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Governments around world eye tougher steps to fight virus | Business

Signs of governments reassessing their coronavirus response were scattered around the world Sunday, with the mayor of Los Angeles saying the city was reopened too quickly, Ohio’s governor warning his state is “going the wrong way,” Hong Kong issuing tougher new rules on wearing face masks and Spain closing overcrowded beaches.

Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti said Los Angeles was “on the brink” of new widespread stay-at-home orders as Los Angeles County continued to see the state’s largest increase in confirmed coronavirus cases. California reported on Saturday its fourth-highest daily total of newly confirmed coronavirus cases, with more than 9,000.

Appearing on CNN Sunday, Garcetti was asked about a Los Angeles Times editorial that criticized the rapid reopening of California, which was followed by a spike in new COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations.

“I do agree those things happened too quickly,” Garcetti said, adding that the decisions were made at the state and county levels, not by city officials. But he also said people in general had become less vigilant about taking precautions to avoid transmission.

“It’s not just what’s open and closed,” he said. “It’s also about what we do individually.”

Infections have been soaring in U.S. states including California, Florida, Texas and Arizona, with many blaming a haphazard, partisan approach to lifting lockdowns as well as the resistance of some Americans to wearing masks.

In Florida, where health officials reported nearly 12,500 new infections and nearly 90 additional deaths on Sunday, U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio called for consistent, nonpartisan messaging.

“We’ve seen a lot of these things turned into sort of a partisan fight or a political statement,” he told South Florida television station, CBS4, on Sunday.

Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine, like Rubio a Republican, said he would not rule out a statewide mandate on wearing masks, as infections in his state grew. He has already issued such orders in 19 counties accounting for nearly 60% of the state’s population.

“We’re going the wrong way. We’re at a crucial time,” DeWine said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

Globally, the World Health Organization said that 259,848 new infections were reported Saturday, its highest one-day tally yet. India, which has now confirmed more than 1 million infections, on Sunday reported a 24-hour record of 38,902 new cases.

Pope Francis said “the pandemic is showing no sign of stopping” and urged compassion for those whose suffering during the outbreak has been worsened by conflicts.

In Europe, where infections are far below their peak but local outbreaks are causing concern, leaders of the 27-nation European Union haggled for a third day in Brussels over a proposed 1.85 trillion-euro ($2.1 trillion) EU budget and coronavirus recovery fund.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel said there is “a lot of good will, but there are also a lot of positions” in the talks, which have have laid bare divisions about how the countries hit hardest by the pandemic, such as Italy and Spain, should be helped. She said the talks, which were initially scheduled to end on Saturday, could still end without a deal.

Confirmed global virus deaths have risen to more than 603,000, according to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University. The United States tops the list with over 140,000, followed by more than 78,000 in Brazil. Europe as a continent has seen about 200,000 deaths.

The number of confirmed infections worldwide has passed 14.3 million, with 3.7 million in the United States and more than 2 million in Brazil. Experts believe the pandemic’s true toll around the world is much higher because of testing shortages and data collection issues.

Even where the situation has been largely brought under control, new outbreaks are prompting the return of restrictions.

Following a recent surge in cases, Hong Kong made the wearing of masks mandatory in all public places and told non-essential civil servants to work from home. Hong Kong leader Carrie Lam said the situation in the Asian financial hub is “really critical” and that she sees “no sign” that it’s under control.

Police in Barcelona have limited access to some of the city’s beloved beaches because sunbathers were ignoring social distancing regulations amid a resurgence of coronavirus infections.

Slaughterhouses also have featured in outbreaks in the U.S., Germany and elsewhere. Authorities in northwestern Germany’s Vechta county said 66 workers at a chicken slaughterhouse tested positive, though most appeared to have been infected in their free time. An earlier outbreak at a slaughterhouse in western Germany infected over 1,400 and prompted a partial lockdown.

Cases in the Australian state of Victoria rose again Sunday, prompting a move to make masks mandatory in metropolitan Melbourne and the nearby district of Mitchell for people who leave their homes for exercise or to purchase essential goods.

Victoria Premier Daniel Andrews said those who fail to wear a mask will be fined 200 Australian dollars ($140).

“There’s no vaccine to this wildly infectious virus and it’s a simple thing, but it’s about changing habits, it’s about becoming a simple part of your routine,” Andrews said.

Moulson contributed from Berlin and Calvan from Tallahassee, Fla. Associated Press writers around the world contributed to this report.

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Stock futures open slightly higher as Wall Street tries to extend last week’s gains

Traders work during the opening bell at the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) on March 5, 2020 at Wall Street in New York City.

Johannes Eisele | AFP | Getty Images

Stock futures rose slightly Sunday night as investors tried to build on last week’s solid performance.

Dow Jones Industrial Average futures traded 45 points higher, or 0.2%. S&P 500 futures advanced 0.15% along with Nasdaq-100 futures.

The S&P 500 and Dow rose 1.3% and 2.3%, respectively, last week for their third straight weekly advances.

Those gains came as investors flocked into more beaten-up value names amid positive vaccine trial news from Moderna and a partnership between Pfizer and BioNTech. ViacomCBS — which is down about 40% for the year — gained nearly 10% last week. Gap Inc jumped 10.6% in that time period and United Airlines rose 3.8%. The iShares Edge MSCI USA Value Factor ETF (VLUE) jumped 3.5% last week as well.

But those advances came at the expense of major tech stocks such as Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, Alphabet and Microsoft. Facebook and Alphabet each lost more than 1% last week. Microsoft dropped 5.1% in that time period while Amazon and Netflix slid 7.4% and 10.2%, respectively. Those declines led to the Nasdaq Composite’s first weekly loss in three weeks. These stocks have been the stalwarts on Wall Street this year as investors bet these companies’ business models can keep them growing during the pandemic.

“All the talk about a rotation out of technology and into more ‘value’ oriented areas, will grow in the coming weeks,” said Douglas Busch, founder of ChartSmarter, in a note. “if we lose technologies leadership in a meaningful way, I think it will adversely affect the overall market.”

“If the sector can just take a rest, and keep in the middle of the pack akin to a smart jockey that has a lot of horse under him in a thoroughbred race, then it will likely see a surge again into the fall,” he added.

The S&P 500 tech sector dropped 1.2% last week and was one of only two to decline by more than 1% in that time period.

Stimulus in focus

Traders also turned their eyes to Washington as lawmakers begin negotiations on new stimulus measures.

Earlier this year, President Donald Trump signed a stimulus package worth roughly $2 trillion which expanded unemployment benefits for those laid off during the pandemic. Among these expanded benefits, a $600-a-week check was included. However, these extra payments are set to expire later this month.

“There is a lot of uncertainty about the size and shape of the next bill, particularly on the consumer side,” said Aneta Markowska, chief financial economist at Jefferies, in a note.

“We believe consensus expects a roughly $1-$1.5 package, so if the draft comes in on the high-end of that range, it would be seen as a positive surprise,” Markowska added. “In light of the deteriorating growth momentum, it is highly unlikely that Republicans under-deliver, which means that risks are skewed to the high side.”

Coronavirus cases have been rising at an alarming rate. Data compiled by Johns Hopkins University showed more than 70,000 cases were confirmed on Saturday. That marks two straight days of at least 70,000 new infections confirmed.

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Leganés ends Madrid’s perfect run but can’t avoid relegation | World Sports

MADRID (AP) — Real Madrid ended its Spanish league title-winning campaign with a 2-2 draw that relegated Leganés after four straight seasons in the first division.

The result also ended Madrid’s 10-game winning streak following the pandemic break. Zinedine Zidane’s team had sealed its record 34th league title — and first in three years — on Thursday.

Madrid ended five points ahead of second-place Barcelona — 87 to 82. Barcelona closed out its campaign with a 5-0 rout of Alavés. Lionel Messi scored twice to finish with 25 goals and become the first player to clinch the league’s scoring title in seven different seasons.

Leganés, led by Mexican coach Javier Aguirre, had entered the match one point behind Celta Vigo, the first team outside the relegation zone. Celta, winless in the final seven rounds, survived despite being held 0-0 by last-place Espanyol. It will play in the top flight for a ninth straight year next season.

Espanyol and second-to-last-place Mallorca had already been relegated.

Sergio Ramos opened the scoring for Madrid with a header in the ninth minute for his sixth goal since the league resumed. Leganés equalized with Bryan Gil’s goal in first-half stoppage time before Marco Asensio gave Madrid the lead again from close range in the 52nd.

Roger Assalé equalized again with a shot from inside the area in the 78th but the hosts were not able to get the winner despite some good chances near the end. They wanted a penalty for a hand ball inside the area in the final minutes but video review let the game continue.

Leganés was unbeaten in the last five rounds, with three wins and two draws. The team from southern Madrid last played in the second division in 2015-16.

Madrid played without some regular starters and others were substituted early in the second half.

MESSI DOUBLE

Messi’s double helped Barcelona close the league season on a positive note after a 2-1 home loss to Osasuna in the second-to-last-round.

Ansu Fati, Luis Suárez and Nelson Semedo also scored for Barcelona, which had already secured second place in advance.

