GENEVA (AP) — The World Health Organization on Sunday reported the largest single-day increase in coronavirus cases by its count, at more than 183,000 new cases in the latest 24 hours.
The UN health agency said Brazil led the way with 54,771 cases tallied and the U.S. next at 36,617. Over 15,400 came in in India.
Continue reading “WHO Reports Largest Single-Day Spike In Coronavirus Cases”
TALLADEGA, Ala. (AP) — NASCAR has launched an investigation after a noose was found in the garage stall of Bubba Wallace, the only Black driver in the elite Cup Series who just two weeks ago successfully pushed the stock car series to ban the Confederate flag at its venues.
NASCAR said the noose was found on Sunday afternoon and vowed to do everything possible to find who was responsible and “eliminate them from the sport.”
Continue reading “NASCAR Investigating After Noose Found In Driver Bubba Wallace’s Garage”
Former National Security Adviser John Bolton told ABC News’ Martha Raddatz in an interview on Sunday about his forthcoming book that Election Day is the “last guardrail” protecting American democracy and that there’s no telling what will happen if Trump gets reelected in November.
Bolton also said that limiting the inquiry to Ukraine and trying to produce a result too quickly actually reinforced Trump’s own political agenda to “keep it narrow, and move it fast.” He said that the impeachment inquiry failed at teaching the president a lesson about seeking help from foreign powers for his own reelection.
“It’s absolutely 180 degrees the opposite of the truth,” Bolton said. When Trump was acquitted in the Senate, Trump instead learned that “he could get away with it.”
When asked why he didn’t testify, rather than taking personal fault to share what he knew, Bolton blamed House Democrats, accusing them of rushing through proceedings and for failing to to widen the scope of the proceedings beyond Ukraine. He said that this approach, and House Democrats not wanting to “mess up the Democratic presidential nomination,” played right into the hands of Trump.
When asked how he would answer to critics who accuse him of putting “personal profit over the country” by reserving damning evidence against Trump for his book, Bolton again blamed House Democrats for launching an investigation that became in his view a “partisan catfight.”
Bolton claims that “minds were made up on Capitol Hill,” and he was convinced that had he offered testimony, it would have been lost in the chaos of the proceedings.
“My judgment was that I was prepared to testify,” Bolton said. “But I think now this is actually a better time to tell the story. Because now the American people can look at it in the context of the most important political decision we make as a nation every four years.”
President Donald Trump’s war on voting by mail took another turn on Monday morning in the form of a new baseless conspiracy theory.
President Donald Trump signaled on Sunday that he will bar Mary Trump, who is the daughter of his eldest brother Fred Trump Jr., from publishing her tell-all book about him and the rest of the family titled “Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man.”
NEW YORK (AP) — President Donald Trump’s return to the campaign trail was designed to show strength and enthusiasm heading into the critical final months before an election that will decide whether he remains in the White House.
Continue reading “Lower-Than-Expected Turnout At Comeback Rally Leaves Trump Fuming”
What’s all this talk about a “second wave” of U.S. coronavirus cases?
In The Wall Street Journal last week, Vice President Mike Pence wrote in a piece headlined “There Isn’t a Coronavirus ‘Second Wave'” that the nation is winning the fight against the virus.
Many public health experts, however, suggest it’s no time to celebrate. About 120,000 Americans have died from the new virus and daily counts of new cases in the U.S. are the highest they’ve been in more than a month, driven by alarming recent increases in the South and West.
But there is at least one point of agreement: “Second wave” is probably the wrong term to describe what’s happening.
“When you have 20,000-plus infections per day, how can you talk about a second wave?” said Dr. Anthony Fauci of the National Institutes of Health. “We’re in the first wave. Let’s get out of the first wave before you have a second wave.”
Clearly there was an initial infection peak in April as cases exploded in New York City. After schools and businesses were closed across the country, the rate of new cases dropped somewhat.
But “it’s more of a plateau, or a mesa,” not the trough after a wave, said Caitlin Rivers, a disease researcher at Johns Hopkins University’s Center for Health Security.
Scientists generally agree the nation is still in its first wave of coronavirus infections, albeit one that’s dipping in some parts of the country while rising in others.
“This virus is spreading around the United States and hitting different places with different intensity at different times,” said Dr. Richard Besser, chief executive of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation who was acting director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention when a pandemic flu hit the U.S. in 2009.
Dr. Arnold Monto, a University of Michigan flu expert, echoed that sentiment.
“What I would call this is continued transmission with flare-ups,” he said.
Flu seasons sometimes feature a second wave of infections. But in those cases, the second wave is a distinct new surge in cases from a strain of flu that is different than the strain that caused earlier illnesses.
That’s not the case in the coronavirus epidemic.
Monto doesn’t think “second wave” really describes what’s happening now, calling it “totally semantics.”
“Second waves are basically in the eye of the beholder,” he said.
But Besser said semantics matter, because saying a first wave has passed may give people a false sense that the worst is over.
Some worry a large wave of coronavirus might occur this fall or winter — after schools reopen, the weather turns colder and less humid, and people huddle inside more. That would follow seasonal patterns seen with flu and other respiratory viruses. And such a fall wave could be very bad, given that there’s no vaccine or experts think most Americans haven’t had the virus.
But the new coronavirus so far has been spreading more episodically and sporadically than flu, and it may not follow the same playbook.
“It’s very difficult to make a prediction,” Rivers said. “We don’t know the degree to which this virus is seasonal, if at all.”
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AP medical writer Lauran Neergaard contributed to this report.
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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
WASHINGTON — White House trade adviser Peter Navarro says U.S. President Donald Trump was being “tongue in cheek” when he claimed at a campaign rally in Oklahoma that he asked officials to slow down coronavirus testing.
Navarro said on CNN’s “State of the Union” on Sunday that Trump made the comment in a “light moment.”
During Saturday’s rally in Tulsa, Trump explained that the “bad part” of widespread testing is that it leads to logging more virus cases. New cases have recently spiked in several U.S. states, but not just due to testing.
The United States has tested over 25 million people for the novel coronavirus. The country has reported more than 2.2 million confirmed cases and about 120,000 COVID-19 deaths. according to a count by Johns Hopkins University. The real numbers are believed to be higher.
In response to Trump’s remarks, Democratic presidential rival Joe Biden criticized Trump for putting politics ahead of the safety and health of Americans.
READING, England (AP) — A stabbing rampage in Britain that killed three people as they sat in a park on a summer evening is being considered a terrorist attack, British police said Sunday as a 25-year-old believed to be the lone attacker was in custody.
Authorities said they were not looking for any other suspects, and they did not raise Britain’s official terrorism threat level from “substantial.”
Continue reading “British Police Call Park Stabbing Rampage That Killed 3 People Terror Attack”
MINNEAPOLIS (AP) — One man is dead and 11 people suffered non-life-threatening wounds in a shooting in Minneapolis, police there said early Sunday.
Minneapolis police had first said 10 people had been shot with “various severity levels of injuries,” but revised their total upward in a tweet posted just after 3 a.m. The man died at the hospital, not at the scene, according to the police daily media briefing sheet.
Continue reading “Shooting In Minneapolis Leaves One Man Dead, 11 People Injured”
