| As coronavirus spreads to people under 40, it's making them sicker — and for longer — than once thought Posted: 29 Jun 2020 04:50 PM PDT  Once assumed to be safe from the dangers of COVID-19, younger adults share their prolonged struggles with the disease.
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| McGrath wins Kentucky Dem primary; McConnell showdown awaits Posted: 29 Jun 2020 10:04 PM PDT  Former Marine pilot Amy McGrath overcame a bumpier-than-expected Kentucky primary to win the Democratic U.S. Senate nomination Tuesday, fending off progressive Charles Booker to set up a bruising, big-spending showdown with Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. Voting ended June 23, but it took a week until McGrath could be declared the winner due to the race's tight margins and a deluge of mail-in ballots. It was a narrow victory for McGrath.
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| Homeowner shoots woman trying to steal his Nazi flag, Oklahoma cops say Posted: 30 Jun 2020 03:56 PM PDT  Authorities said the victim is expected to recover.
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| Radiation Leak in Europe Points to a Possible Russian Weapons Test Posted: 29 Jun 2020 02:15 PM PDT  This isn't the first time Europe's detected radiation leaks likely originating from Russia.
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| Vice President Mike Pence discloses donors who helped pay nearly $500K in legal bills from Mueller investigation Posted: 30 Jun 2020 12:16 PM PDT  Vice President Mike Pence received nearly $500,000 from a dozen contributors to help him pay his legal bills from special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation.
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| Heavily armed riot police break up peaceful violin vigil for young black man killed by fellow officers Posted: 30 Jun 2020 01:53 AM PDT  Armed officers in Colorado used tear gas against protesters this weekend, as thousands attended a vigil for Elijah McClain, a 23-year-old who died after police put him in a chokehold that has since been banned.Riot police arrived at the City Centre Park in Aurora, Colorado, on Saturday night where thousands had marched and chanted some hours earlier.
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| China enacts sweeping national security law seen as major blow to Hong Kong autonomy Posted: 30 Jun 2020 06:13 AM PDT  "It's really the biggest crisis Hong Kong has faced in its modern history," said China-watcher Benedict Rogers.
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| The Texas Medical Center scrubbed data showing ICU beds at full capacity as the state's coronavirus cases spike Posted: 29 Jun 2020 08:01 AM PDT  The medical center had no empty ICU beds by Thursday. Its ICU capacity is usually between 70% and 80% of its total stock.
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| Study This Submarine: Could It Sink a U.S. Navy Aircraft Carrier? Posted: 29 Jun 2020 11:00 PM PDT  "The ambush tactics for which the mini-sub is designed seem to fit the pattern of recent Iranian weapons procurement and their expressed interest in building a robust anti-access/area denial capability."
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| Pakistani PM says 'no doubt' that India was behind stock exchange attack Posted: 30 Jun 2020 04:37 AM PDT  Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan told parliament on Tuesday he had no doubt that India was behind an attack on the stock exchange building in the southern city of Karachi. Four gunmen armed with grenades attacked the Pakistan Stock Exchange on Monday, killing two guards and a policeman before security forces killed the attackers. "There is no doubt that India is behind the attack," Khan said in his address to parliament - a charge that India had denied a day earlier.
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| Supreme Court declines to hear border wall challenge Posted: 29 Jun 2020 07:01 AM PDT  The Supreme Court is leaving in place a decision that rejected environmental groups' challenge to sections of wall the Trump administration is building along the U.S. border with Mexico. The high court on Monday declined to hear an appeal involving construction of 145 miles (233 kilometers) of steel-bollard walls along the border in Arizona, California, New Mexico and Texas. The Center for Biological Diversity, the Animal Legal Defense Fund, Defenders of Wildlife, and the Southwest Environmental Center had challenged a federal law that allows the secretary of Homeland Security to waive any laws necessary to allow the quick construction of border fencing.
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| Rayshard Brooks: Accused officer bailed despite widow's plea Posted: 30 Jun 2020 05:16 PM PDT  Rayshard Brooks' widow said the ex-officer was dangerous and asked the judge to deny bail.
