Summary
We’ll be shutting down the blog shortly. Here’s a look at today’s top news lines:
- Donald Trump wears mask in public for first time. Decision comes during visit to military hospital.
- South and west drive record-breaking surge in coronavirus cases across US. America is breaking records for new coronavirus cases almost every day and hospitals in the new hotspots in southern and western states are under severe strain.
- Fox host’s writer quits after racist and sexist online comments revealed. One of Fox News star Tucker Carlson’s top writers has resigned after a CNN investigation found he was posting racist and sexist comments online under a pseudonym.
- Trump’s commutation of ally Roger Stone’s sentence sparks outrage. Outrage is growing among opponents of the president’s decision to commute the prison sentence of his longtime friend and notorious Republican fixer.
- India reports record spike as coronavirus cases double in South Africa. Indian cases pass 800,000; Johannesburg struggles to find vital equipment; Texas warns ‘worst is yet to come’.
- Florida sets one-week record for confirmed coronavirus deaths. The state health department reported 96 new deaths today, bringing the total for the week to 496 or an average of nearly 71 per day.
Updated
In first, Trump wears face mask for Walter Reed visit
Donald Trump was wearing a black mask as he walked down the entryway of Walter Reed medical center accompanied by hospital staff, marking the first time he has been seen wearing a protective face covering in public.
The president did not stop to take questions from the White House pool before turning down a hallway. His meeting with injured troops and staff is closed to the press.
The only other time Trump was spotted wearing a mask was behind the scenes during a tour of a Ford plant in Michigan back in May.
“I think when you’re in a hospital, especially in that particular setting where you’re talking to a lot of soldiers and people that in some cases just got off the operating tables, I think it’s a great thing to wear a mask,” Trump said before boarding Marine One en route to the hospital. “I’ve never been against masks, but I do believe they have a time and a place.”
Updated
The gradual return of sports to American life continued on Saturday when the National Hot Rod Association resumed its season after a 138-day hiatus in front of an expected crowd of 3,000 to 4,000 at Lucas Oil Raceway in Indianapolis.
Fans were not allowed at Friday’s practice session but returned in a limited capacity for qualifying. NHRA president Glen Cromwell said ticket sales were capped at about 10 to 15% of normal capacity, the AP reported.
They also are expected to attend Sunday’s finals.
Most fans wore face coverings on a hot, sun-drenched day, complying with county guidelines, and observed social distancing in the stands, pits and at concession areas.
Donald Trump spoke with reporters for three minutes after emerging from the South Portico of the White House shortly after 5pm to depart for Walter Reed National Military Medical Center.
Asked whether he will wear a face mask in an environment with medically vulnerable troops, the US president said: “I love masks in the appropriate locations.”
Trump then addressed his commutation of longtime friend Roger Stone’s prison sentence, likening the treatment of the notorious Republican fixer to that of Michael Flynn and George Papadopoulos. He declined to answer whether he would consider pardoning Flynn and Papadopoulos.
“I’m happy with what I did,” Trump said. “Roger Stone was treated horribly. He was treated very unfairly.”
The president ended by saying prosecutors should take a look at Andrew McCabe, James Comey, Joe Biden and Barack Obama before walking away from the gathered pool to board Marine One, which took off from the South Lawn at 5.14pm en route to the Bethesda hospital.
Infections in Texas rose by 10,351 on Saturday to 250,462 in total, the highest single-day increase in the state since the pandemic started.
Current hospitalizations in the state rose by 81 to a record high of 10,083 on Saturday, the state’s health department said.
The New York Times reported earlier that in the popular beachfront vacation spot of Corpus Christi hardly any new infections were recorded in early June, before out-of-towners brought the virus back.
Now the city of 325,000 has one of the fastest-growing outbreaks in Texas.
The spike in coronavirus cases in the Las Vegas area contributed to the National Hockey League choosing two Canadian cities to complete its season, Reuters reports.
NHL deputy commissioner Bill Daly on Saturday called the rise a “concern” to the league. He adds that it was “one of the reasons” they chose to put games in Toronto and Edmonton instead of Vegas, which had long been considered a front-runner.
