Good morning,
Seven weeks after the world recorded its 10 millionth case of the coronavirus, the global number of infections has topped 20m. Yet the World Health Organization chief, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, has at last sounded a note of optimism, pointing to countries that successfully prevented the spread of the disease, and to those now responding quickly to flare-ups, as representing “green shoots of hope”.
And just breaking on our live blog, Vladimir Putin has said Russia has become the first country to grant regulatory approval to a Covid-19 vaccine, although there are concerns about the speed at which the country is moving to rolling it out, and New Zealand has recorded its first community transmission of Covid-19 in over 100 days.
In the US, the Guardian and Kaiser Health News have been counting the cost of Covid-19 among American healthcare workers, more than 900 of whom have already died battling the pandemic. A significant minority of those victims were under 30, as Alastair Gee reports. In a new interactive database for our series Lost on the Frontline, we continue to document those workers individually, and to ask whether their deaths were truly necessary.
Andy Slavitt, who was head of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services under President Barack Obama, says medics have put their patients’ lives ahead of their own, and we must honour them by doing more to keep them safe.
The database reveals how often a simple lack of very basic gear is implicated in so many deaths. The degree to which they fought for our lives is nothing new. The degree to which they were abandoned is.
Trump might ban infected Americans from coming home
The Trump administration is considering a ban on US citizens and permanent residents entering the country if they could “reasonably” be believed to have contracted Covid-19. The draft regulation, which would augment sweeping immigration restrictions already introduced amid the pandemic, comes months after administration officials were said to be concerned that dual US-Mexico citizens might flee to the US if the coronavirus outbreak in Mexico worsened.
Congressional negotiations over a new Covid stimulus package remain stalled. Donald Trump claimed to have broken the deadlock by signing a series of executive orders over the weekend but, as Lauren Aratani explains, the reality is more complicated. Meanwhile, across the US, cities and states face deep budget deficits, with the coronavirus crisis threatening an “economic tsunami”.
Trump was briefly evacuated from a press briefing on Monday after the Secret Service shot an armed man outside the White House.
The president might accept the GOP nomination at Gettysburg. Trump, who has previously compared himself to Lincoln, said he was thinking of speaking at the civil war battlefield where the 16th president delivered his most celebrated address.
More than 100 were arrested after the violence in Chicago
It may have been sparked by a police shooting, but Chicago’s police superintendent David Brown said the unrest in the city’s downtown area on Sunday night “was not an organised protest” but “an incident of pure criminality”. More than 100 people were arrested on Monday after a spate of violence and looting in the Magnificent Mile shopping district, which Chicago’s mayor, Lori Lightfoot, described as “an assault on our city”.
The trouble began on Sunday afternoon after police shot a man who had opened fire on officers in the south side neighbourhood of Englewood, the Chicago PD said. On Monday, the city was partially shut down in response to the unrest, with downtown public transit services suspended and bridges over the Chicago River lifted.
The Belarus opposition leader had to flee to Lithuania
The Belarus opposition leader, Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, has fled to neighbouring Lithuania after challenging the results of Sunday’s presidential election, which the country’s longtime authoritarian ruler, Alexander Lukashenko, claims to have won in a landslide. Tikhanovskaya was detained by Belarusian authorities for seven hours on Monday after filing a complaint against vote-rigging, as the election result sparked a second night of protests in Minsk and other cities.
Belarus is at a crossroads, reports Shaun Walker, as experts liken the situation to the 1989 uprisings that toppled many of eastern Europe’s communist regimes.
Tikhanovskaya was a ‘Chernobyl child’, one of those directly or indirectly affected by the 1986 nuclear disaster, whom Irish families hosted for respite and recuperation. Henry Deane, who welcomed her as a teenager, remembers her as “humble”, “modest” and “clearly intelligent”.
In other news…
Lebanon’s government has fallen after more than a third of its ministers quit, forcing the resignation of the prime minister, Hassan Diab, days after the vast explosion that destroyed Beirut’s port, a disaster Diab blamed on endemic corruption.
Uber and Lyft must classify their drivers as employees under California’s strict new AB5 labour law, a judge in the state has ruled, dealing a serious blow to the structure of the gig economy.
New and established QAnon groups on Facebook are growing rapidly in at least 15 countries, the Guardian has found, helping to spread the baseless and dangerous conspiracy theory around the world.
Great reads
Why Cori Bush is poised to change politics
The Black Lives Matter activist Cori Bush recently unseated the Democratic incumbent in Missouri’s first congressional district, six years since the police killing of Michael Brown drove her to politics. At last, she tells Poppy Noor, “we have some type of hope.”
Steve Martin at 75: ‘There will never be another like him’
Master of slapstick, surrealist clown, art collector and the star of LA Story, the Jerk and Roxanne… As he turns 75, fellow comedians including Sarah Silverman, Alex Edelman and Michael Palin pay tribute to the “gloriously daft” Steve Martin.
Opinion: I set up a TikTok house
Trump has threatened to ban TikTok in the US, claiming the Chinese-owned app is a threat to national security. Timothy Armoo, who set up a house for TikTok creators, says a ban would destroy the creative communities built by its young American users.
When I first came across TikTok three years ago I quickly realised why young people have taken to it so strongly. It offers its users something completely unique: unlike the idealised lifestyle images that are the staple of Instagram or Facebook, TikTok gives users a chance to be authentic, creative, and let their hair down.
Last Thing: Scientists found a new ‘ocean world’
The largest object in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, the dwarf planet Ceres was long thought to be a chunk of barren space rock. But a recent space exploration mission has found that, in fact, there is an “extensive reservoir” of seawater beneath its surface.
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