Messi ended with four more goals than Madrid striker Karim Benzema to clinch his fourth scoring title in a row.

Barcelona now turns its focus to its Aug. 8 home game against Napoli in the round of 16 of the Champions League. The first leg, played before the break, ended 1-1.

“We have important things to play for,” Messi said. “We needed some tranquility to clear our heads and come back with more desire than ever.”

EUROPA LEAGUE SPOTS

Villarreal, Real Sociedad and Granada grabbed the Europa League spots in the final round.

Villarreal routed Eibar 4-0 to finish in fifth place, Real Sociedad drew 1-1 at Atlético Madrid to end sixth and Granada defeated Athletic Bilbao 4-0 to earn seventh.

The Champions League spots had already been clinched by Madrid, Barcelona, Atlético Madrid and Sevilla.

Cádiz and Huesca have already secured promotion to the first division.

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Jada Pinkett Smith’s ‘Entanglement’ With August Alsina Just Got Even Messier

Jada Pinkett Smith’s “entanglement” with August Alsina sure is getting twisty.

After the “Red Table Talk” host confirmed that she’d had a secret relationship with the R&B singer while she was still married to Will Smith, describing their connection as an “entanglement,” he’s now released a song referencing their romance.

And guess what it’s called? Yep, “Entanglements.” Alsina dropped the new track featuring an assist from rapper Rick Ross on Saturday, and it’s a clear sendup of the drama with the Smith family.

“The definition of entanglement/ It’s when you tangled in the sheets/ Girl I know that we don’t call it a relationship/ But you’re still fuckin’ with me,” he sings in the opening of the song. “Entanglements, is when you tangled in them sheets/ Entanglements, is when you’re tangled up with me/ Entanglements, is when you’re gettin’ in too deep/ Tangled up with me, tangled in them sheets.”

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August Alsina and Jada Pinkett Smith at the 2017 BET Awards.

Elsewhere in the song, Alsina addresses a woman who “left your man to fuck with me, just to pay him back,” later singing, “That ain’t my girl, but I got the key to the crib and to your car (To the crib and to her heart).”

Ross, meanwhile, takes the less subtle approach, dropping references to Pinkett Smith’s film “The Matrix: Reloaded” and her past relationship with Tupac Shakur.

“Jaded by her beauty, but her reputation real solid,” he raps on the song.

Pinkett Smith confirmed she pursued a relationship with Alsina while separated from her husband, explaining that they broke up within their marriage following a period of unhappiness.

In their “Red Table Talk” sit down, the couple seemed to suggest that Will Smith also had his fair share of dalliances.

“We were over,” Pinkett Smith said to Smith about what sparked their separation.

He added, “I was done with your ass. … We decided we were going to separate for a period of time, and you go figure out how to make yourself happy, and I’ll figure out how to make myself happy.”

During the conversation, Pinkett Smith repeatedly used the word “entanglement” to describe her connection with Alsina, which has since spawned many a meme across social media. Smith, however, pushed her to acknowledge that it was a full-fledged relationship.

But Alsina doesn’t seem to mind the categorization, telling Vulture in an interview published earlier this week that the word is actually well-suited to their situation.

“If you look up the definition of ‘entanglement,’ it is a complex and difficult relationship. It was exactly that,” he told the outlet. “I think it’s just the language that probably stuck out to people. But I definitely have to agree with it being an entanglement. It definitely was something complicated, a complicated dynamic.”

Listen to “Entanglements” below.

Calling all HuffPost superfans!

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U.S. coronavirus cases and deaths rising amid ineffective response to pandemic

The holiday had always been her daughter’s favorite. Fiana Tulip loved the family cookouts, the fireworks, the feeling of America united. Now, she wonders if she’ll ever be able to celebrate it again. In mourning, she’s furious.

Tulip, 40, had seen her country fail to control the virus. She had seen Texas ease restrictions even as case counts and hospitalizations soared. She had seen fellow citizens refuse to wear a mask or engage in social distancing.

“I feel like her death was a hundred percent preventable. I’m angry at the Trump administration. I’m angry with the state of our politics. I’m angry at the people who even now refuse to wear masks,” she said.

Six months after the coronavirus appeared in America, the nation has failed spectacularly to contain it. The country’s ineffective response has shocked observers around the planet.

The United States may be heading toward a new spasm of wrenching economic shutdowns, or to another massive spike in preventable deaths from covid-19 — or possibly both.

How the world’s richest country got into this dismal situation is a complicated tale that exposes the flaws and fissures in a nation long proud of its ability to meet cataclysmic challenges.

The fumbling of the virus was not a fluke: The American coronavirus fiasco has exposed the country’s incoherent leadership, self-defeating political polarization, a lack of investment in public health, and persistent socioeconomic and racial inequities that have left millions of people vulnerable to disease and death.

In this big, sprawling, demographically and culturally diverse nation, the decentralized political structures gave birth to patchwork policies that don’t make sense when applied to a virus that ignores state boundaries and city limits.

While other countries endured some of the same setbacks, few have suffered from all of them simultaneously and catastrophically. If there was a mistake to be made in this pandemic, America has made it.

The single biggest miscalculation was rushing to reopen the economy while the virus was still spreading at high rates through much of the country, experts say. The only way to reopen safely, epidemiologists said as far back as early April, was to “crush the curve” — to drive down the rate of viral transmission to the point that new infections were few and far between.

Many countries did just that. The United States did not follow the expert advice. Now, the curve is crushing America.

“We didn’t have the stick-to-itiveness, the determination, to carry through what we started in March, April and May, and now the virus is taking advantage of that,” National Institutes of Health Director Francis Collins said.

“If we’d had really strong guidance from local, state and national leaders, maybe we could have sustained the determination to get the curve all the way down to zero,” he said. “Now, we’re on the upswing, and I don’t quite see the top of the upswing yet.”

America, the outlier

Other countries have managed to avoid the kind of dramatic viral resurgence that is happening in America. Spain, Italy, Germany and France — all devastated by the virus months ago — drove coronavirus cases and deaths to relatively low levels. The United Kingdom has been an outlier in Europe, with one of the highest per capita death tolls in the world, but after suppressing transmission it has not seen a major rebound.

And in Asia, the picture is radically different. In Taiwan, baseball fans sit in the stands and watch their teams play. Japan has had fewer than 1,000 deaths from covid-19, the illness caused by the coronavirus. South Korea has had fewer than 300. Vietnam has recorded no deaths from the virus.

The death rate from covid-19 in the United States looks like that of countries with vastly lower wealth, health-care resources and technological infrastructure.

America’s mishandling of the pandemic has defied most experts’ predictions. In October, not long before the novel coronavirus began sickening people in China, a comprehensive review ranked the pandemic preparedness of 195 countries. The project — called the Global Health Security Index and spearheaded by the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security and the Nuclear Threat Initiative — assigned scores to countries as a way to warn them of the rising threat of infectious-disease outbreaks.

With a score of 83.5 out of 100, the United States ranked No. 1.

How did the nation get caught so flat-footed? By not really trying, said Beth Cameron, who helped lead the project for the Nuclear Threat Initiative.

The federal government punted the coronavirus response to the states, counties and cities, said Cameron, who was senior director for global health security and biodefense on the White House National Security Council and helped write a pandemic response plan under President Barack Obama. The team Cameron led was disbanded after Donald Trump took office.

“I just never expected that we would have such a lack of federal leadership, and it’s been deliberate,” she said. “In a national emergency that is a pandemic, spreading between states, federal leadership is essential. And if there was any doubt about that, we ran that experiment from March and April until now. It failed. So we have to run a different experiment.”

A nation of individuals

Somehow, this highly mobile virus keeps sneaking up on communities, seeding itself extensively before people detect the breadth and intensity of the attack. That happened catastrophically in New York City early in the pandemic. The new outbreaks have been largely in the South and West.

This month, Roy Ramos, a reporter for WPLG-TV in Miami, noticed he had a cough. He and his wife, the station’s evening news anchor, Nicole Perez, went to get tested for the coronavirus. Positive — both of them. Soon, another anchor and the station’s chief meteorologist had tested positive, too.

As of July 14, 10 station employees had tested positive, including some who hadn’t even been in the office or in contact with their co-workers. The virus was everywhere in South Florida, which is now reeling from the pathogen’s assault.

“This is not a political message, but a personal one,” Perez’s co-anchor, Calvin Hughes, told viewers. “Please, please wear a mask.”

In the minds of many Americans, the coronavirus crisis that was so alarming in March and April lost its fearsomeness in May and June, when people tried to resume something approximating a normal life. The shutdowns had been miserable, but they’d been effective.

The success of the shutdowns meant that many Americans didn’t know anyone personally sickened by the virus. In places with low transmission, the crisis seemed far away.

“We just let our guard down,” Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine (R) said in an interview Friday. “Some people when they heard, ‘Hey, Ohio’s open,’ what they mentally processed is, ‘It’s safe. We can go out and do whatever we want to. It’s back to normal.’ ”

In the past two months, the virus has been smoldering in his state, the governor said, and “now we start to see some flames.” He fears Ohio could soon have the kind of runaway transmission afflicting Florida.