Each city will host 12 teams, sequestering players in so-called bubbles that encompass arenas, hotels and select restaurants. Fans will not attend the games.
Alberta premier Jason Kenney said hosting games could generate C$60 million ($44.16 million) in economic activity.
“That alone is not going to turn around our economy, but it’s a great shot in the arm,” he said.
Alberta’s unemployment rate was the second-highest in Canada in June as a crash in oil prices this spring forced energy companies to lay off workers and some businesses remained closed due to the pandemic.
The province’s chief medical officer has reassured the public that arriving hockey players will not accelerate the spread of the virus if they abide by certain conditions, which include daily testing and restricted movement.
An Arizona woman has laid the blame for her father’s death from coronavirus at the feet of the state’s Republican governor, Doug Ducey, in a searing obituary published this week in the Arizona Republic.
Mark Urquiza, a Mexican-American manufacturing worker from Phoenix, died on 30 June after a three-week battle with Covid-19 – and his daughter, Kristin, minced no words in her remembrance.
Powerful obituary in today’s AZ Republic. Regular people are starting to boil over pic.twitter.com/fNdL1bCDh2
— Bill Scheel (@billyscheel) July 9, 2020
“His death is due to the carelessness of the politicians who continue to jeopardize the health of brown bodies through a clear lack of leadership, refusal to acknowledge the severity of this crisis, and inability and unwillingness to give clear and decisive direction on how to minimize risk,” she wrote.
Hospital caseloads have surged since Arizona became one of the hotspots for the coronavirus after Ducey relaxed stay-home orders and other restrictions in May.
Arizona’s health officials reported an additional 69 deaths from the coronavirus outbreak on Saturday, brining the overall number of confirmed dead to more than 2,150.
The state added 3,038 confirmed cases in the last day, raising the overall count to 119,930. Arizona also set a record with 3,485 patients hospitalized for Covid-19 as of Friday.
Fox News has addressed the resignation of one of Tucker Carlson’s top writers, who was revealed to have been posting racist and sexist comments online under a pseudonym.
A CNN investigation discovered Blake Neff regularly posted offensive language under the name “CharlesXII” on an online forum called AutoAdmit.
Fox News CEO Suzanne Scott and president Jay Wallace decried Neff’s “abhorrent conduct” in an internal memo sent to all employees on Saturday:
Dear colleagues,
Yesterday we learned that now former employee Blake Neff, a writer on Tucker Carlson Tonight, made horrendous and deeply offensive racist, sexist and homophobic comments under a pseudonym on the forum AutoAdmit.
We want to make abundantly clear that FOX News Media strongly condemns this horrific racist, misogynistic and homophobic behavior. Neff’s abhorrent conduct on this forum was never divulged to the show or the network until Friday, at which point we swiftly accepted his resignation. Make no mistake, actions such as his cannot and will not be tolerated at any time in any part of our work force.
Tucker will be addressing this on his show on Monday night.
Thank you,
Suzanne & Jay
Carlson has called Neff a “wonderful writer” and in an interview with Dartmouth’s alumni magazine, Neff said: “Anything [Carlson is] reading off the teleprompter, the first draft was written by me.”
Donald Trump returned to the White House from today’s golf course visit at 2.52pm and is due to depart for Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda at 5 today.
The otherwise routine photo opportunity is noteworthy because it’s expected to the first time the US president is officially seen wearing a face mask in public.
“I’m going to Walter Reed to see some of our great soldiers who have been injured. Badly injured. And also see some of our Covid workers, people who have done such a great job,” Trump said on Friday. “And I expect to be wearing a mask when I go into Walter Reed. You’re in a hospital so I think it’s a very appropriate thing.”
The only other time Trump was spotted wearing a mask was behind the scenes during a May tour of the Ford Rawsonville Components Plant in Ypsilanti, Michigan.
For months Trump has resisted wearing a protective face covering in an effort to project an image of strength and virility, though in recent weeks he’s expressed a more favorable view of what’s been stressed by public health experts as a critical preventative measure in the fight to contain the coronavirus pandemic.
“I’m all for masks,” Trump told Fox Business Network earlier this month. “If I were in a tight situation with people I would absolutely” wear a mask, he added.
The governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis, has said during a press conference on the Covid-19 crisis that 427 additional cases of the drug Remdesivir had been delivered to Florida’s hospitals.
He said the drug was unlikely to make a difference for severely ill patients, but was likely to help many patients “as they come in” while only mildly ill with Covid-19.
The rate of coronavirus infections among care staff in the state stood at 2.4% after 70,000 tests, DeSantis said, a number he described as “very, very low”.
The governor added that 12 “Covid-only” nursing home facilities had been created across Florida, and that the state was working on expanding the number of beds in these units from 750.
DeSantis advised “vulnerable” people in high-risk groups to continue to avoid contact with others, and warned that socializing indoors with other households would increase transmission.
DeSantis emphasised the need for children to attend school again, and said online tuition could not be a substitute for in-person attendance, adding that he believes the negative impact of non-attendance outweighs the risk of transmission among pupils.
Updated
A commission at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill has voted in favor of a recommendation to rename four campus buildings that currently have ties to slaveholders or white supremacists.
According to the Associated Press:
The recommendation from the Commission on History, Race & A Way Forward on Friday will go to school’s chancellor, who can then decide to forward it to the Board of Trustees, the Charlotte Observer reported. The board, scheduled to meet Thursday, is expected to discuss a policy to change the names of facilities on campus.
The four buildings at issue are named after men who “used their positions to impose and maintain violent systems of racial subjugation,” said history professor Jim Leloudis, who co-chairs the commission.
The recommendation comes after the university last month lifted a moratorium that had been in place since 2015 preventing the school from removing names on campus buildings that may be associated with slavery, segregation and white supremacy.
The newspaper reported the Daniels Building is named after former newspaper publisher and lifelong white supremacist Josephus Daniels, while Carr Building holds the name of Ku Klux Klan supporter Julian S. Carr. Carr gave a racist speech during the dedication of the Confederate statue on campus known as “Silent Sam,” which was torn down by protesters in 2018.
Donald Trump’s presidential motorcade departed Trump National Golf Club at 2.10pm, according to a pool report. The White House has yet to provide any information on the president’s activities, but NBC News cameras captured the president on the course.
Today’s pool reporter notes a mix of about 20 supporters and protesters gathered outside the entrance to the golf club to greet the motorcade:
The scene was quite spirited while pool waited for the president to depart.
One supporter was particularly animated, repeatedly clapping and chanting “keep America great” and “four more years.”
Protesters at one point chanted “136,000 dead, bounties on our soldiers’ heads.”
There were a few new signs added to the mix. One read “I beg your pardon I want you out of the Rose Garden.” Another banner said “Putin’s Apprentice.” One sign said “130K deaths.”
A Jeep drove by with an American flag and a Trump 2020 flag. It made several loops up and down the road outside the property, slowing down each time it passed.
Law enforcement walked over just before the motorcade left to ask the demonstrators to back up from the road slightly. The group complied without issue.
Today’s trip marked Trump’s 260th visit to a golf course since taking office, according to the website trumpgolfcount.com.
Afternoon summary
US politics-related news has been dominated so far today by the coronavirus surge continuing and worsening in southern and western hotspots, with another record of daily new cases set yesterday in the US.
There will be much more news as the day continues. Donald Trump has postponed the rally he was going to hold tonight in New Hampshire.
But once he gets off the golf course, he is later going to the Walter Read military hospital, which is not very far from the White House, to visit health workers and veterans.
So far today:
- Coronavirus cases and now deaths are rising in Florida, where the president visited yesterday and went to several locations but barely spoke about the public health crisis.
- Arizona’s stock of adult intensive care unit beds across the state are now 90% occupied, up from 89% the day before, as hospitals fill.
- After falling consistently in recent weeks, deaths from coronavirus in the US are starting to rise again.
- Donald Trump went to his golf course in Virginia, where he was greeted outside by some supporters and some protesters.
- There has been some pointed outrage against Donald Trump’s announcement last night that he’s commuting the upcoming jail term of Republican operative Roger Stone. Senior Democrats raged, one senior Republican joined in.
- One of Fox News star Tucker Carlson’s leading writers, Blake Neff, has resigned after prejudiced writings of his emerged into the sunlight.