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| Tucker Carlson’s Journey From Coronavirus Alarm-Puller to COVID Truther Posted: 30 Jun 2020 12:17 AM PDT  In early March, while President Donald Trump's loudest allies at Fox News downplayed the coronavirus pandemic, with some claiming it was nothing more than an "impeachment scam" to destroy the president, Tucker Carlson received widespread—and usual, considering his notoriously far-right rhetoric—praise for calling out his colleagues and Trump for "minimizing" the impending danger.The Fox News primetime star continues to receive plaudits for reportedly convincing the president to finally take the crisis seriously. Days after that March 9 monologue, which was delivered shortly after Carlson privately spoke with Trump about the virus, the president publicly addressed the nation and his administration began pushing social-distancing guidelines.While Carlson sounding the alarm much earlier than his Fox News peers may have a had a positive impact (on his viewers, especially, as studies show his audience took protective measures before Trump confidant Sean Hannity's), it didn't take long for the right-wing TV host to shift gears and rage against social distancing, lockdowns, and any other measure implemented to slow the spread of the virus.Over the past two months, Carlson has devoted much of his coronavirus coverage to discrediting public-health experts, specifically top infectious disease expert Dr. Anthony Fauci, a member of the White House coronavirus task force. On top of telling his audience to stop listening to Fauci and other health officials, the Fox News star has repeatedly boosted a fellow contrarian, former New York Times reporter-turned-spy-novelist Alex Berenson, as an expert on the deadly virus.Less than a month after his much-lauded call to action on the virus, Carlson declared the crisis to be over—a claim that received far less attention from the mainstream press than his rogue stance against the president. Despite the United States having already experienced 13,000 deaths by that point, Carlson pointed to revised models showing lower expected deaths to call for the easing of stay-at-home orders, insisting that the "short-term crisis may have passed."Since the Fox star's assertion that the pandemic was essentially over and it was time to go back to business as usual, the nation has suffered roughly 115,000 more deaths and at least two million more confirmed cases.Carlson, in his quest to convince viewers that social distancing was futile and lockdowns were useless, began taking aim at Fauci almost immediately, framing the Medal of Freedom honoree as a power-hungry bureaucrat who had suddenly become the most powerful person in the world. Furthermore, the conservative talk-show host repeatedly portrayed the top doctor as incompetent and unknowledgeable about infectious diseases.One way Carlson often sharply criticized the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases was by highlighting his shifting opinions on the virus as more information became known about the disease. In particular, he hit Fauci for initially saying mask-wearing was unnecessary—a position the renowned immunologist quickly reversed, as have other health officials who initially worried that masks might instill a false sense of security.Tucker Carlson Wants to Have It Both Ways on CoronavirusAt one point in mid-May, following Sen. Rand Paul dressing down Fauci in a Senate hearing, Carlson applauded the pro-Trump Republican before delivering his own lengthy takedown of Fauci, arguing that the top doctor's advice was "buffoon-level stuff," later describing him as "the chief buffoon of the professional class." Weeks prior, Carlson called it "national suicide" for Fauci to urge aggressive social-distancing restrictions."We should never let someone like that run this country," he fumed.Besides repeatedly dismissing social distancing, Carlson has also told his viewers that the virus is just not that deadly, even as the death toll continues to rise. In late April, for instance, Carlson pointed to some antibody studies—which have since largely been dismissed due to a large number of false-positive statistical errors—and the laughable claims made by a pair of California doctors who pushed for reopening by claiming the disease "just isn't nearly as deadly as we thought it was."The segment was steeped in so much disinformation on the disease that MSNBC host Chris Hayes, his direct 8 p.m. time slot competitor, directly called out Carlson for peddling "coronavirus trutherism" the next evening, picking apart the arguments put forth by the Fox star."There is a reason many of the employees of Fox News, which is based in New York, are working from home right now," Hayes pointedly stated. "At least someone there understands why it is important to continue to keep physical distance."Weeks later, Carlson again pointed to antibody tests and cherry-picked surveys to claim the deadly virus was relatively tame."We now know, thanks to widespread blood testing, that the virus isn't that deadly," he said on May 21. "An enormous percentage of coronavirus infections produce mild symptoms or no symptoms at all, they're asymptomatic. The death toll is a tiny fraction of what we were told it would be."Carlson, meanwhile, has also seemed more than willing to accept that the death toll—which is now approaching 130,000—is overinflated and possibly a hoax, despite overwhelming evidence showing it has likely been undercounted. Besides giving airtime to "COVID Contrarian" Berenson, who has repeatedly suggested the death toll is inflated or would remain low, he has also