“Florida a month ago is where Ohio is today. If we don’t want to be Florida, we’ve got to change what we’re doing. Everybody’s got to mask up,” the governor said.

He and others cite human nature as a problem with containing the virus. Human brains simply aren’t wired to emphasize the importance of doing things, like wearing masks, that protect others but offer no immediate payoff, said Paul Slovic, a University of Oregon psychologist.

“You don’t get rewarded for putting on a mask,” Slovic said. “You don’t see who you’ve protected from harm, but you do feel an immediate discomfort.”

Protecting one life — or even one small puppy — generates a major emotional response that can prompt action, Slovic has found. But as the number of individuals involved increases — say, to the 137,000-plus deaths caused by the coronavirus — people grow inured to the loss, less prone to take action.

That makes public messaging especially essential, experts say. But the messaging in the United States has been all over the place. Even the scientists have struggled: They were wobbly on the effectiveness of masks before eventually embracing them.

Kristin Urquiza, 39, said she tried warning her father, Mark — a lifelong Republican — against going out and risking infection. In their home state of Arizona, as leaders including Gov. Doug Ducey (R) sprinted to reopen in May and June, Urquiza could tell she was losing the argument.

“When the president, the governor and people on cable news are all saying one thing, how do you compete with that?” she said. “He would push back. ‘I hear what you’re saying, but why would the governor say it’s safe to go out if it’s not true?’ ”

“He was a huge supporter of Trump and Arizona governor Ducey. He believed what they said. And they betrayed him,” she said in an interview.

When there’s no cavalry to send

Even before the pandemic hit, local public health agencies had been decimated by years of staffing and budget cuts.

They had lost almost a quarter of their overall workforce since 2008 — a cut of almost 60,000 workers, according to national associations of health officials. The agencies’ main source of federal funding — the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s emergency preparedness budget — had been cut 30 percent since 2003.

Public health is an enterprise with an intrinsic problem: People can’t see sicknesses avoided or deaths averted.

“You don’t see the results. It’s a dog that doesn’t bark,” said David Himmelstein, professor of public health and health policy at the CUNY School of Public Health.

“The question is, does the water come out of your tap clean? Are the sewer systems being inspected? Are restaurants and food being inspected? Those things, you don’t notice until they fail,” he said.

The country’s electronic disease surveillance systems are “archaic and cumbersome,” said Cathy Slemp, who was recently dismissed as West Virginia’s public health commissioner after the governor blamed her for failing to reclassify certain coronavirus cases as recovered.

“We’re driving a Pinto, and want to have a Ferrari,” she said.

The public health challenges are keenly felt in Malheur County, a vast swath of mostly federal rangeland in rural eastern Oregon. About a quarter of its 30,000 residents live in poverty. Teen pregnancy rates are double the statewide rate. There’s one school nurse for 10,000 square miles. Drug use is high.

The first coronavirus case hit March 30, and for more than a month, the county averaged just one to two cases a week. There was resistance to a statewide shutdown in the conservative area, but most people were willing to observe temporary restrictions, said Sarah Poe, director of the county health department.

But after a month or so, residents began to complain of government overreach. Many felt they had to resume working to survive, she said.

“People’s response has been to just take care of themselves, take care of your own business, your own family,” Poe said. “That’s not how this virus works.”

Now, the coronavirus is a full-blown crisis in Malheur County. Cases began soaring three weeks ago, to 15 or 16 a day. As of Friday, the county had 477 cases. The cumulative positive rate since the first case is nearly 16 percent — quadruple the state’s rate.

On Wednesday, facing an accelerating caseload, Malheur County commissioners passed a resolution that goes further than the state’s mask order. It recommends gatherings of no more than 10 people indoors and 25 outdoors, and mask-wearing in groups indoors and out.

“We’re up against just a ton of misinformation,” she said. “What are we fighting here? We are fighting a virus and our goal is to save lives. Let’s not be distracted into fighting other people.”

A turning point

America, experts say, is approaching a tipping point at which its public health systems could become so overwhelmed they begin to collapse. Already, coronavirus test results take so long to come back they are almost useless for anything except as a historical record.

The delays have a cascading effect. Contact tracing is rendered ineffectual. Containing the virus by isolation becomes impossible. And as hospitals fill, the virus’s fatality rate could inch upward because of overtaxed ICU nurses and doctors struggling to care for so many.

But the most dangerous cascading effect could be despair — a loss of hope, along with the resolve to fight the virus, warned Michael T. Osterholm, director of the University of Minnesota’s Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy.

“When that happens, you lose the ability to act rationally. You lose the commitment to fight. You lose all chance of beating back the virus,” he said.

Adam Fleming Petty, a writer in Grand Rapids, Mich., said he feels that demoralization acutely — as well as “so much rage” at Trump and other political leaders whose measures did not quell the virus enough to allow many schools to open.

“One thing I told myself was, ‘Okay, as long as school starts back up in the fall, I can do this. I can make it through the summer if I have that goal waiting for me.’ Now, that goal isn’t there anymore,” said Petty, 38, who has been the primary supervisor of two daughters, ages 5 and 7, while his wife works from home. For four months, the family has socialized with only a handful of relatives just a few times.

“This is far from the first time that governmental administrative incompetence has been displayed. But I can’t remember the last time that the consequences of that were so personal,” Petty said.

Governors and local officials across the Sun Belt have announced incremental measures in recent days to halt the viral resurgence. California instituted a statewide mask requirement. Arkansas and Colorado did so Thursday. Arizona allowed local jurisdictions to implement mask mandates as they see fit.

Florida’s governor has resisted weeks of calls to implement such a mandate. Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp (R) announced Wednesday that all local mask mandates in his state are void.

Louisiana and Texas recently shut down bars in their state all over again. Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey (R) announced a statewide mask mandate in recent days as an alternative to closing. West Virginia limited gatherings to 25 people or fewer.

In New York, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo (D) threatened to close restaurants if social distancing is not taken seriously.

“Closing the bars is going to be the equivalent of fixing three of the five screen doors in your submarine,” said Osterholm, who believes that places with high levels of transmission need to return to the kind of shutdowns common in March and April.

In a telephone interview, Cuomo said New York officials were caught off guard early in the year because everyone assumed the virus was coming into the West Coast from China. But the virus had already spread in Europe, and from there to New York.

“We didn’t find out until after the fact. You don’t have the revelation by the academics until mid-March that this was one of the great health blunders of all time,” Cuomo said. “You actually got hit by a bus that came from the other direction.”

He expressed dismay about the national failure to suppress the virus.

“If you could have written a prescription four months ago, a manual — ‘This is what you must do to deal with a virus’ — and if people could just follow the manual, we would be over this, like other countries are over it,” Cuomo said. “I think it exposed a fundamental weakness in this country. We have a divided country.”

New York beat back the virus by closely following the scientific data and being cautious about reopening the economy, Cuomo said. Many places suffering high rates of infections didn’t do that, he said.

“It was science denial meets government incompetence,” he said.

‘The exception and anomaly’

This crisis has been sucked inexorably into the vortex of political polarization.

Trump repeatedly downplayed the viral threat. “You have 15 people, and the 15 within a couple of days is going to be down to close to zero,” he said in late February. On Twitter, he cheered on citizen protests of shutdowns that had been ordered by Democratic governors. He did not wear a mask in public until July 11.

White House spokeswoman Sarah Matthews in a statement defended the administration’s response to the crisis, saying Trump “has led an historic, whole-of-America coronavirus response — resulting in 100,000 ventilators procured, sourcing critical PPE for our frontline heroes, and a robust testing regime resulting in more than double the number of tests than any other country in the world. … This strong leadership will continue as we safely reopen the economy, expedite vaccine and therapeutics developments, and continue to see an encouraging decline in the U.S. mortality rate.”

A White House official on background defended the president’s support for reopening the economy while the virus was still spreading, citing Trump’s belief that the cure cannot be worse than the disease: “There are consequences to staying closed, including but not limited to missed doctors’ appointments, drug or alcohol misuse, and suicide as a result of the pandemic.”

Future historians will not treat kindly Trump’s efforts to divide and confuse, said James Grossman, executive director of the American Historical Association.

“You look at the Great Depression and how Roosevelt made a concerted effort to unite the country — the fireside chats, the New Deal. That is the instinctive reaction of almost every president in crisis. Even if you don’t succeed, you try to convince people that they’re all in this together,” Grossman said. “This presidency is the exception and anomaly.”

Many Americans now believe the pandemic has been exaggerated, or even fabricated, by scientists and the mainstream news media. The rejection of scientific expertise has flowered into a conspiracy theory holding that the experts are lying as part of a political agenda.

“The most outrageous lies are the ones about Covid 19. Everyone is lying. The CDC, Media, Democrats, our Doctors, not all but most, that we are told to trust,” former “Wheel of Fortune” game show host Chuck Woolery tweeted July 12.

Trump retweeted that. Days later, Woolery revealed his son was sick with the virus, and he has since taken down his Twitter account.

To be an American

As she prepares for a three-day drive across the country — from New York to Texas — to bury her mother, Tulip said she has been thinking a lot about what it means to be American.