Updated
Record deaths in Florida
Florida has set a one-week record of nearly 500 confirmed coronavirus deaths.
The state health department reported 96 new deaths today, bringing the total for the week to 496 or an average of nearly 71 per day.
A record 120 deaths were reported on Thursday, The Associated Press reports. Three weeks ago, Florida’s weekly average for deaths stood at 30 per day.
The state on Saturday confirmed 9,960 new coronavirus cases and 421 addition hospitalizations. Since March 1, when the first Florida infections were recorded, the state has reported 254,511 confirmed cases and 4,301 deaths.
The previous weekly record average of 60 deaths per day was set May 8. Throughout May and into June, the state reopened much of its economy with some restrictions.
Testing has increased, but the percentage of people testing positive has risen. A month ago, fewer than 5% of tests came up positive on a daily average. Over the past week, the daily average exceeded 19%.
Arizona hospitals, intensive care units, filling up
Rapid case increases and hospitalizations have made Arizona one of the worst hot spots in the nation for Covid-19.
The disease is widespread in the state, and health officials caution people to stay home unless necessary to leave - and to wear masks in public, the Arizona Republic newspaper reported today.
Arizona adult intensive care unit beds in use by all patients rose to 90% yesterday compared with 89% the previous day, the state health department reported today, via Reuters.
During the past three weeks, the number of coronavirus cases iin Arizona jumped by 150% and tests increased by just 71%, the Republic reported, adding:
Arizona reported another 3,028 Covid-19 cases on Saturday and hospital metrics remained high two days after Governor Doug Ducey urged Arizonans to stay home but shied away from major policy changes.
Identified cases rose to 119,930 and known deaths total 2,151, according to the daily report by the Arizona Department of Health Services. The state does not report the number of recovered cases, though it does report hospital discharges.
Hospitalizations, ICU beds and ventilators in use by suspected and confirmed Covid-19 patients hit new records on Friday, according to hospital data reported to the state. Emergency room visits dropped after reaching a record of 2,008 on Tuesday.
Saturday’s dashboard shows 88% of current inpatient beds and 90% of ICU beds were in use, which includes people being treated for Covid-19 and other patients. Most people who get the disease are not hospitalized.
US coronavirus deaths on the rise again
A long-expected upturn in US coronavirus deaths has begun, driven by fatalities in states in the south and west, where cases have been surging calamitously, according to data on the pandemic.
The number of deaths per day from the virus had been falling in May and June and even remained down as states like Florida and Texas saw explosions in cases and hospitalizations and reported daily US infections broke records several times in recent days, the Associated Press reports.
Scientists warned it wouldn’t last. A coronavirus death, when it occurs, typically comes several weeks after a person is first infected. And experts predicted states that saw increases in cases and hospitalizations would, at some point, see deaths rise too.
Now that’s happening. “It’s consistently picking up. And it’s picking up at the time you’d expect it to,” said William Hanage, a Harvard University infectious diseases researcher.
According to an Associated Press analysis of data from Johns Hopkins University, the seven-day rolling average for daily reported deaths in the US has increased from 578 two weeks ago to 664 on July 10, though still well below the heights hit in April.
Daily reported deaths increased in 27 states over that time period, but the majority of those states are averaging under 15 new deaths per day. A smaller group of states has been driving the nationwide increase in deaths.
California is averaging 91 reported deaths per day while Texas is close behind with 66, but Florida, Arizona, Illinois, New Jersey and South Carolina also saw sizable rises.
New Jersey’s recent jump is thought to be partially attributable to its less frequent reporting of probable deaths.
The impact has already been felt by families who lost kin and by the health care workers who tried to save them.
Rublas Ruiz, a Miami intensive care unit nurse, recently broke down in tears during a birthday dinner with his wife and daughter. He said he was overcome by the number of patients who have died in his care.
“I counted like 10 patients in less than four days in our ICU and then I stopped doing that because there were so many,” said the 41-year-old nurse at Kendall Regional Medical Center who lost another patient Monday.
The virus has killed more than 134,000 people in the US and more than a half-million worldwide, according to Johns Hopkins University, one of the most reliable trackers of the pandemic, though the true numbers are believed to be higher because a lack of official reporting of deaths or misclassification of cause of death by authorities.
