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Title: Twitter searched for security chief weeks prior to bitcoin hack That’s one hell of a job advertisement. Twitter had stepped up its search for a new chief information security officer in the weeks prior to the massive bitcoin scam that breached the social network’s system Wednesday, sources told Reuters. The San Francisco-based social media giant has been without a permanent security chief since May 2018, when Michael Coates left the post and was replaced on an interim basis by Joe Camilleri, a former executive at JP Morgan Chase. Camilleri served in the post for the remainder of that year. The company said security has since been handled by “a stable infosec team that is operating effectively with executive support” pending the hiring of a permanent security director. On Wednesday, hackers — reportedly with help from a Twitter employee who was paid off — took control of accounts belonging to prominent personalities including Tesla CEO Elon Musk, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, Amazon chief Jeff Bezos and former President Barack Obama. Messages sent out from the high-profile handles promised to double contributions sent to a listed bitcoin address — prompting a nearly $120,000 influx of cash into the account in a matter of hours. The FBI is now probing the scam to determine if Twitter is vulnerable to future attacks that could compromise national security. While it is uncertain if a permanent chief security officer could have protected the system from hackers, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey has also been under pressure from investors and analysts to replace Chief Operating Officer Anthony Noto, who left the post in 2018. With Post wires

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Title: Florida can restrict convicted felons' voting rights: Supreme Court The Supreme Court on Thursday said Florida can enforce a law that blocks felons from voting if they have court-related debt. The decision impacts nearly a million convicted Florida felons who owe outstanding fines or fees in what’s viewed as a key battleground state for the November presidential election. The high court’s three liberal justices — Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg — dissented. The decision comes just ahead of the state’s July 20 voter-registration deadline. “This Court’s inaction continues a trend of condoning disenfranchisement,” Sotomayor wrote in the dissent. “Under this scheme, nearly a million otherwise-eligible citizens cannot vote unless they pay money,” wrote Sotomayor, describing the policy a “voter paywall” against poor convicts. The decision was a victory for Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis, who has fought improving voting rights for the state’s felons. When voters in 2018 approved a ballot measure to restore voting rights to most felons, the state Legislature passed a bill blocking those with felony convictions from registering to vote. DeSantis signed the bill into law last June. Rick Hasen, an election law professor at the University of California Irvine, wrote in a blog post Thursday that the decision has “big implications” on the November election. “This case is perhaps the most consequential when it comes to election outcomes; Florida is a perennial swing state and the number of voters affected by this ruling is significant,” Hasen said. The case will now move back down to the appeals court, where a hearing is set for Aug. 18, the same day as Florida’s primary elections. Daniel Smith, a University of Florida political professor, found in an analysis submitted as evidence that nearly 775,000 people with felony convictions have some sort of outstanding legal financial obligation.

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Title: Pentagon eyes new way to bar Confederate flag, officials say WASHINGTON — Defense leaders, who for weeks have been tied in knots over the incendiary issue of banning the Confederate flag, are weighing a new policy that would bar its display at department facilities without actually mentioning its name, several U.S. officials said Thursday. No final decisions have been made, but officials said the new plan presents a creative way to ban the Confederate flag in a manner that may not raise the ire of President Donald Trump, who has defended people’s rights to display it. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss ongoing internal deliberations. Defense Secretary Mark Esper discussed the new plan with senior leaders this week, triggering some bewilderment over the lack of an appetite for a straight-forward ban on divisive symbols. The Marine Corp has already banned the Confederate flag, saying it can inflame division and weaken unit cohesion. Military commands in South Korea and Japan quickly followed suit and the other three military services were all moving to do the same when they were stopped by Esper, who wanted a more uniform, consistent policy across the whole department. An early version of the Defense Department plan banned display of the Confederate flag, saying the prohibition would preserve “the morale of our personnel, good order and discipline within the military ranks and unit cohesion.” That policy was never finalized, and a new version floating around the Pentagon this week takes a different tack, simply listing the types of flags that may be displayed at military installations. The Confederate flag is not among them — thus barring its display without singling it out in a “ban.” Acceptable flags would include the U.S. and state banners and the widely displayed POW/MIA flag. Official military division and unit flags are also likely to be allowed. see also Trump says flying Confederate flag is a 'freedom of speech' issue The move is an attempt at finding compromise, as Esper tries to enact a ban that passes legal muster, gives military leaders what they want, but doesn’t infuriate the commander in chief. That delicate balance has proven difficult and officials said Thursday there was no guarantee that this latest version would make the final cut. An apparent sticking point is whether the military services will be allowed to develop their own more stringent policies on what they consider to be divisive symbols, and whether the policy will state that or leave it unsaid. Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy told reporters on Thursday that he is still working on a policy that would remove all divisive symbols from Army installations. He specifically didn’t mention the flag, but said, “we would have any divisive symbols on a no-fly list.” Confederate flags, monuments and military base names have become a national flashpoint in the weeks since the death of George Floyd. Protesters decrying racism have targeted Confederate monuments in multiple cities. Some state officials are considering taking them down, but they face vehement opposition in some areas. Trump has flatly rejected any notion of changing base names, and has defended the flying of the Confederate flag, saying it’s a freedom of speech issue.