She was raised like many Texans, unabashedly proud of her roots and her patriotism. “I grew up a Dallas Cowboys fan. All about the stars and stripes. You know that song ‘Proud to Be an American’? We would literally sing that as kids in elementary school and mean every word.”

Now, she said, she feels betrayed by her country and home state. For the past two weeks, she and her husband have been calling funeral homes in Brownsville, unable to get through because the town has been overwhelmed by the virus.

“I desperately want to believe we as a country can change, that we can recover from where we are now,” she said. “I want to believe that America can get back to who we were, a proud country, one where people can thrive and not suffer.”

Isaac Stanley-Becker contributed to this report.

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What TBT Showed the Sports World About Bubbles

For those unaware or uninterested, TBT (or: The Basketball Tournament) is an annual summer single-elimination and million-dollar-winner-take-all basketball tournament that took place over the past couple of weeks. 24 teams comprised of mainly college alums and overseas stars descended upon Columbus, Ohio to break in the idea of quarantined basketball in the United States. For the most part…it worked!

Phenomenal job by Jon Mugar, head of this entire shindig. He made the whole thing happen and was open and direct in planning for the tournament with unusual circumstances, preparing an overly-cautious bubble. Both are reasons sports took a step forward with TBT (even if Florida and the rest of the US can’t get their act together).

I’d like to take a look at the principles and procedures that went into creating and maintaining a clean “bubble” for the TBT and how the sports that are coming back soon–NBA, college football potentially, the NFL, maybe college basketball–can learn from it.

Starting with…

Testing!

TBT tested its players every single day and made sure each player passed five consecutive tests without testing positive for the virus before they were allowed to join the campus. With even one positive coronavirus test among any player or staff, that team would be eliminated. In a 10-day, 23-games-total tournament, it’s a reasonable and effective rule. Over the course of the NBA Restart or an entire college football season, canceling a whole team over one positive test would be too strict.

I think we can agree that testing every player every week (at least) is a good place to start, and a number of positive tests in a row before starting practice or playing the games should be required as it was in TBT.

Dealing with positive tests is another issue. In TBT, it’s the boot, no negotiation. For college and professional sports trying to play large portions of or even their entire seasons, positive-testing players need to be immediately separated from the team without the whole squad (or sport for that matter) having to shut down.

I’d argue there definitely should be a minimum number of days a positive tester (even if they test positive just once) needs to quarantine from everyone else and also, obviously, a number of negative tests in a row that the player needs to pass to get back on the court or field.

Fans

TBT featured zero fans and it was only half the sneaker-squeak chalkboard scrape I thought it would be.

I’ll say this: I liked TBT’s approach to fans better than any other sports league that’s restarted. No cardboard cut-outs or stuffed animals or fans’ creepy pictures in the stands. In fact, no stands at all.

TBT wrapped the court in big black curtains and colored banners with past champions and sponsors. At midcourt, behind the scorer’s table, in full view of the exclusively-TV audience, they hung a giant velcro bracket. This was brilliant; (1) Because brackets are the coolest thing in sports, and (2) the kings crowned themselves. Following each game, the victorious team would stampede over to the central bracket and place their name on the next line, velcro-ing one line closer to the million.

(Dayton Daily News)

Here’s a picture of the court:

If you don’t have to show thousands of sweaty, mouth-agape Americans sitting and watching basketball, why not throw a handful of sponsorships and old champs and one behemoth bracket on colorful drapes in the background? It made for a cool viewing experience, I’ll tell you that. I didn’t even miss the fans because I couldn’t see the open seats, just the bracket.

Who needs fans anyway. At this point, we’re becoming more trouble than we’re worth in this whole pandemic shebang. As one of the guys on the TBT team named Brotherly Love said: “it’s nice getting that energy from fans, but we’ll create enough of our own.”

An Exclusive Campus

For sports considering a bubble, TBT, while lasting just a week-and-a-half, paved an innovative example. The TBT ruled its campus a little more barbarian that I think the NBA will, assuring players essentially were jailed in individual hotel rooms every minute of the day aside from the games and practice.

But you can’t fault them because…it worked! One of the 24 teams had a positive test or two and was outed but otherwise, every game in the bubble happened on schedule and as the days went on, the positive tests came with less and less frequency; and the whole campus was corona-dry for a nearly a week straight by the time TBT ended.

That feat required the very skills I try to impart on my Kindergarten students: follow the rules, stay safe, be courteous to others and everything will be alright.

Again, it was easier to contain over a short period of time and with much fewer people than other bubbles will have, plus…no fans at all, including no family or close friends or girlfriends. 10 days without your wife or kid…ok that’s probably fine. Multiple months of separation…that’s tough and maybe not worth it to some professional athletes. We also have to factor in the multiplied risk that comes with nearly doubling the bubble’s population by letting everyone bring their family.

What the NBA and MLB are doing with bubbles relies on the same concepts and guidelines that governed the TBT so perfectly, but on a grandiose multi-million dollar scale over all of fall 2020. We’ll see.

Now, with college sports, while schools and teams should govern themselves in a manner concurrent with a bubble, creating one won’t be possible, at least for the most crucial sport: football. In terms of basketball, Mark Emmert and the NCAA are full steam ahead with 2021 March Madness plans (it is their major moneymaker).

At the very worst, they’ve indicated they will find a way to host a March Madness, even if no regular season is able to be played. Maybe we’d see a TBT-esque set up with an even bigger velcro bracket, maybe some group play, a few regional bubbles leading to a Final Four or Sweet 16 (or however many) championship bubble.

The Games

The only flawless part of sports’ return: the actual games. TBT was awesome because everyone pitched in to help make the bubble work and guys competed their tails off! From tip-off to Elam-ender, nearly every game was decided in the final few possessions by 2020’s hottest basketball trend: the Elam Ending, where the clock expires after four minutes in the fourth quarter and eight points are added to the leading team’s total–whoever reaches that number first wins. “Every Game Ends On A Made Shot” is the Elam motto, and it bore out excitingly in TBT 2020.

Over everything, TBT brought basketball (and Fran Fraschilla) back into my life and suggested a reality where sports are played safely in 2020. It was quite refreshing.

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Ohio heading in the wrong direction, ‘could become Florida��

Ohio Republican Gov. Mike DeWine said Sunday that while his administration has stopped short of issuing a statewide mask ordinance, he’s not ruling out implementing that step as coronavirus cases continue to surge in the state.

“We’re going the wrong way,” Dewine said of the outbreak in Ohio during an appearance on NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday. But DeWine pushed back that the recent surge in the state’s number of confirmed Covid-19 cases was due entirely to a lack of a statewide mask mandate.

“I don’t think anybody in Ohio who’s watched what I’ve done over the last four months doubts that, you know, I’ll do what we need to do to protect Ohioans,” DeWine told NBC’s Chuck Todd, adding that he “certainly would not rule out going statewide. We’re certainly looking at that.”

Earlier this month, Ohio was reporting more than 1,000 people falling ill with the virus daily, though that appears to have trended downward in recent days, with only 524 reports of an onset of Covid-19 for Friday. However, the Ohio Department of Health confirmed Friday the state’s total cases increased by 1,679, which includes people who fell ill on different days.

More than 9,500 people have been hospitalized in Ohio since the pandemic hit the state and at least 3,174 residents have died from the virus.

“We’re very, very concerned,” DeWine said, but added that protecting the public is not just about issuing mask mandates. “It’s not all about orders. Orders are important. But it’s also about getting people to understand, ‘Hey, this is very, very serious,'” he said.

“We are at a crucial stage. We are at the point where we could become Florida,” DeWine said. Last Sunday, Florida reported more than 15,000 Covid-19 cases, the highest daily total recorded in any U.S. state since the pandemic began.

Florida has more than 350,000 total cases, according to the state’s health department. Those levels are higher than several major countries with much larger populations such as Italy and Spain. Overall, the U.S. has over 3.7 million confirmed cases and at least 140,294 people have died, according to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University.

Rather than issue a statewide mask mandate, DeWine and the Ohio Department of Health issued an order earlier this month that required all counties that are designated as a Level 3 or Level 4 public health emergency in regards to the level and spread of Covid-19 cases to require face coverings. About 60% of the state is currently under a mask ordinance as the state’s total number of cases pushed past 74,900 as of Sunday.

Ohio, which had a gross domestic product of $698 billion in 2019 and ranks in the top 10 of CNBC’s most recent annual America’s Top States for Business study, instituted a statewide shelter-in-place order that closed nonessential businesses for nearly six weeks. The state then started a phased-in reopening plan on May 1, allowing health-care facilities to resume providing medical services that did not require overnight stays.

Manufacturing, retail, dining, and personal services such as salons, opened gradually throughout May, with limitations placed on capacity and guidelines issued around safety and social distancing. Although most Ohio businesses have reopened, the state has not yet allowed K-12 schools to resume and has also kept entertainment venues, sports stadiums and areas, and certain recreational sports closed for now.