The Associated Press reports that beekeepers have been declared essential workers in Washington DC during the pandemic. Here’s more on the subject from the AP:
The coronavirus outbreak coincided with the start of warmer weather, when bees naturally begin separating from their hives. When district officials began looking at the possibility of shutting down the city due to the outbreak, Toni Burnham of the DC Beekeepers Alliance reached out to her contact at the DC Department of Energy & Environment.
“When I saw the lockdown happening and really scary quarantining things, I called up our regulators and said essentially, ‘If we’re going to catch swarms we need to not be arrested.’ They took care of it, she said.
“Beekeepers needed to be essential because often the hives that they keep are not on their property,” says Tommy Wells, the department’s director and a former member of the City Council. “So, they need to be able to travel and get to their bee colonies.”
Republican senator Kelly Loeffler, who also owns the WNBA’s Atlanta Dream, objected to proposal for players to wear Black Lives Matter slogans when the league resumes later this summer.
“I adamantly oppose the Black Lives Matter political movement, which has advocated for the defunding of police, called for the removal of Jesus from churches and the disruption of the nuclear family structure, harbored anti-Semitic views, and promoted violence and destruction across the country,” wrote earlier this week. “I believe it is totally misaligned with the values and goals of the WNBA and the Atlanta Dream, where we support tolerance and inclusion.”
Black Lives Matter is a decentralized movement and does not have official policies. Loeffler’s reference to Jesus may be due to the objection of some supporters to depictions of Jesus as a white European.
Glory Johnson’s signature was incorrectly left off of this statement. She contributed to it, stands by it and her signature should also be at the end of it. pic.twitter.com/BMUcHj8sRH
— Atlanta Dream (@AtlantaDream) July 11, 2020
On Friday, the Dream players told Loeffler what they thought in a statement on Friday on Twitter. “Our team is united in the Movement for Black Lives. It is not extreme to demand change after centuries of inequality. This is not a political statement. This is a statement of humanity,” they wrote.
Hispanic supporters of Donald Trump sat around the cabinet table, lavished him with praise and promised: “We will rebuild America with you, and we will make America great again.” For a moment, in his self-affirming White House bubble, it seemed the US president remained master of his destiny.
But when reporters questioned him, Trump answered only one. Then he was done. A White House staffer bellowed forcefully at the assembled media: “Let’s go! Let’s go! Keep going! Let’s go! Come on, we’re done! Let’s go!” It was a sign of how the president has become less indulgent of unfriendly media questions than when he thought he was riding high.
Trump is in trouble. The coronavirus has killed more than 130,000 Americans, tens of millions of people have lost their jobs and there has been a tectonic cultural shift for racial justice. Opinion polls suggest he is the worst-placed incumbent since Jimmy Carter was hammered by Ronald Reagan in 1980, leaving his Republican party somewhere between anxiety and panic about November’s elections for the White House and Congress.
“The mood is like probably what it felt like when you were on the Titanic,” said Joe Walsh, a former congressman from Illinois. “These cowardly Republicans in the Senate and House know Trump’s going to get destroyed in November but they’re tied to him and they’re gonna go down with him and they have no choice, and I think they realise that.”
The sinking ship metaphor comes up again and again among Republicans interviewed by the Guardian and other media outlets.
Biden leads Trump by 52% to 40% in a Guardian/Opinium Research poll conducted in late June. Numerous other polls agree the Democrat has a double-digit lead and, crucially, put him ahead in six battleground states. Two in three people now disapprove of Trump’s handling of the pandemic, according to an ABC News/Ipsos poll, with the percentage of Republicans who approve sinking from 90% in mid-June to 78% now.
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Florida reports record single-day death total
The Florida Department of Health reports that 188 people died from Covid-19 on Friday, a new record for a single day in the state. The previous highest total was 120 on 9 July. There were also 10,360 new cases of the virus.
While cases surge around the US, New York is a reminder that things can get better.
At the peak of the state’s outbreak, more than 800 people died of Covid-19 a day in New York (for context, 827 died from the virus in the whole of the US yesterday). But on Saturday, New York governor Andrew Cuomo reported seven people have died of the virus over the last three days, the lowest three-day total since March.