hosted Fox News senior political analyst Brit Hume to make those same claims. "Dr. Birx said tonight during the briefing at the White House that all deaths from anyone who died with coronavirus is counted as if the person died from coronavirus. Now, we all know that isn't true," Hume said on April 7 before relaying anecdotal evidence: " I remember my own doctor telling me at one point when I was discussing prostate issues, he said about prostate cancer—I didn't have it, as it happened, but he said, 'You know, a lot more people die with it than die from it.'"In recent weeks, amid nationwide unrest following the Minneapolis police killing of George Floyd, an unarmed Black man, Carlson has spent far more time demonizing the Black Lives Matter movement than covering the outbreak of new coronavirus cases, many of which are occurring in the states that rushed to reopen. When the Fox host did shift from fear-mongering about a race war to cover the virus, however, he actively minimized the damage of the pandemic while once again claiming lockdowns do not work.Just as multiple states began seeing a massive uptick in confirmed cases following relaxed restrictions and Memorial Day weekend celebrations, Carlson definitively declared social-distancing rules to be useless."We do think it's worth, for a minute, taking a pause to assess whether or not they were in fact lying to us about the coronavirus and our response to it," he said on June 10, taking issue with media criticizing lockdown protests but praising police brutality demonstrations. "And the short answer to this is: Yes, they were definitely lying.""As a matter of public health, we can say conclusively the lockdowns were not necessary. In fact, we can prove that and here's the most powerful evidence: states that never locked down at all, states where people were allowed to live like Americans and not cower indoors alone, in the end turned out no worse than states that had mandatory quarantines, the state you probably live in," Carlson continued. "The states that did lock down at first but were quick to reopen have not seen explosions of coronavirus cases."Since making that proclamation, Florida, Texas and Arizona have all set single-day records for confirmed cases, and have reported newly overwhelmed hospitals and ICU capacity. Presented with Carlson's repeated claims that social distancing and stay-at-home orders have been unnecessary, Dr. Irwin Redlener, a Daily Beast contributor and director of the National Center for Disaster Preparedness at Columbia University outright dismissed the TV host's analysis."Tucker Carson is one of the most fervent anti-science commentators on the airway," the public-health activist told The Daily Beast. "He, like Sean Hannity, seems to relish in unwavering support for Donald Trump, no matter how outlandish, dishonest or ignorant the president's statements or policies might be. I assume that Tucker is probably a bright guy, but his uncritical support of Trump is a dangerous disservice to his audience."While Carlson has privately advised the president on several issues and is regularly cited by the president's Twitter account, he has also stood out among his Fox primetime peers in offering up criticism of Trump. Besides subtly calling the president out over his COVID-19 response, Carlson has also knocked the president for not being tough enough in dealing with the protests, arguing that it is placing him on a trajectory to lose.An analysis from Columbia University, meanwhile, has found that if the United States had implemented physical-distancing guidelines just one week earlier in March, as many as 36,000 American lives could have been saved.I Spent a Week Down the Right-Wing Media Rabbit Hole—and Was Mesmerized by ItAs Carlson has dismissed the expertise of epidemiologists and scientists, while boosting spy novelists and talking heads, he has occasionally sought the advice of actual medical professionals to provide pandemic analysis. One of the most frequent voices on his show in this respect has been Fox News medical contributor Dr. Marc Siegel.While the Fox News primetime star has blasted Fauci and others for their inaccurate predictions and so-called buffoonery, he doesn't seem to have an issue with Siegel's history of comically over-the-top projections and medical punditry that seemingly bends over backwards to please the Fox audience.For example, Siegel, who infamously said in March that the "worst-case" for coronavirus is that it "will be the flu," told Carlson last month that "we're not going to have a big second wave," citing the low number of cases in Australia. "That's the southern hemisphere," he said. "That's essentially our November right now."He would eventually walk back that claim on Carlson's show days later, noting that Brazil—which is also in the southern hemisphere—was experiencing a huge surge in cases. And last week, Siegel lashed out at the European Union for possibly banning American visitors due to the latest rise in cases. "Could this be retaliatory? Possibly," he huffed. "Could it be public health? Whatever it is, it is not the tone they sounded back in March, when they were horrified at our travel ban, at a time when thousands and thousands of cases were coming here." And then the unmistakably Carlson-esque reactionary barb. "So I have a message for the European Union tonight: How about remembering what we did for you in the middle of the 20th century?"Read more at The Daily Beast.Got a tip? Send it to The Daily Beast hereGet our top stories in your inbox every day. Sign up now!Daily Beast Membership: Beast Inside goes deeper on the stories that matter to you. Learn more.