“When we reopened, we were one of the first states to put in place a very sophisticated policy about how you reopen,” DeWine said. But Ohio’s response to the pandemic has not been without controversy. Protesters gathered multiple times at the statehouse in Columbus to oppose Ohio’s shelter-in-place orders. On Saturday, hundreds gathered to protest Ohio’s current county-level mask mandates, saying the requirements are government overreach.

To help drive home the importance of wearing a mask, DeWine’s administration is releasing an ad on Tuesday advocating Ohio residents wear masks whenever possible. The message, DeWine said, is that you wear the mask for other people. Getting people to buy in and to understand why wearing a mask is important is key, the governor added.

“Getting a 20-year-old to understand that he or she may feel invulnerable, nothing’s going to happen to them — but they may get it, they may not know they have it. They may go home and see their grandmother. She may get it, she may end up dying,” DeWine says. “That’s the message that we’re trying to get out across the state of Ohio.”

DeWine also said states need additional funds to help with the public health crisis, particularly money for testing. The Ohio governor’s comments come as the White House tries to block funding for testing and contact tracing in negotiations over the latest relief bill in Congress. Senate Republican, in a rare break with the administration, are pushing back against the White House and trying to keep funding for testing in the bill.

“We’re going to continue to need money for testing,” DeWine said, adding that while Ohio has doubled testing over the past five weeks, the state, frankly, needs to “double” that rate.

“We can only do that with money coming in from the federal government,” he said. “And it has to be over a long period of time — we’re not going to be out of this in a month, or two months, or three months.”

Though the White House is trying to block more money for testing, DeWine said he has confidence in the Trump administration, pointing to the call governors have with Vice President Mike Pence every week.

“Anytime I’ve asked— ‘Look, we need something. We need to try to get more reagents. We need to get the FDA moving’ — every single time I’ve asked the president or I’ve asked the vice president, they’ve come through.”

“What this administration has been able to provide us and that Congress has provided us, and we thank both of them, is the money,” DeWine says.

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Burgundy by bicycle: Saddling up for a vintage ride through wine country

No way am I wearing these,’ says my 14-year-old daughter Hannah. She’s referring to a pair of padded undies that were recommended by a friend when she heard we were going on a cycling holiday in France. Admittedly they’re little more than hot-pink nappies, but they should help prevent saddle soreness, so I pack them anyway.

Twenty-four hours later and we arrive in Macon, southern Burgundy. I’ve hired e-bikes, which have a built-in electric motor to give us a helping hand when the going gets tough on our four-day cycle.

We begin pedalling along the Voie Verte – a cycle path we’ll follow north for the first couple of days. The greenway bisects lush meadows from where cows watch us with interest, especially when Hannah has a change of heart and puts on the ugly undies.

The Mail on Sunday’s Jo Kessel and her daughter went on a cycling holiday through beautiful Burgundy (pictured)

While Burgundy is renowned for wine, it’s less known for its family-friendly cycle paths – all 600 miles of them. They’re mostly flat, easy to navigate and have chateaux and abbeys lining their routes.

And thanks to a luggage-transfer service, which picks up your bags from your hotel in the morning and delivers them to that evening’s destination, we’ve planned a 100-mile loop with plenty of stops on the way.

Every morning we breakfast on croissants, compote and cheese and set off before 9am. Today’s target is Cluny – a distance of 20 miles. I’d thought Burgundy was all about red wine, but the vineyards we pass are ripe with white grapes. We stop at winery Chateau de la Greffiere, where we’re allowed to taste chardonnay straight from the barrel. Dry and crisp with hints of peach, it hits the spot nicely, as does Hannah’s non-alcoholic grape juice, called Nectar de Chardonnay.

Whenever we cross paths with cyclists they bid a friendly ‘Bonjour’. And they cry ‘Allez!’ when we head up what turns out to be a very steep road towards Chateau de Berzy-le-Sec – a hilltop castle with fairytale turrets once home to the Duke and Duchess of Bourgogne. Thank goodness we have e-bikes – we need their boost. Even so, it’s a huffing, puffing ascent, but a stroll around the castle’s ornate gardens allows us to catch our breath.

Jo and her daughter reached the abbey town of Cluny (pictured) after a ride through the Tunnel du Bois Clair, the longest bike-only tunnel in Europe

We don’t want to leave, but it’s time for the final push. It starts easily enough through the mile-long Tunnel du Bois Clair, the longest bike-only tunnel in Europe, which is eerily dark save for spotlights which make it feel very Phantom Of The Opera. But soon the gradient increases. The bikes stutter, thighs wince and it is a relief to reach the abbey town of Cluny. At the B&B, as if by magic, our suitcases are in our room.

The conversation over dinner isn’t about how we cycled 20 miles, it’s about how the undies fared. The answer: very well. So it’s surprising when we return to the Voie Verte the next morning and, instead of wearing the undies, Hannah attaches them to her saddle with hair bobbles. ‘That’ll never work,’ I say. But she does it anyway. Teens!

The Voie Verte has been built on a disused train line and the scenery changes constantly. At first fields are filled with poppies, then rapeseed, and every couple of miles we pass what were once remote train stations now converted into houses.

Chateau de Berzy-le-Sec, a hilltop castle with fairytale turrets once home to the Duke and Duchess of Bourgogne

Jo and daughter Hannah (pictured) on their e-bikes

We’ve been assured that today’s 25-mile ride to the medieval town of Buxy will be easier, and so it proves. We stop twice. First for a picnic of quiche and salami-filled baguettes, and then to visit the Chateau de Cormatin – France’s only chateau with authentic 17th Century decor from Louis XIII’s reign. Its lavish interior drips with gold leaf and lapis lazuli. It’s divine.

Sometimes it’s tricky to find our accommodation once we’ve left the bike path, so it’s handy to have a teen who can download and operate a GPS app. But any aggravation is quickly forgotten after tasting a few grands crus, as I discovered when Laurent Cognard pours me nine vintages to try at his winery in central Buxy, four of which are named after his children.

There’s no bike path for the third section of our loop, so we have to cross Burgundy from west to east via dirt tracks and country lanes.

I had booked a guide to lead the way (I hadn’t bargained on Hannah being so GPS-savvy), but it’s still hard on the legs.

However, I slip into a rhythm and suddenly appreciate the joy of cycling. I’m getting from one place to another under my own steam in fresh air. How brilliant is that?

The guide deposits us in Tournus, on the River Saone. Its abbey is older than nearby Cluny’s, celebrating its 1,000th anniversary last year. The piece de resistance, however, is the town’s Hotel de Dieu – a former convent hospital. The beds, wood panelling, apothecary and leech jars are all as they were when built in 1675. It’s classed as a museum, but it’s so much more. It’s living history.

It’s the first time I’ve been away with just Hannah on an active holiday and we joke over dinner about my speed (or lack of). Whenever I mention my aching limbs, she reminds me that hers don’t hurt in the least. This only spurs me on to pedal harder.

All too soon it’s the last leg, using the Voie Bleue Moselle-Saone a Velo, a new cycle path stretching all the way from Luxembourg to Lyon. Our section flanks the River Saone, which sparkles under a hot sun, but even though it’s our easiest path so far, my legs start to quiver from cycling four days in a row. I’m in a hurry to reach Macon, return the bikes and flop by the pool at our hotel.

I have a longer shower and more wine with dinner than normal, but it feels well deserved. Yes, limbs ache, but the sense of accomplishment is immense. Never before has a holiday combined so much physical activity with such rich heritage.

Would we do it again? Absolutely. And guess what? Those undies will be coming with us again.

TRAVEL FACTS

Jo Kessel was a guest of Burgundy Tourist Office. A five-night cycling holiday in southern Burgundy, including two nights’ B&B and three nights’ half-board, with two sharing, from £435pp (bourgognerando.com). London-to-Paris train tickets (eurostar.com) from £78 return. Trains from Paris to Macon Ville or Macon Loche TGV station (oui.sncf) from £58 return. Visit bourgognefranchecomte.com for more information.

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Lindsay Lohan And Lindsay Lohan To Reunite For ‘Parent Trap’ Special

Does the iconic “Parent Trap” handshake still hit the same virtually? You be the judge when Lindsay Lohan, Dennis Quaid, the film’s true hero, Elaine Hendrix, and more reunite for the time since the movie hit theaters.

To celebrate the 22nd anniversary of Nancy Meyers’ remake, the cast and crew filmed a special that will be released on Katie Couric’s Instagram on Monday to benefit José Andrés’ World Central Kitchen, supporting COVID-19 relief efforts.

Couric will moderate the reunion as the movie’s stars share “their favorite moments on set, recite their characters’ most iconic lines, and discuss the film’s lasting impact,” according to a news release.

“Boy, do @nmeyers and I have a treat for you! We got the cast of the Parent Trap together again for the first time since 1998,” Couric posted Sunday.

“Let’s get together,” added Lohan, who was just 11 years old during filming.

Actors Lisa Ann Walter and Simon Kunz, as well as Meyers and co-writer and producer Charles Shyer, will also be on hand for the special, which will pay tribute to the late, great Natasha Richardson.

The British star, who played Lohan’s characters’ mother in the film, died in 2009 after suffering a head injury in a skiing accident.

