Good morning.
It took 14 weeks for the US to go from zero to 1 million confirmed coronavirus cases. The journey from there to 2 million has taken just six weeks, according to the Johns Hopkins University tracker. Though experts believe the true number of infections is probably far greater than that, we are still in “the first 100 yards of this marathon,”, one infectious disease specialist told Oliver Milman.
As states and cities across the country continue to reopen, new hotspots of the disease are developing in regions including Texas, Florida and the Southwest, with nine California counties experiencing a rise in infections and hospitalisations. The state has at last cancelled two major music festivals, Coachella and Stagecoach, over concerns about coronavirus. The Guardian asked experts about the likelihood of a second wave.
Locking down a week earlier could have saved 20,000 British lives, according to the leading UK epidemiologist Prof Neil Ferguson, who was advising Boris Johnson’s government during the country’s initial outbreak.
George Floyd’s brother urges Congress to ‘do the right thing’
Raw with grief, but giving expression to a community’s collective pain, Philonise Floyd testified before Congress on Wednesday, just a day after his elder brother George had been laid to rest in Houston. “I’m tired,” he said.
I’m tired of the pain I’m feeling now, and I’m tired of the pain I feel every time another black person is killed for no reason. I’m here today to ask you to make it stop. Stop the pain.
Floyd was appearing alongside national civil rights leaders at a House hearing in Washington, where lawmakers are scrambling to devise a meaningful response to this moment of national reckoning over race and policing. Democrats have announced proposals for sweeping reforms, but Republicans appear hamstrung by Donald Trump’s crackdown on protests and blunt Twitter calls for “LAW & ORDER”.
The labor movement is reconsidering its relationship with police unions. The east coast branch of the Writers Guild of America is the first affiliate of the AFL-CIO to call for the removal of the International Union of Police Associations from the labor federation that represents them both.
Amazon is banning police use of its facial recognition software, Rekognition, for a year, after a backlash over the company’s ties to law enforcement.
The death of Manuel Ellis is being reinvestigated. Ellis, an African American man from Washington state, died in police custody in March. His death has since been ruled a homicide.
Will Trump stoke racial tensions with a comeback rally in Tulsa?
The Trump campaign is going back out on the road, with the president set to hold his first rally since early March in Tulsa, Oklahoma, next week, despite expert warnings that such mass gatherings could still exacerbate the spread of the coronavirus. Whether by accident or design, the event also threatens to inflame existing racial tensions, by taking place in a city with a history of racial violence, and on 19 June – known as Juneteenth – which is considered the anniversary of the end of slavery in the US.
Trump expressed his own reverence for American history on Wednesday, when he tweeted that he would “not even consider” renaming US military bases named after Confederate military leaders, despite the Pentagon indicating it is open to the idea.
Nascar is banning the Confederate flag from tracks over its symbolic links to slavery, in a move made under pressure from the sport’s sole black driver, Bubba Wallace, who is saving a retrograde organisation from itself, writes Andrew Lawrence.
Europe’s reckoning with its colonial past – and racist present
In the past, as protests over racial injustice played out across the Atlantic, many in Europe comforted themselves with the notion that “things are better” there than in the US. But Britain has its own long racist legacy, not to mention a shameful record of black Britons dying in police custody. And, as Gary Younge writes, Europeans’ cultural awareness of American racial violence has allowed many to ignore similar acts of brutality in their own countries.
In other news …
JK Rowling has revealed she is a survivor of domestic abuse and sexual assault, in a 3,600-word statement posted to her website after the controversy over the Harry Potter author’s public comments about transgender issues.
The US economy is expected to shrink by 6.5% this year as a result of the fallout from the coronavirus pandemic, the Fed has forecast, though the US central bank expects a return to growth in 2021.
A group of hackers for hire targeted ExxonMobil critics who were campaigning against the company for withholding information about the climate crisis, according to a report that refers to the hacker group as Dark Basin.
Zoom temporarily closed an activist group’s account after it hosted a video conference to mark the anniversary of China’s Tiananmen Square crackdown, raising fears the company was responding to pressure from Beijing.
Great reads
Who found Forrest Fenn’s hidden treasure?
After a decade-long treasure hunt that claimed up to five lives and consumed many others, someone has at last found the $2m treasure chest hidden in the Rockies by an eccentric New Mexico millionaire. For those who didn’t find it, the hunt’s conclusion has brought delight, dismay – and suspicion. Samuel Gilbert reports.
Bill Barr’s military masquerade
Hundreds of former justice department officials have expressed concern about the attorney general’s role in the crackdown on peaceful protests. And his denial that systemic racism remains a problem in US law enforcement has revived calls for Barr’s resignation, writes Tom McCarthy.
Opinion: Georgia’s election fiasco was a warning
Georgia’s primary on Tuesday experienced widespread equipment failures, diminished precinct numbers and triggered long lines in minority communities – evidence of voter suppression against the backdrop of a pandemic. The omens threaten a trainwreck in November, writes David Daley.
We are in deep, deep trouble and seemingly completely unprepared for this November’s elections. The alarm bells keep ringing – first in Ohio and Wisconsin, then in Pennsylvania and now Georgia. Yet we hurtle heedlessly toward chaos.
Last Thing: Banksy’s Bataclan mural found in Italy
The picture originally graced an emergency exit door at the Bataclan concert hall in Paris: a tribute to the 90 people killed by terrorists during a concert at the venue in 2015. Now, the mural by the British street artist Banksy, which was stolen last year, has been recovered by police from a farmhouse in Italy.
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