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Title: AG Barr: China trying to topple US as world's 'superpower' Attorney General William Barr warned on Thursday that the Chinese Communist Party has launched an “economic blitzkrieg” to topple the US from its perch as the world’s superpower, laying out the threat as the most important issue of this century and calling for the free world to join together in a “whole of society approach” against it. “How the United States responds to this challenge will have historic implications and will determine whether the United States and its liberal democratic allies will continue to shape their own destiny or whether the CCP and its autocratic tributaries will control the future,” Barr said during a speech at the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Museum in Grand Rapids, Mich. “The People’s Republic of China is now engaged in an economic blitzkrieg — an aggressive, orchestrated, whole-of-government (indeed, whole-of-society) campaign to seize the commanding heights of the global economy and to surpass the United States as the world’s preeminent superpower,” he continued. By exceeding World Trade Organization quotas on domestic output, “it is clear that the PRC seeks not merely to join the ranks of other advanced industrial economies, but to replace them altogether. “The General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party, Xi Jinping, who has centralized power to a degree not seen since the dictatorship of Mao Zedong, now speaks openly of China moving ‘closer to center stage,’ ‘building a socialism that is superior to capitalism,’ and replacing the American Dream with the ‘Chinese solution.'” Barr said China’s “Made in China 2025” initiative seeks to dominate high-tech industries like robotics and information technology and electric vehicles, which “poses a real threat to US technological leadership.” “‘Made in China 2025’ is the latest iteration of the PRC’s state-led, mercantilist economic model. For American companies in the global marketplace, free and fair competition with China has long been a fantasy.” Barr noted that America aided China’s rise by granting the country favored-trading status in 1980 and supporting its joining the World Trade Organization a decade later. China “used tariffs and quotas to pressure American companies to give up their technology and form joint ventures with Chinese companies. Regulators then discriminated against American firms, using tactics like holding up permits. Yet few companies, even Fortune 500 giants, have been willing to bring a formal trade complaint for fear of angering Beijing,” he said. Even more, Barr said American companies have become dependent on the China markets to provide “vital goods and services” – a situation that has been emphasized during the pandemic. Barr said the Chinese Communist Party has launched an “orchestrated” campaign enlisting the government and society to “exploit the openness of our institutions in order to destroy them.” To counter Beijing’s efforts and “to secure a world of freedom and prosperity for our children and grandchildren,” Barr said the free world will have to mount its own “whole-of-society approach.” “America has done that before. If we rekindle our love and devotion for our country and each other, I am confident that we – the American people, American government, and American business together – can do it again.  Our freedom depends on it,” he said. Barr called on America’s corporate executives and the tech giants of Silicon Valley to defy China’s encroachment. “The ultimate ambition of China’s rulers isn’t to trade with the United States. It is to raid the United States,” he said. Barr also warned those who believe trade and investment would appease and liberalize China that it has no desire to be an open and democratic society. “As its ruthless crackdown of Hong Kong demonstrates once again, China is no closer to democracy today than it was in 1989 when tanks confronted pro-democracy protesters in Tiananmen Square.  It remains an authoritarian, one-party state in which the Communist Party wields absolute power, unchecked by popular elections, the rule of law, or an independent judiciary,” he said. Barr said American companies, hungry for short-term profits, have come under Beijing’s influence – “even at the expense of freedom and openness in the United States.” “Globalization does not always point in the direction of greater freedom. A world marching to the beat of Communist China’s drums will not be a hospitable one for institutions that depend on free markets, free trade, or the free exchange of ideas,” he said. In retaliation for Beijing imposing a strict new national security law on Hong Kong to crackdown on pro-democracy protests, President Trump signed an executive order this week slapping sanctions on Chinese officials. It also removes Hong Kong from special trade status it had enjoyed with the US when it was semi-autonomous. Trump also said he’s “not interested” in meeting with his Chinese counterpart Xi JInping to hammer out a phase two trade deal. The Trump administration has accused China of downplaying the severity of the coronavirus after the first cases were reported in late December in Wuhan, China, and falsely reporting the number of cases. The United Kingdom this week under pressure from the US ordered Chinese tech giant Huawei to remove its equipment from Britain’s 5G wireless network by 2017.