Lohan skyrocketed to fame after playing twins Hallie Parker and Annie James, who were separated at birth only to meet by chance at a summer camp. After settling their differences and stumbling upon some disturbing similarities (Oreos and peanut butter, anyone?), the two decide to switch places and wreak havoc all in the name of getting their family back together.

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Lindsay Lohan attends the 2019 Ali Forney Center Gala.

The reunion special came about when Lohan, who’s firmly pro-reboot for most of her past projects, popped up in the comments of Couric’s interview with Meyers in May.

Couric and Meyers were discussing how beloved the film still is all these years later when Lohan chimed in. “Nancy was a mother to me,” she wrote. The message apparently jump-started a long-overdue conversation about getting the cast back together.

Lohan’s performance in the film ranks as one of her finest to date, and many still express disbelief that she played both roles so skillfully at such a young age.

“Meeting her, and you just knew, right off the bat — this was her very first thing — she was so natural,” Quaid recalled about his first impression fo the young actor in a 2015 HuffPost interview. “She just came out of herself, and what a talented, talented kid. I myself forgot that she was just one person. Watching the movie, I think it’s two people!”

Calling all HuffPost superfans!

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Trump challenged over claims as L.A. mayor warns city ‘on the brink’ of new stay-home order

With coronavirus cases rising across the country and the U.S. death toll topping 137,000, President Donald Trump on Sunday dismissed concerns about the spike in infections, telling Fox News that “many of those cases shouldn’t even be cases.”

“Many of those cases are young people that would heal in a day,” the president told Fox News host Chris Wallace in an interview. “They have the sniffles and we put it down as a test.”

While young people make up an increasing share of new cases, the virus has affected people in all age groups. A surge of infections is driving deaths back up again after months of decline, and hospitals in hard-hit states such as Florida, Texas and Arizona are facing an influx of patients that health officials say could soon overwhelm medical systems. Nationwide, hospitalizations were on track to exceed their previous peak of roughly 60,000, reached in the pandemic’s early months.

Trump’s remarks came after another week of grim data highlighting the uncontrolled spread of the virus. Infections rose in states from every region of the country, with more than a dozen states on Saturday reaching record highs in their seven-day averages for new daily cases.

Georgia, Missouri, Wisconsin, North Carolina and Kentucky reported new single-day case records on Saturday, while states from Vermont to North Dakota to Oregon showed significant increases in their weekly averages, according to tracking by The Washington Post.

More than 20 states are reporting seven-day averages in coronavirus-related deaths that are higher than at the end of June, underscoring the turnaround since May and June, when deaths declined nationally – which Trump had touted as a sign of progress.

Rep. Donna Shalala, D-Fla., whose district encompasses parts of Miami with widespread infections, pushed back on the notion that the new cases were limited to young, healthy people and weren’t a cause for concern.

“It’s the working poor, it’s seniors, it’s now young people, and it’s totally out of control,” Shalala, a former health and human services secretary, said on ABC News’s “This Week.” “We need to close down again … That’s our worst nightmare, and we’re going to have to do that.”

In Sunday’s interview, Wallace noted that new cases had far outpaced increases in testing over the past month. He also confronted Trump about his incorrect and oft-repeated predictions that the virus would “disappear.”

“I will be right eventually,” Trump told the host. “You know I said, ‘It’s going to disappear.’ I’ll say it again.”

“Does that discredit you?” Wallace asked.

Trump said he didn’t think so. “It’s going to disappear, and I’ll be right,” he said.

The president’s dismissive attitude toward the coronavirus appears to be costing him public support as the 2020 presidential election draws closer. The approval rating for his handling of the pandemic has dropped 28 points since March as he has disregarded health experts and sowed confusion about the importance of public health measures, according to a new Post-ABC News poll. Thirty-eight percent of Americans currently approve of his handling of the pandemic, compared with 60 percent who disapprove.

The White House’s approach to the pandemic is also starting to put Trump at odds with fellow Republicans as Congress debates another round of coronavirus relief funding. The administration is seeking to block billions of dollars for states to conduct testing and contact tracing, along with billions of dollars that Republican lawmakers want to allocate for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Officials speaking on the condition of anonymity to reveal confidential deliberations said the administration’s stance had angered some Republican senators, who were pushing to secure the funds.

The country’s already feeble coronavirus testing system is under increased strain from the wave of new infections, with labs in some places taking a week or more to provide results to patients. Health experts say such wait times render tests useless in efforts to control the spread of the virus.

“The national testing scene is a complete disgrace,” Colorado Gov. Jared Polis, a Democrat, told NBC News’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday, adding that tests sent to out-of-state private labs were taking as many as nine days to return results.

Once a test is delayed for more than 48 hours, it becomes “not very useful for clinical decision-making,” former FDA commissioner Scott Gottlieb said on CBS News’s “Face the Nation.”

“We’ve had plenty of time to get this right,” he said. “What we don’t have is excess capacity that we can surge into these epidemic cities.” Testing companies were falling behind not just in hotbeds such as California, Florida and Texas, he said, “but now they’re pulling testing out of other regions and you’re seeing delays there.”

With little leadership from the federal government, state and local officials were pressing forward with a patchwork of efforts to control their own outbreaks.

In Los Angeles, where cases have reached record levels, Mayor Eric Garcetti, a Democrat, warned that the city was “on the brink” of another stay-at-home order. He told CNN’s “State of the Union” that the city reopened too quickly and called for patience as businesses shuttered again.

In the past week, Los Angeles County has registered its highest current coronavirus hospitalizations since the pandemic began. Garcetti said “a lot of things went wrong” leading up to the dismal numbers but focused his blame on what he called a vacuum of national leadership.

“They said this was under control,” he said of federal leaders. “They said this would be over soon. And I think when leaders say that, people react, and they do the wrong things.”

“Let people know this is a marathon that we have to kind of push through every single mile, and if we don’t come together as a nation with national leadership, we will see more people die,” he urged.

A growing number of states have instituted mask requirements, with governors from both major parties urging people to stop politicizing the issue.

“It shouldn’t be about politics,” Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson, a Republican, who last week issued a statewide requirement for people to wear face masks in public, told ABC News on Sunday. “It’s not popular, it’s not something that we want to do, it’s not the first lever we pull, but it is one that when the data says it’s necessary, we do it, and I think this is the right approach that we have to take.”

Still, others have held out, even as health experts and the CDC stress that wearing masks is essential for curbing virus transmission. In Mississippi, which reported record high average case numbers last week, Gov. Tate Reeves, a Republican, defended his decision to order face coverings. “If I believed that was the best way to save lives in my state,” Reeves said, “I would have done it a long time ago.”

In Georgia, Atlanta Mayor Keisha Bottoms, a Democrat, and Gov. Brian Kemp, a Republican, continued to spar openly about the importance of face coverings. After Bottoms mandated them in her city, Kemp responded last week with a lawsuit seeking to block the order, saying it was not enforceable. Part of the lawsuit requested a court order barring Bottoms from making public statements that she has “the authority to impose more or less restrictive measures” than those ordered by the governor.

“Far more have sacrificed too much more for me to be silent,” Bottoms tweeted Sunday in response to the lawsuit.

Georgia set a statewide record Saturday, reporting 4,689 new coronavirus cases.

– – –

The Washington Post’s Cat Zakrzewski contributed to this report.

This story was originally published at washingtonpost.com. Read it here.

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UAE great sporting moments – No 2: UAE grace football’s biggest tournament – the Fifa World Cup

Every day over three weeks, The National looks back at the 21 greatest moments in UAE sports history.

On October 28, 1989, on sodden Singapore turf and less than 18 years after the formation of their homeland, the UAE realised one of football’s great dreams.

They qualified for a Fifa World Cup.

So very close in 1986, the national team hauled themselves over the line three years later, coming through a six-team final qualifying round when almost no one expected it. It was even suggested Mario Zagallo’s team had travelled simply to fulfil contractual obligations.

But the UAE beat the odds. After four draws and a late, late win against China, they entered the final match, against group leaders South Korea, sat second. Behind them, the Chinese, North Korea and Qatar gunned for their spot.

It didn’t begin well at the Jurong Stadium. South Korea scored after eight minutes, but the UAE regrouped to equalise in the 16th minute through sharpshooter Adnan Al Talyani. As they clung on for point, and not long before the conclusion, word filtered through from across the island-city state that Qatar had defeated China. The UAE had done it; they had reached the World Cup.

Watching the players celebrate in the mud, Emirati commentator Adnan Hamad was caught up in the emotion.

“I can see the lights of Rome from here,” he wept, his voice pumped into houses back home.

Speaking to The National in 2009, Abdulrahman Mohammed, the former UAE captain, said: “When the referee blew the whistle for the game to end, it was something I will never forget, something incredible. This, for me, was the best moment in the UAE’s football history.”

Goalkeeper Abdulqadir Hassan later added: “But it was not just for our team, it was for the whole UAE.”

Hamad’s now-famous words, meanwhile, make up the title to the excellent documentary, The Lights of Roma [Anwar Roma], which chronicles the UAE’s remarkable journey to, and time at, Italia ’90.

