic incident,” Pope wrote. “Our focus is on supporting our associates, as well as their families and co-workers in the facility. This is an active police investigation and we will continue to work with Tehama County Sheriff’s Office and assist in their investigation in any way possible.”
Damon Arthur is the Record Searchlight’s resources and environment reporter. He is among the first on the scene at breaking news incidents, reporting real time on Twitter at @damonarthur_RS. Damon is part of a dedicated team of journalists who investigate wrongdoing and find the unheard voices to tell the stories of the North State. He welcomes story tips at 530-338-8834 and damon.arthur@redding.com. Help local journalism thrive by subscribing today!
Alayna Shulman covers a little bit of everything for the Record Searchlight. In particular, she loves writing about the issues of this community through long-form storytelling. Her work often centers on local crime, features and politics, and has won awards for best writing, best business coverage and best investigative reporting in the California News Publishers Association’s Better Newspapers Contest. Follow her on Twitter (@ashulman_RS), call her at 530-225-8372 and, to support her work, please subscribe.
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