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Donald Trump denounced his Democratic rival Joe Biden on Tuesday for following coronavirus restrictions, while breaking them himself. Despite local officials urging him to wear a mask, Trump arrived at his hundreds-strong North Carolina rally without one, breaking both the state’s rules on compulsory face coverings and exceeding the number of people allowed at a gathering.
Trump isn’t the only one coming under fire for breaking coronavirus regulations. The three-time Olympic beach volleyball champion Kerri Walsh Jennings is facing a backlash after announcing she did not wear a face mask in public, as part of a “little exercise in being brave”. In San Francisco, more than a thousand people gathered to celebrate Burning Man, the desert arts festival that was cancelled due to coronavirus, in a move the city’s mayor described as “absolutely reckless”.
Iowa’s governor is refusing to close bars and make masks mandatory, despite the White House coronavirus taskforce recommending the measures, after coronavirus infections surged in some parts of the state.
“We can’t take American democracy for granted”: Concerns are mounting over the health of American democracy, from former presidents to human rights groups, ahead of the 2020 election.
Trump is trying to get the US government to fund his defamation case
The US justice department is attempting to take over Trump’s defence in a defamation case involving a writer who accused him of rape, in a move that could result in taxpayers funding any payouts. Yesterday, justice department lawyers filed papers attempting to shift the case to federal court and substitute the US for Trump as the defendant, meaning the US is liable for damages, rather than the president himself.
Congress has launched an investigation after 28 soldiers died at a Texas army base this year. The investigation will look into cases of sexual assault, disappearances, deaths and the subsequent leadership response.
Rescue missions were sent for more than 150 people trapped by California blazes
More than 150 people trapped by wildfires in remote locations had to be rescued on Tuesday, as one of California’s wildfires, the Creek fire, spread rapidly across more than 140,000 acres in the Sierra Nevada mountain range. Despite progress on other blazes, the Creek fire was still 0% contained on Tuesday afternoon.
The rescue missions, conducted by pilots using night goggles, come after the fires burned a record 2m acres – larger than the state of Delaware. Much of the US west is cloaked in smoke from the wildfires, causing some of the poorest air quality in the world.
The plight of thousands who lost their homes in 2018 wildfires in Paradise is likely to be repeated, as the climate crisis intensifies fire risk.
Illegal devices which bypass vehicles emissions controls are on sale across the US, with an estimated 500,000 diesel pickup trucks using them since 2009, and in doing so, producing hundreds of thousands of tons of excess nitrogen oxide.
In other news…
Thousands of people have fled a refugee camp after fires tore through it on the Greek island of Lesbos. The Moria camp hosts more than 12,000 people, four times its stated capacity, but there were no reports of injuries.
Police shot a 13-year-old boy with autism several times after his mother called for help when he experienced an episode at home. Golda Barton had told the officers her son was not armed and requested a crisis intervention team.
The Oscars have revealed new diversity requirements for best picture nominees, who must show they have encouraged diversity and equitable representation to win.
Keeping up with the Kardashians has announced it will end in early 2021, after a 14-year run during which its stars became household names.
Great reads
Time to pay attention: the increasing complexity of time travel in cinema
Time travel used to be a common plot device, but a recent cinematic trend has seen it re-emerge in “head-spinning detail”. With Christopher Nolan’s Tenet now out, Alex Hess explores the evolution of time travel in film.
How football unravelled a young man’s life
Zac Easter began to suffer severe memory loss, attributed to years of concussions suffered during football matches, in a downward spiral which eventually drove him to suicide. In an extract from a new book, Reid Forgives looks at the impact of football of on one family.
Opinion: The coronavirus pandemic could revolutionise the world economy
The economic impact of the coronavirus pandemic could trigger radical new policies and revolutionise the global economy, argues Adam Tooze, as he explores the history of the model of central banking we use today, and what the future could look like.
Prophets of the end of the dollar regime – under which the US dollar serves as the world’s main reserve currency – are right to sense change, but wrong in their diagnosis. It is not the end of the postwar world that we are witnessing, but the end of the uniform central banking model of the 1990s.
Last Thing: New Zealand PM kicks off election campaign at parents’ home … so they can babysit
The New Zealand prime minister, Jacinda Ardern, has launched her election campaign out of her parents’ house, so they can help with childcare duties. Ardern, who has a two-year-old daughter, said she was basing her campaign out of Morrinsville, where she grew up, to enable her to stay with her parents. “It’s just the realities of the road,” she said.
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