Today's update on the numbers:
— Andrew Cuomo (@NYGovCuomo) July 11, 2020
69,203 tests were performed yesterday. 730 tests came back positive (1.05% of total).
Total hospitalizations fell to 799
Sadly, there were 6 COVID fatalities yesterday. pic.twitter.com/mAwlD98Tr1
While around 20% of those taking tests in Florida and Texas are testing positive, the figure is closer to 1% in New York: 730 of the more than 69,000 who took the test on Friday in New York proved to have the virus.
“I urge residents to stay New York tough and not give up the ground we’ve worked so hard to gain together, particularly in the face of rising cases throughout the country and compliance issues here at home,” Cuomo said.
Updated
Gone golfing
By two minutes to 10 this morning, the president was at his golf club in Sterling, Virginia, a short drive from the White House, even as the coronavirus largely spreads out of control in what is shaping up to the worse surge yet of the outbreak in the US.
Pres Trump has arrived at his golf club in Sterling, VA. By my count, it's his 84th time there, topping his 83 visits to his club in West Palm Beach, FL
— Mark Knoller (@markknoller) July 11, 2020
His club, as in he owns it. Duty reporters on the White House beat report that there were a handful of onlookers as the president’s motorcade drove onto the property.
“One man walking his dog gave a thumbs down as the motorcade drove by. On one side of the street near the entrance to the club were three Trump supporters. One man was flashing thumbs up and another saluted.
“On the other side of the street were a few protesters holding signs. One read “SCOTUS not drinking your Kool-Aid?” and another read “WOAT Worst of All Time,” today’s pool reporter wrote.
For readers in parts of the world beyond America who may not be so familiar, Scotus = the Supreme Court of the United States, which has ruled against the Trump administration four times in recent big cases, despite Trump nominating two conservative justices to the bench which tipped the court to the right.
Kool-Aid is a kind of vivid-hued energy soft drink and if you’ve “drunk the Kool-Aid” about a person or thing it, these days it basically implies that you’ve come under their spell, with risk attached.
The origin of the Kool-Aid phrase is generally reported to be from the terrible events involving the Rev Jim Jones, the charismatic leader of an American cult in the Guyanese jungle, who ordered his followers to murder a US congressman and several journalists, then commit mass suicide in 1978 by drinking cyanide-laced fruit punch.
As the Guardian wrote in 2018: The Jonestown massacre was, before 9/11, the largest single incident of intentional civilian death in American history. More than 900 people died, many children. It was also a devastating cultural trauma: the end of the last strains of a certain kind of 1960s idealism and 1970s radicalism. Jonestown’s legacy lives on in the ironic phrase “drink the Kool-Aid”. (In actuality it was Fla-Vor-Aid).
It’s commonly used as a bitter-sweet joke, about becoming obsessed with something/someone risky or falling under their spell.
In this case it’s meant to reassure that the Supreme Court hasn’t succumbed blindly to presidential influence or pressure on that independent branch of the US government.
Updated
A top health expert has warned that failing to curb the spread of Covid-19 risks plunging the US into instability.
“We will have hospitals overwhelmed and not only in terms of ICU beds and hospitals – and that’s bad – but exhausted hospital staff and hospital staff that [are] getting ill themselves,” Dr Peter Hotez, the dean of tropical medicine at Baylor College of Medicine, told CNN on Friday night. “So, we won’t have enough manpower, human power, to manage all of this.”
Hotez added that if the virus is not brought under control the US could see “one of the most unstable times in the history of our country.”
Covid infections were rising in 41 US states as of Friday, and more isolated areas are now seeing an uptick in numbers - previously the virus had mainly been restricted to urban regions. The 66,627 new cases on Friday were a new record for the US.
On Friday, the nation’s top infectious disease expert, Dr Anthony Fauci, told the Financial Times he had not directly briefed the president in two months.
“You have a random virus jump species from an animal to a human that is spectacularly efficient in spreading from human to human, and has a high degree, relatively speaking, of morbidity and mortality,” Fauci told the FT. “We are living in the perfect storm right now.”