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Title: Trump touts deregulation, warns of 'dismal future' under Democrats President Trump on Thursday touted his administration’s deregulation agenda and warned of a “dismal future” if Democrats led by presidential candidate Joe Biden defeat him. Trump cast himself as a crusader against red tape during remarks in a second-straight stump-like speech at the White House, praising his rollback of vehicle emissions standards, watershed rules and a lightbulb ban. The president said he repealed almost eight regulations for every new one, and that businesses and property owners would suffer under Biden. “The American dream would be sniffed out so quickly and replaced with a socialist disaster,” he said. Democrats want to enact the Green New Deal, either “rename” the Washington Monument or “take it down,” “abolish our beautiful and successful suburbs,” and “get rid of prisons,” he said from the South Lawn. Trump largely avoided the coronavirus pandemic while promising “very exciting” action on issues including immigration, for which he has pledged help for young illegal immigrants brought to the US as children. “Nobody’s ever going to see eight weeks like we’re going to have,” Trump said. “We’re taking on so many aspects of things that people were hopelessly tied up in knots in Congress, they’ve been working on some of these things for 25-30 years.” “We’re going to get things done,” he said. “We’re going into the immigration — the world of immigration, the world of education. We’re going into the world of health care, very complete health care.” On Tuesday, Trump said he would begin with action on the suburbs addressing the 2015 Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing initiative, which sought to correct segregation in residential neighborhoods. Trump said the initiative empowers “far-left Washington bureaucrats” to “eliminate single-family zoning to destroy the value of houses.” The Thursday event featured large props, including a crane that lifted the metaphorical weights of regulations from a pickup truck parked beneath the Truman Balcony. “So shower-heads, you take a shower, the water does not come out. You want to wash your hands, the water does not come out. So what do you do? You just stand there longer? Because my hair, I don’t know about you, but it has to be perfect,” Trump said. “Dishwashers, you didn’t have any water, so you – the people that do the dishes, you press it and it goes again. And you do it again and again. So you might as well give them the water because you’ll end up using less water. So we made it so dishwashers now have a lot more water and in many places, in most places of the country, water is not a problem. They don’t know what to do with it. It’s called rain.” Trump also said he brought back “old-fashioned incandescent light bulbs.” “I brought them back. They have two nice qualities: they’re cheaper and they’re better. They look better, they make you look so much better. That’s important to all of us,” Trump said in trashing the regulations that have mandated energy efficient fluorescent and LED bulbs. Speakers touted Trump’s deregulation. A ranch-owner told of how a repealed federal water rule tied up his land due to its usually dry seasonal stream beds. Trump pointed to a recently released “unity platform” from Biden and his leftwing primary competitor Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) as reason to fear future regulations. “They are proposing to re-enter the job killing unfair Paris Climate Accord, which will cost our country trillions of dollars,” Trump said. “They propose to mandate net zero emissions from all new homes and buildings, skyrocketing the cost of construction and putting the goal of homeownership out of reach for millions [and] destroying the look of the home.” Trump added: “The Biden-Bernie plan would also use the weapon of federal regulation to tie the hands of our police departments by abolishing cash bail. Think of that: Bail? No problem. They killed somebody — let them out.” The event was previewed by a senior administration official who told reporters it was a needed “victory lap” on deregulation because the media “is not going to tell our story in a way that it deserves.”