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| The 10 Best Dino-Killing, Ice Spewing, Earth-Destroying Asteroids Posted: 30 Jun 2020 11:20 AM PDT |
| Missing hiker's body found at Mount Rainier National Park in Washington; 2 others still missing Posted: 30 Jun 2020 04:18 AM PDT  The body of one of three hikers missing at Mount Rainier National Park in Washington state has been found, according to the National Park Service.
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| Russian envoy says North Korea anger over leaflets was for depiction of Kim’s wife Posted: 30 Jun 2020 03:38 AM PDT  A series of condemnations over leaflets distributed in North Korea were driven by fury over "dirty, insulting" depictions of leader Kim Jong Un's spouse, Russia's top envoy in the reclusive country has said.
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| Israel orders evangelical Christian media network God TV to take channel off air Posted: 29 Jun 2020 10:47 AM PDT  "The channel does not appeal to the Christian population in Israel, but rather to the Jews," said Israel's broadcasting regulator.
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| Lebanon army scraps meat from meals as prices skyrocket Posted: 30 Jun 2020 09:26 AM PDT  The Lebanese army has scrapped meat from all meals it offers to soldiers on duty as food prices skyrocket because of a deepening economic crisis, state media said Tuesday. Lebanon is in the throes of its worst economic downturn since the 1975-1990 civil war, with poverty surging to now afflict around half of the population. Although its currency is officially pegged at 1,507 pounds to the dollar, a shortage of hard currency has seen its black market value plummet to more than 8,000 to the greenback.
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| A stacked deck: How police forces get away with killing more than 1,000 Americans a year Posted: 30 Jun 2020 07:58 AM PDT  Most people who shoot and kill someone else are investigated and prosecuted. Police have a different set of rules.
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| US could buy Turkey’s Russian-made S-400 under Senate proposal Posted: 29 Jun 2020 02:42 PM PDT  The U.S. would be able to buy Turkey's Russian-made S-400 air defense system under legislation proposed in the Senate last week.
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| Russia vs. NATO: Welcome to the Fourth Battle of the Atlantic Posted: 30 Jun 2020 04:14 AM PDT  The Russian submarine threat is significant.
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| Missouri couple point guns at protesters calling for St. Louis mayor to resign Posted: 29 Jun 2020 11:43 AM PDT  A video on social media shows a couple pointing guns at protesters marching through a St. Louis neighborhood demanding Mayor Lyda Krewson's resignation.
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| Miami-Dade teachers union ratifies new contract. Starting teachers to get big raise Posted: 29 Jun 2020 03:16 PM PDT  Despite technological difficulties with electronic voting — and with the 2019-20 school year behind them — Miami-Dade teachers approved Monday a new labor contract that benefits new educators by increasing the minimum salary by $6,500 but shorts mid-career teachers, who will receive almost the same base pay as rookie teachers.