Not long before the tournament in Italy, former manager Carlos Alberto Parreira replaced compatriot Zagallo, a late change that threatened the team’s chances of making their mark on the global stage.

The draw wasn’t kind either. Placed in Group D, the UAE would face Colombia, West Germany and Yugoslavia.

Although they suffered three defeats, Parreira’s side exited with reputations enhanced. They coped admirably with a Colombia side boasting Carlos Valderrama and Freddy Rincon before losing 2-0.

In the 5-1 defeat to the Germans, Khalid Ismail ensured his name in Emirati lore by finding the net against the side who would go on to lift the trophy. Ali Thani matched the feat in the 4-1 reverse to a masterly Yugoslavia.

To this day, that UAE side, made up exclusively of locally based players, is revered and respected, held up as a shining example of the country’s ability to prosper against all circumstances.

Some years on, the golden group of 1990 exists still as the only UAE side to feature at a World Cup. Without doubt, it remains the country’s finest football achievement.

Updated: July 19, 2020 08:46 AM

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gizedcom · 5 years ago

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Visit UK spots that inspired famous composers, from the Malvern Hills to the Suffolk coast

The British countryside is woven through with home-grown classical music, from symphonies inspired by the Scottish islands to Sir Harrison Birtwistle’s chamber composition that references a prehistoric mound in Wiltshire.

And exploring the areas which influenced a composer’s finest work, or visiting museums which celebrate their legacy, makes for an inspiring break.

British composers might not have the exuberance of Italian ones, nor the fame of Bach or Mozart, but if there’s one thing that unites them it’s that their music is tied to the landscape around them. This can range from the sound of birdsong, a blustery Suffolk day or even, in the case of Gustav Holst when he wrote The Planets, the clear night skies.

Inspirational: Black Pear Tours has a self-guided, five-night Elgar walking tour through the Severn Valley and surrounding hills, visiting Malvern and Worcester

Sir Edward Elgar, perhaps Britain’s most famous composer, wrote the Pomp And Circumstance Marches as well as the music for Land Of Hope And Glory. Visit The Firs (nationaltrust.org.uk/the-firs), his birthplace in Worcester, and it’s soon clear how much the countryside meant to him, especially the soft green hills where he grew up and continued to live near for much of his life.

Elgar composed the Enigma Variations in Malvern in 1898, each one a musical portrait of a friend and inspired by the magnificent landscape. A keen cyclist and walker, he wrote The Apostles after cycling to the beautifully still Longdon Marsh, today a nature reserve and haven for birdwatchers.

And while staying at Spetchley Park Gardens, as a guest of the owner when it was privately owned, Elgar penned part of his choral masterpiece, The Dream Of Gerontius. The little-known 30-acre garden, three miles east of Worcester, is a Victorian delight, remains largely unaltered and contains one of the country’s biggest private collections of peonies (spetchleygardens.co.uk).

The dining area at The Cottage In The Wood hotel in Malvern Wells, which has a sense of Edwardian generosity

If you want a relaxing stay nearby, The Cottage In The Wood hotel in Malvern Wells has a sense of Edwardian generosity and spectacular views, especially in its 1919 restaurant. B&B costs from £109 (cottageinthewood.co.uk).

To dig a little deeper, Black Pear Tours has a self-guided, five-night Elgar walking tour through the Severn Valley and surrounding hills, visiting Malvern and Worcester. The price starts at £415pp and covers maps, B&B accommodation and luggage transportation between hotels (blackpearwalkingtours.com/the-walks/elgar-trail).

Elgar was also a regular guest at Long White Cloud, a house close to the Thames in Bray which is now part of the luxurious Monkey Island hotel (monkeyislandestate.co.uk). It was here that he worked on his Violin Concerto.

Not every Elgar haunt is so grand. On the Isle of Wight you can stay in Bermuda House, a Victorian villa in Ventnor where he honeymooned with wife Alice (ventnorselfcatering.co.uk/bermuda-house).

London has a special classical musical landscape of its own. Baroque composer George Frideric Handel left his native Germany and lived here for more than 40 years, becoming a British citizen (he’s buried in Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey, alongside Thomas Hardy and Charles Dickens). And, like Elgar, he had a strong connection with the Thames.

His Water Music, still wonderfully cheerful and party-minded, was written for a pageant on the river in 1717 where musicians performed while bobbing around on a boat. His Music For The Royal Fireworks was first performed in Green Park in 1749 flanked by a recently built Buckingham Palace.

Sir Edward Elgar, perhaps Britain’s most famous composer

Handel’s home in Mayfair’s Brook Street also comes with a plaque to Jimi Hendrix, who spent a year living next door. The two very different musicians also share a museum (handelhendrix.org).

Just around the corner from the designer shops of Bond Street, the museum celebrates both with small but very popular concerts of Handel’s chamber music and also jam sessions, Hendrix-style. Until audiences can enjoy live concerts again, they are being filmed and can be found on the museum’s website.

Also on Brook Street, Claridge’s has history and comfortable double rooms costing from £660 a night (www.claridges.co.uk).

There’s something particularly magical about hearing a piece of music in the place it was first designed to be performed, and Britain’s churches and cathedrals will be for ever intertwined with such an experience, even in more modern cathedrals – Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem was commissioned for the opening of the newly consecrated Coventry Cathedral in 1962.

Next year, Martin Randall Travel has a trip to Oxford that focuses on Divine Office, a series of psalms and hymns written to be performed at certain times of the day.

Held over four days in a variety of colleges, including Magdalen and Christ Church, there’s strong emphasis on British composers, ranging from Thomas Tallis and Henry Purcell through to Britten and modern works. Prices start at £2,580pp including accommodation, breakfasts and some dinners (martinrandall.com/divine-office).

Many of Britain’s oldest stately homes nurtured the talent of English composers. Cliveden House – now a luxury hotel – saw the first performance of Rule, Britannia! in 1740 when Frederick, George III’s eldest son, lived there. Room-only from £445 (clivedenhouse.co.uk).

These days, patronage operates in different ways. Glyndebourne (glyndebourne.com) and Garsington Opera (garsingtonopera.org) are just two historic organisations that started in stately homes.

As well as staging classic operas, both commission new compositions that play to music fans who come to take in culture amid meadows and formal gardens. This year the season has been disrupted but operas can be viewed online, and at 5pm today you can watch the premiere of Rossini’s The Barber Of Seville from Glyndebourne on YouTube.

Cliveden House – now a luxury hotel – saw the first performance of Rule, Britannia! in 1740 when Frederick, George III’s eldest son, lived there

Ralph Vaughan Williams devoted his life to collecting English folk tunes before they were lost, and used them as a basis for lyrical classical music, from the glorious The Lark Ascending to the more mournful Norfolk Rhapsody and In The Fen Country.

He grew up at the 17th Century mansion Leith Hill Place in Surrey, now owned by the National Trust. There are some glorious walks that allow you to follow in his footsteps. Even if you can’t guarantee hearing a lark these days, you can really get a sense of the peaceful, nature-filled landscape that Vaughan Williams grew up in (nationaltrust.org.uk/leith-hill/trails/leith-hill-woodland-walk).

With eight acres of protected landscape, including a river, the rather special Wotton House Country Estate Hotel, which dates from the 16th Century, is a ten-minute drive from Leith Hill Place. Room-only from £110 (wottonhouse.co.uk).

Benjamin Britten was born in Lowestoft in 1913 but spent most of his life down the Suffolk coast in Aldeburgh, working on operas such as Peter Grimes, Billy Budd and The Turn Of The Screw.

Sound sculpture: The Scallop on Aldeburgh beach, dedicated to Suffolk-born Benjamin Britten

His home, the Red House (brittenpears.org/visit), full of hip 1960s furnishings and his purpose-built Composition room, is open to the public. Visitors are welcome to picnic in the classic cottage garden, but venture outside this protected zone and you’re on the starker, moodier North Sea coast that suddenly makes sense of the Sea Interludes in Peter Grimes.

Full Aldeburgh immersion can be had by staying at the seafront Brudenell Hotel, a mile from the Scallop, Maggi Hambling’s controversial four-metre-high steel sculpture dedicated to Britten. Doubles from £150, including breakfast (brudenellhotel.co.uk).

Britain’s composers tend to leave festivals as one of their legacies. Britten set up the Aldeburgh Festival in 1948, starting as a few concerts in the nearby Jubilee Hall. It is now held in Snape Maltings (snapemaltings.co.uk) – a venue converted from a barley warehouse which is on the banks of the River Alde and surrounded by fields.

The Aldeburgh Festival has been cancelled this year, but some of its archives are now online so it’s more accessible than ever. It’s due to host the festival again in 2021.

Three Choirs Festival, which runs each year at Worcester, Gloucester and Hereford cathedrals (3choirs.org) is most closely associated with Elgar but has also featured work composed by Sir Arthur Sullivan, whose favourite collaborations were with the dramatist W. S. Gilbert, resulting in The Pirates Of Penzance and The Mikado.