Outrage grows of Trump's Roger Stone decision
Outrage is growing among opponents of Donald Trump’s decision to commute the prison sentence of his longtime friend and notorious Republican fixer Roger Stone despite the US attorney general having declared Stone’s conviction “righteous”.
Criticism on Saturday came from both sides of the political aisle.
Adam Schiff, a California Democrat and chairmen of the House intelligence committee – the congressional panel Stone was convicted of lying to about aspects of the Trump-Russia investigation – called the decision “destructive of the criminal justice system and the rule of law” on Saturday morning.
Senator Mitt Romney, a Republican of Utah, described the decision as “unprecedented, historic corruption”.
Unprecedented, historic corruption: an American president commutes the sentence of a person convicted by a jury of lying to shield that very president.
— Mitt Romney (@MittRomney) July 11, 2020
Trump commuted the sentence of Stone on Friday night. He was a former campaign adviser to the president and was due on Tuesday to begin a sentence of three years and four months in jail.
Stone, 67, was convicted in November 2019 of obstructing a congressional investigation into whether the Trump campaign colluded with Russia to win the 2016 election.
Trump said that Stone was targeted in an “illegal witch-hunt”, prompting the global politics professor and political columnist Brian Klass to tweet on Saturday: “This is a complete lie. Roger Stone committed a series of well-documented crimes that are not seriously contested.”
He added: “This is what despots do: wield the law like a weapon to attack political opponents and protect loyal cronies. It’s a disgraceful, dark day for American democracy.”
Stone was convicted in November 2019 of seven crimes, including obstruction of justice, lying to Congress and witness tampering in the congressional investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.
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Updated
As Disney World starts its reopening on Saturday, Florida has 7,063 people in hospital with Covid-19, according to data from the Agency for Health Care Administration. Orange county, where Disney World is located has 475 Covid patients. More than 40 hospitals across the state have maxed out their intensive care unit capacity, NBC News reported on Friday.
Magic Kingdom and Animal Kingdom will open today with the Epcot Center and Hollywood Studios due to open on Wednesday. The resort will also host the NBA season starting later this month, while Major League Soccer is also hosting a month-long tournament on the premises.
Top writer for Fox's Tucker Carlson resigns
One of Fox host Tucker Carlson’s top writers has resigned after a CNN investigation found he was posting racist and sexist comment online under a pseudonym. Under the name “CharlesXII”, Blake Neff regularly posted offensive language an online forum called AutoAdmit.
In June, for example, Neff wrote, “Black doods staying inside playing Call of Duty is probably one of the biggest factors keeping crime down.” Neff also harassed a woman on the forum, posting information about her personal life and encouraging other users to post private information about her.
Carlson has called Neff a “wonderful writer” and in an interview with Dartmouth’s alumni magazine, Neff said: “Anything [Carlson is] reading off the teleprompter, the first draft was written by me.”
Carlson has not commented directly on Neff’s resignation but on Friday night’s show, he appeared to reference the story when he attacked “cancel culture”.
“We are in a situation where it’s really individuals against the mob. Online, other news organizations – CNN particularly,” said Carlson. He added: “How can people stand up to the mob and prevail?”
Carlson, one of Donald Trump’s favourite Fox News personalities, recently targeted Democratic senator and Iraq war veteran Tammy Duckworth, calling her a “coward” on Tuesday’s show. Duckworth, a former helicopter pilot, lost her legs after her aircraft was hit by enemy fire in Iraq.
Updated
Good morning. There were more grim Covid-19 figures on Friday as another record was set for new cases of the virus in the US, 66,627. Hospitals in the south felt the strain in particular as Florida and Texas both recorded more than 10,000 new cases. In Texas and Florida around 20% of Covid tests are coming back as positive, in Arizona it is even higher at around 30%, those are staggeringly high proportions and greater than we usually see.
We’ll also be looking at the reaction to Donald Trump’s decision to commute the prison sentence of his long-time friend and advisor, Roger Stone. Elsewhere, the president surprisingly told Telemundo that he wants to prompt legislation that will help Dreamers get a path to US citizenship under the DACA program, not something that you would play well among his most ardent supporters.
Updated
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