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| School teacher who self-quarantined at Connecticut home for three weeks vanishes after going for a walk in early May Posted: 29 Jun 2020 03:05 PM PDT  Gil Cunha was last seen just after midnight on May 7, 2020, at his parents' home on Overlook Avenue in West Haven, Connecticut. Later that morning, Gil's parents figured he was out for one of his daily walks. He never returned. Gil had been self-quarantining in his room the prior three weeks due to COVID-19 symptoms. He left behind two cell phones, his passport, credit cards and cash. The only item that appears to be missing is his driver's license. The West Haven Police Department is inve
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| Tokyo court rejects damages for man forcibly sterilised at age 14 Posted: 30 Jun 2020 01:30 AM PDT  A Japanese pensioner forcibly sterilised as a 14-year-old under a now-defunct eugenics law failed Tuesday in a legal bid for $280,000 in state compensation. According to local media, Tokyo District Court found the government was not obliged to pay the man compensation because the 20-year statute of limitations had passed. Last year, the government passed legislation offering the victims 3.2 million yen each ($29,700), an amount campaigners slammed as "failing to meet the seriousness" of the issue.
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| U.S. Supreme Court gives president more power over consumer financial agency Posted: 29 Jun 2020 08:13 AM PDT  The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday handed President Donald Trump more authority over a federal agency charged with protecting consumers in the financial sector, empowering him to fire its director at will and ruling that the structure it was given by Congress violated the U.S. Constitution. The court, in a 5-4 decision, stopped short of the much more drastic solution of invalidating the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, an agency set up in 2011 under Democratic President Barack Obama that long has been criticized by Trump and his fellow Republicans. The justices ruled in favor of California-based law firm Seila Law LLC, which challenged the agency's structure after being investigated by it.
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| Astronaut says losing mirror on spacewalk was 'real bummer' Posted: 29 Jun 2020 11:34 AM PDT  The commander of the International Space Station said Monday that losing a mirror during last week's otherwise successful spacewalk was "a real bummer." NASA astronaut Chris Cassidy said he has no idea how the small mirror on his left sleeve came off. "I just happened to glance down and I saw this reflecting thing disappearing into the darkness, and that was the last I saw of it," Cassidy said in an interview with The Associated Press.
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| Elderly woman choked and robbed by thief in New York City Posted: 30 Jun 2020 08:07 AM PDT  Thief chokes and robs an elderly woman, then calmly walks away with her bag.
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| An Italian teenager is one miracle away from becoming the first millennial saint Posted: 30 Jun 2020 07:28 AM PDT  Carlo Acutis coined the phrase: "Everyone is born an original, but many die like photocopies," to warn people not to lose themselves on the internet.
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| Xi Jinping’s Internal Great Wall Posted: 30 Jun 2020 07:40 AM PDT  Like the Great Wall of generations past, Xi's Internal Great Wall will continue to keep China behind the rest of the world because a nation that suppresses its own people is not a nation the world can trust to do business fairly.
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| City of London must face Brexit hit, Barnier tells finance chiefs Posted: 30 Jun 2020 09:22 AM PDT  British trade negotiators will fail in their efforts to insulate the City of London from the worst consequences of Brexit, Michel Barnier warned a meeting of finance chiefs on Tuesday. The EU's chief negotiator said that British demands in the ongoing trade talks in Brussels were unacceptable and that UK plans to ditch EU financial regulation risked another crisis that could hurt the bloc. UK proposals would make it easy to continue to run EU businesses from London after the end of the transition period on December 31, he said, and prevent the EU from freezing UK financial services out of the Single Market at short notice. "I will be blunt. Its proposals are unacceptable," he said as negotiations continued in the Belgian capital, "The UK is trying to keep as many Single Market benefits as it can." London remains Europe's pre-eminent financial hub but that status is coveted by Paris, Amsterdam and Frankfurt, which hope to profit from Brexit. "[The UK] would like to make it easy to continue to run EU businesses from London,with minimal operations and staff on the continent," Mr Barnier, said. "It wants to ban residence requirements for senior managers and boards of directors, to ensure that all essential functions remain in London," he added. "We