Felix Mendelssohn visited Staffa (pictured) in 1829 – and wrote an overture inspired by it first performed in 1833 in Berlin

Fingal’s Cave was written by Felix Mendelssohn about Staffa, an uninhabited island in the Inner Hebrides, when he visited it in 1829. Queen Victoria’s favourite composer, he dedicated his Scottish Symphony to her.

And this tradition of Scottish scenery inspiring music continued into the 20th Century. Composer and conductor Sir Peter Maxwell Davies lived in the Orkney Islands for more than 40 years, using the location to inspire operas – most joyously with An Orkney Wedding With Sunrise, depicting the aftermath of a riotous wedding.

If ever there was a year to enjoy the remote beauty of the Orkneys, it’s 2020.

The Storehouse restaurant with rooms makes a perfect base, with doubles costing from £110 including breakfast (thestorehouserestaurantwithrooms.co.uk).

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Pandemic, parking restrictions take a bite out of local K9 business

‘These dogs are a part of this community and if we can’t socialize them … the waterfront is going to be flooded with dogs that are all reactive,’ said TopDog owner

TopDog K9 Services has had some “ruff” times during the COVID-19 pandemic. But, there has been some tail-wagging moments as well.

The doggie daycare and enrichment training facility opened in Orillia on Dunedin Street in December of 2018.

“We offer education as well as the opportunity for dogs to socialize and play with other dogs,” owner Kathy Currie-Eyers explained.

“We do different levels of training and offer enrichment activities for the dogs to do while they are here with us.”

TopDog K9 Services also offers basic training for puppies and speciality training for dogs who have specific issues such as being reactive when they are out for walks and see other dogs, people or other distractions.

When the COVID-19 pandemic threatened local businesses beginning in March, Currie-Eyers was fearful that she would have to close her doors.

“We thought we were in trouble, especially because right out of the gate our business didn’t grow the way I thought it was going to,” she said.

Currie-Eyers cancelled in-building group classes, reduced dog daycare hours from five days a week to two, and laid off some staff.

But what happened next was totally unexpected. Because most other dog daycare and training services completely closed their doors, TopDog K9 Services saw a flurry of new customers.

“People are home with their dogs and there are no training classes available … we were the only option,” Currie-Eyers explained.

Before the pandemic, TopDog K9 Services welcomed in five to seven dogs per day. That number ballooned to 12-15.

While business was booming, a new challenge presented itself.

“We are seeing a lot of pandemic puppies who have anxiety and they are under socialized, they are nervous and afraid out in the world and that is a ramification from all the isolation that has transpired,” Currie-Eyers said.

Puppies who were recently brought into the world and are stuck at home with their owners during the pandemic could be at a disadvantage for the rest of their lives, Currie-Eyers warned.

“When you get a puppy, you have a limited amount of time to build socialization and it needs to be done in the first 6-18 weeks. That’s when puppies need to get out, meet people, see different sights, hear different sounds, be in all sorts of different safe environments so they become confident,” she said.

Manager Jackie Ditchburn-Currie has been taking dogs down to the Orillia waterfront for training sessions and to help make up for the isolation period.

However, the City of Orillia’s new parking restrictions for out of town residents have jeopardized TopDog K9 Services training sessions.

“We are having an issue getting the city to provide us with a parking permit to allow us to go down to the waterfront to do training with the dogs,” Ditchburn-Currie explained.

“I live in Warminster, so they won’t allow me to have a parking pass to do our work on behalf of the business,” she said. Permits are only issued to city residents.

TopDog K9 Services didn’t request any extra parking permits but rather sought permission to allow the permit issued to the owner to be transferred to Ditchburn-Currie’s licence plate so she can be the designated waterfront instructor. But, according to Ditchburn-Currie, city officials won’t budge.

“The ability to get these dogs down to the waterfront to see people, boats, bikes, other dogs, is crucial to get them through COVID because they are under socialized from being isolated,” Ditchburn-Currie explained.

The City of Orillia has informed TopDog K9 Services that the parking permits are not permanent, but, Ditchburn-Currie says the dogs can’t wait any longer, they need to receive training now or they might be beyond re-habilitation soon.

“These dogs are a part of this community and if we can’t socialize them and fix their problems then the waterfront is now and forevermore going to be flooded with dogs that are all reactive,” she said.

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Trump not ready to commit to election results if he loses

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump is refusing to publicly commit to accepting the results of the upcoming White House election, recalling a similar threat he made weeks before the 2016 vote, as he scoffs at polls showing him lagging behind Democrat Joe Biden. Trump says it’s too early to make such an ironclad guarantee.

“I have to see. Look … I have to see,” Trump told moderator Chris Wallace during a wide-ranging interview on ”Fox News Sunday.” “No, I’m not going to just say yes. I’m not going to say no, and I didn’t last time either.” The Biden campaign responded: “The American people will decide this election. And the United States government is perfectly capable of escorting trespassers out of the White House.”

Trump also hammered the Pentagon brass for favoring renaming bases that honor Confederate military leaders — a drive for change spurred by the national debate about race after George Floyd’s death. “I don’t care what the military says,” the commander in chief said.

The president described the nation’s top infectious diseases expert, Dr. Anthony Fauci, as a “a little bit of an alarmist” about the coronavirus pandemic, and Trump stuck to what he had said back in February — that the virus is “going to disappear.” On Fox, he said, “I’ll be right eventually.” The United States tops the global death toll list with over 140,000 and confirmed infections, with 3.7 million.

It is remarkable that a sitting president would express less than complete confidence in the American democracy’s electoral process. But for Trump, it comes from his insurgent playbook of four years ago, when in the closing stages of his race against Hillary Clinton, he said he would not commit to honoring the election results if the Democrat won.

Pressed during an October 2016 debate about whether he would abide by the voters’ will, Trump responded that he would “keep you in suspense.”

Trump has seen his presidential popularity erode over his handling of the coronavirus pandemic and in the aftermath of nationwide protests centered on racial injustice that erupted after Floyd’s death in Minneapolis nearly two months.

Trump contends that a series of polls that show his popularity eroding and Biden holding an advantage are faulty. He believes Republican voters are underrepresented in such surveys.

“First of all, I’m not losing, because those are fake polls,” Trump said in the taped interview, which aired Sunday. “They were fake in 2016 and now they’re even more fake. The polls were much worse in 2016.”

Trump was frequently combative with Wallace in defending his administration’s response to the pandemic, weighing in on the Black Lives Matter movement and trying to portray Biden, the presumptive Democratic nominee, as lacking the mental prowess to serve as president.

Among the issues discussed was the push for wholesale changes in policing that has swept across the nation. Trump said he could understand why Black Americans are upset about how police use force disproportionately against them.

“Of course I do. Of course I do,” the president said, adding his usual refrain that “whites are also killed, too.”

He said he was “not offended either by Black Lives Matter,” but at the same time defended the Confederate flag, a symbol of the racism of the past, and said those who “proudly have their Confederate flags, they’re not talking about racism.”

“They love their flag, it represents the South, they like the South. That’s freedom of speech. And you know, the whole thing with ‘cancel culture,’ we can’t cancel our whole history. We can’t forget that the North and the South fought. We have to remember that, otherwise we’ll end up fighting again. You can’t just cancel all,” Trump said.

Wallace challenged Trump on some of his claims and called out the president at time, such as when Trump falsely asserted that “Biden wants to defund the police.” The former vice president has not joined with activists rallying behind that banner. He has proposed more money for police, conditioned to improvements in their practices.

Trump continues to insist that Biden “signed a charter” with one of his primary rivals on the left, Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont. At one point in the interview, Trump calls on aides to bring him documentation to support his assertion. Trump, however, is unable to point to language from a Biden-Sanders task force policy document released this month by the Biden campaign.

Trump stood behind his pledge to veto a $740 billion defense bill over a requirement that the Defense Department change the names of bases named for Confederate military leaders. That list includes Fort Bragg in North Carolina, Fort Hood in Texas and Fort Benning in Georgia.

The president argued there were no viable alternatives if the government ever tried. “We’re going to name it after the Reverend Al Sharpton?” Trump asked, referring to a prominent civil rights leader. “What are you going to name it?”

Trump, 74, stuck to a campaign charge that Biden, 77, is unable to handle the rigors of the White House because of his age. As for polls showing the incumbent is trailing, Trump noted he was thought to be behind for much of the 2016 contest. “I won’t lose,” he predicted.

The president and top advisors have long accused Biden of using the pandemic as an excuse to stay in “his basement” in his Delaware home. Biden has indeed shifted much of his campaign online, but frequently travels in Delaware and Pennsylvania, organizing speeches and small gatherings with voters and community leaders that are within driving distance of his home. Biden’s campaign says it will begin resuming normal travel and campaign activities, but only when health officials and state and local authorities say it is safe.

Questioned about the coronavirus, Trump chided Fauci, the National Institutes of Health expert, and repeated false claims that anybody could get a test and that increased testing was the only reason that the U.S. was seeing more cases.

Case are rising because people are infecting each other more than they were when most everyone was hunkered down. The percentage of tests coming back positive for the virus has been on the rise across nearly the entire country.

___

Associated Press writer Hope Yen contributed to this report.

WILL WEISSERT

COLLEEN LONG

Aamer Madhani

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