Good morning,
Donald Trump has announced a “surge” of US troops – not into Iraq or Afghanistan, but into the streets of American cities. The president on Wednesday said he would send hundreds of federal law enforcement officers to Chicago, Albuquerque and other Democratic controlled communities, which he claims are “plagued by violent crime”.
In response to the announcement, the American Civil Liberties Union tweeted that it would “continue to defend our constitutional rights from Trump’s lawlessness – in Portland, Chicago, and wherever else necessary.”
The move comes amid continued clashes between federal agents and anti-racism protesters in Portland. The Oregon city has quickly become the focus for a national debate, with Trump’s deployment of a shadowy police taskforce not simply failing to quell the protests, but in fact giving them fresh energy. Maeve Higgins says the president’s CBP militia, trained in terrorising immigrants, have now been turned against US citizens.
At a time when immigration has almost come to a complete stop and the president is struggling to uphold his strongman image long enough to be re-elected, we should not be surprised that he is using the Department of Homeland Security against his own citizens.
Biden described Trump as America’s ‘first’ racist president
Speaking at a town hall event on Wednesday, Joe Biden described Trump as America’s first racist president. “The way he deals with people based on the colour of their skin, their national origin, where they’re from, is absolutely sickening,” said the former vice president:
No sitting president has ever done this. Never, never, never. No Republican president has done this. No Democratic president. We’ve had racists, and they’ve existed. They’ve tried to get elected president. He’s the first one that has.
George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and other early presidents owned slaves, while more recent commanders-in-chief such as Woodrow Wilson strongly supported segregation. In responding to Biden’s remarks, however, Trump compared himself to another of his forebears, claiming: “I’ve done more for Black Americans than anybody with the possible of exception of Abraham Lincoln.”
America’s daily Covid-19 death toll is back above 1,000
The daily death toll from the coronavirus in the US topped 1,000 on Tuesday, for the first time since June, in yet another sign that the country is still in the depths of the disease crisis. California has now surpassed New York as the state with the most total cases: more than 413,576 since the pandemic began. In New York, however, there are fears that partying young people have stopped taking the pandemic seriously, and could fuel a fresh spike in cases.
Trump on Wednesday cited Black Lives Matter protests as one “likely” cause of the national surge in infections, despite experts saying there is little evidence of disease spread linked to the demonstrations. Following the president’s recent conversion to face-mask usage, meanwhile, Republican governors in the south have started at last to issue mask mandates.
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The administration has agreed to pay Pfizer $2bn for 100m doses of a vaccine being developed by the pharmaceutical giant, if they are delivered by December as part of the government’s Operation Warp Speed vaccine program.
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A newly identified cocktail of antibodies could be a ‘very potent’ treatment for Covid-19, with the potential to be manufactured at scale, say researchers at New York’s Columbia University.
A wanted Chinese researcher is holed up at the SF consulate
With tensions between Beijing and Washington still running hot, a Chinese researcher wanted by the FBI has taken refuge at the country’s consulate in San Francisco, after reportedly lying to US law enforcement about her affiliation with the Chinese military. The story emerged in court documents just as the US ordered China to close its consulate in Houston, citing involvement in the theft of “American intellectual property”. China has threatened to retaliate against what it called an “outrageous” escalation.
In other news…
Who killed Berta Cáceres?
Reporter Nina Lakhani is the author of Who Killed Berta Cáceres? Dams, Death Squads, and an Indigenous Defender’s Battle for the Planet. On Friday at 1pm EDT, Nina will join the Guardian US international editor Martin Hodgson for a live online discussion of what Cáceres’s story teaches us about violence, corruption, poverty, and environmental justice in Central America.
You can read an extract from the book here, and join us live for the event here.
Great reads
What’s this year’s song of the summer?
Summer is normally a time for travelling, partying and all sorts of other activities that aren’t really allowed in July 2020. But so far, the music hasn’t stopped. From Chloe x Halle to Haim, our critics pick their favourite tracks for an unusual season.
The rise of the private ‘Zutor’
With schools set to be online-only in the fall, many families are looking for other solutions to educate their children – including hiring private virtual tutors. It’s just one way in which the pandemic is exacerbating existing inequalities, reports Mario Koran.
Opinion: we don’t owe anything to Confederate monuments
Donald Trump has decided that human rights are secondary to the protection of sacred objects: namely, Confederate statues. He is displacing the idea of democratic responsibility with that of the politics of eternity, writes historian Timothy Snyder.
A politician of eternity seeks to shift the work of government away from the actual problems of actual people and towards the enforcement of national myth.
Last Thing: ‘Person, woman, man, camera, TV’
Fixated on flaunting his cognitive prowess, Trump on Wednesday explained one of the most “difficult” aspects of the brainpower test he recently took to Fox News medical analyst Marc Siegel. The question involved the president remembering and repeating five simple words. But if you get them in the right order, he insisted, “you get extra points”.
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