are asking for arrangements just like those the EU agreed with Japan," a UK spokesman said, "Japan is not in the single market." UK financial services lose their EU "passport" to the Single Market at the end of the year. Brussels insists that future access will be based on "equivalence", a system of regulatory approval that can be withdrawn by the European Commission unilaterally and at as little as 30 days notice in some cases. British negotiators have called for a joint committee on equivalence decisions, which Mr Barnier said was attempting to turn unilateral decisions into co-managed ones. "These are autonomous, unilateral tools. And, as such, they are not part of our current negotiations," Mr Barnier said. Last year, the commission froze Swiss stock exchanges out of the Single Market in a bid to force Bern back to the negotiating table over a new treaty governing their relationship. London and Bern said on Tuesday they would begin negotiating a bilateral financial services agreement. Mr Barnier was internal market commissioner during the financial crisis and was responsible for much of the post-crisis regulation that was introduced by Brussels after 2008. Mr Barnier told the Eurofi think tank that the UK planned to ditch EU financial services regulations after Brexit. "Let us have no illusions: The UK will progressively start diverging from the EU framework. This is even one of the main purposes of Brexit," he said. He said, "The size of the UK financial market and the very close links between the EU and UK financial systems mean we need to be extra careful. We need to capture all potential risks: for financial stability, market integrity, investor and consumer protection, and the level playing field." EU and UK negotiators will continue discussion until the end of the week before another round of talks is held in London next week. In London, it emerged that UK companies exporting into the EU will have to wait for permission from tax authorities before moving their goods. Lorries will only be able to move loads into the EU if they have a valid reference from the so-called Goods Vehicle Movement Service, a new and untested IT platform, under plans being drawn up by the government. "British exporters will be the biggest losers from this," said Naomi Smith, chief executive officer of Best for Britain, a pro-EU campaigning group. "Additional bureaucracy threatens to clog up our trade arteries."
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| Russian Arctic sets 'fantastical' heat records: weather chief Posted: 30 Jun 2020 06:26 AM PDT  The Russian Arctic set record temperatures in June that sparked abnormal tundra fires, the head of Russia's weather service said Tuesday, blaming climate change for the "fantastical" anomalies. Russia's northern territories, including parts of Yakutia region which borders the Arctic ocean, have faced a heat wave in recent weeks, and villages in the remote tundra are battling wildfires with some districts declaring a state of emergency. "We had extremely anomalous weather" in June, Roman Vilfand said, adding that "previous records were broken easily".
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| What's going on between Russia, US and Afghanistan? Posted: 29 Jun 2020 06:41 PM PDT  Russia denies reports it paid militants to kill US troops. The BBC's Jonathan Marcus evaluates those reports.
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| China cuts Uighur births with IUDs, abortion, sterilization Posted: 28 Jun 2020 09:04 PM PDT  The Chinese government is taking draconian measures to slash birth rates among Uighurs and other minorities as part of a sweeping campaign to curb its Muslim population, even as it encourages some of the country's Han majority to have more children. While individual women have spoken out before about forced birth control, the practice is far more widespread and systematic than previously known, according to an AP investigation based on government statistics, state documents and interviews with 30 ex-detainees, family members and a former detention camp instructor. The campaign over the past four years in the far west region of Xinjiang is leading to what some experts are calling a form of "demographic genocide."
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| California, Texas see record COVID-19 surges, Arizona clamps down Posted: 29 Jun 2020 07:51 AM PDT  California and Texas both marked record spikes in new COVID-19 infections on Monday, a Reuters tally showed, as Los Angeles reported an "alarming" one-day surge in America's second-largest city that put it over 100,000 cases. Los Angeles has become a new epicenter in the pandemic as coronavirus cases and hospitalizations surge there despite California Governor Gavin Newsom's strict orders requiring bars to close and residents to wear masks in nearly all public spaces. "The alarming increases in cases, positivity rates and hospitalizations signals that we, as a community, need to take immediate action to slow the spread of COVID-19," Barbara Ferrer, director of public health for Los Angeles County, said in a statement announcing the sharp rise.
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| The 20 Best Deals from REI’s Fourth of July Sale Posted: 30 Jun 2020 11:09 AM PDT |
| Federal appeals court upholds GOP-enacted voting restrictions in Wisconsin Posted: 30 Jun 2020 04:46 AM PDT  The judicial panel found that the state can restrict early voting hours and restored a requirement that people must live in a district for 28 days.
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| Meet the Boeing X-40A—The Strange Looking Proto-Space Plane Posted: 29 Jun 2020 09:50 AM PDT  Here's what we know about Boeing and NASA's achievement.
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| Texas Bar Owners Sue Over Reimposed Coronavirus Restrictions Posted: 30 Jun 2020 07:36 AM PDT  Several Texas bar owners on Monday sued over Governor Greg Abbott's order to shut down their businesses again as coronavirus cases in the state soar.Texas reported a record high on Monday of 5,913 individuals hospitalized for the coronavirus, and new cases of the virus rose on Saturday to a record daily high of 6,263 confirmed new cases. Deaths from the virus have remained level, however.The bar owners filed lawsuits in Austin, Houston, and Galveston, charging that the governor has exceeded his authority under the state constitution to order bars to close again and claiming that the restrictions are being unfairly imposed on bars while other businesses, such as nail and hair salons, are allowed to continue operating. The owners are demanding that Abbott call the state legislature into a special session to handle the issue."Gov. Abbott continues to act like a king," said Jared Woodfill, a lawyer representing the bar owners. "Abbott is unilaterally destroying our economy and trampling on our constitutional rights."Abbott rolled back his state's reopening process on Friday, singling out activity in bars as a driving factor of the spike in coronavirus cases and hospitalizations Texas has experienced."As I said from the start, if the positivity rate rose above 10%, the State of Texas would take further action to mitigate the spread of COVID-19," the Republican governor said. "At this time, it is clear that the rise in cases is largely driven by certain types of activities, including Texans congregating in bars."The governor's slowdown of the reopening process reimposes restrictions on businesses he had allowed to reopen at partial capacity, including bars, restaurants, gyms, malls, and bowling alleys. Bars were required to close at 12 p.m. on Friday but are allowed to remain open for delivery and take-out orders. Restaurants may operate dine-in service at 50 percent capacity, down from the 75 percent capacity Abbott approved earlier this month. The majority of gatherings of 100 or more people must gain approval from local governments.The announcement came two days after Abbott warned that the coronavirus is now spreading in Texas at an "unacceptable rate" and pleaded with residents to wear masks in public and continue practicing social distancing.Several other states have seen their coronavirus cases spike in the last several weeks, including Florida, Arizona, and California. Along with Texas, Alabama, Missouri and Nevada.
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| Iran journalist who fueled 2017 protests sentenced to death Posted: 30 Jun 2020 12:45 AM PDT  Iran sentenced a once-exiled journalist to death over his online work that helped inspire nationwide economic protests that began at the end of 2017, authorities said Tuesday. Ruhollah Zam's website and a channel he created on the popular messaging app Telegram had spread the timings of the protests and embarrassing information about officials that directly challenged Iran's Shiite theocracy. Judiciary spokesman Gholamhossein Esmaili announced Zam's death sentence on Tuesday, saying he had been convicted of "corruption on Earth," a charge often used in cases involving espionage or attempts to overthrow Iran's government.
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| Sarah Sanders on Biden pledging to eliminate Trump tax cuts, GOP strategy to widen its base Posted: 30 Jun 2020 05:02 AM PDT  Former White House press secretary and Fox News contributor Sarah Sanders reacts to the latest in the 2020 campaign on 'Fox & Friends.'
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| Germany to dissolve special forces unit over far-right links Posted: 30 Jun 2020 09:26 AM PDT |
| Five years later, diplomatic relations between the U.S. and Cuba are a mess | Opinion Posted: 30 Jun 2020 09:51 AM PDT  Five years ago, on July 1, I walked into the Cuban Ministry of Foreign Affairs and exchanged letters with my Cuban counterpart from our respective heads of state, setting in motion the re-establishment of diplomatic relations between Havana and Washington. A heavy page was turned, weighted down by 55 years of pain, suffering, regrets and recriminations.
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