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Title: Lowe's employee ordered to change ‘Black Panther’ shirt A teen employee at a Washington Lowe’s said he was forced to change out of his shirt reading “Black Panther Wakanda Forever” after a customer complained it was racist. A supervisor gave the employee a dressing down over the shirt last weekend in the chain’s Bonney Lake location, ordering him to either buy a new shirt or go home and change, the employee, Kyle Sales, told the local CBS affiliate. “She goes, ‘A customer said your shirt is offensive and racist,’” Sales said. “This is from a movie. How is this racist?” Sales was furious, but ultimately decided to put on a sports jersey over the superhero shirt to hide its wording. “I was very angry. It just did not seem fair in light of all of the things that are happening in our in the world right now,” he said. “This isn’t racist. I shouldn’t be punished for a t-shirt from a movie.” The female customer who complained wasn’t ready to drop the issue, either. She apparently returned the next day to ask whether Sales was reprimanded for the shirt, Sales had reportedly heard from a friend. “She came in throwing a fit saying, ‘What happened to that kid; what was his punishment?’” he said. Sales had only begun working at the hardware store several months ago. He recently graduated high school and took the job to save up money for when he begins college at Washington State University next semester, the station reported. The shirt snafu reminded Sales, who is black, of discrimination he faced in high school and at previous jobs, he said. Kids called him the N-word in school and that a manager at a prior gig referred to him as a “colored boy,” he went on. Sales’ mother, Kimberly, described the incident as “pure, unadulterated discrimination” and added that the company owes Kyle “more than an apology.” Lowe’s did not immediately respond to a request for comment, but the hardware chain told the outlet that it had apologized to Sales. “Mr. Sales should never have been asked to change his shirt, and we have apologized to him directly,” a Lowe’s spokesperson said. “We know this is a teachable moment, and we will take action to coach and train the managers at the store to help prevent this from happening again. “Diversity and inclusion are important to our culture at Lowe’s, and we remain committed to fostering an environment where all individuals are safe, treated fairly, valued and respected.”

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Title: Pregnant Philadelphia woman fatally shot in the head A pregnant woman was fatally shot while inside a car in Philadelphia Thursday afternoon, according to reports. The 25-year-old woman was on West Berks Street in North Philadelphia when she was blasted in the right side of her head at around 2:35 p.m., The Philadelphia Inquirer reported. The victim, whose identity was not immediately released, was rushed to Temple University Hospital in grave condition. She was pronounced dead at about 6:45 p.m., according to the news outlet. The woman is four months pregnant, according to NBC10, which reported that police said the shooting may have been a domestic situation. No arrests were immediately made.

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Title: Florida cops capture kangaroo hopping through the streets We all needed some happy 🦘news this Thursday 📺 🎥 @FLPD411 took the wandering little guy into custody 😜 AKA: The Fort Lauderdale Police Dept Barn #KangarooOnTheLoose #ThankYouFLPD. More @nbc6 pic.twitter.com/dA5KJg0Rwo — Vanessa Morales (@NewsDeskChica) July 16, 2020 FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. — Police officers captured an unlikely suspect bouncing through a Fort Lauderdale neighborhood on Thursday morning. After receiving a call about a kangaroo running loose in the area, officers managed to capture it and place it in a squad car. The agency posted a picture of the kangaroo on Twitter. So far, police have few clues as to the origins of this misplaced marsupial. No one was injured in its capture. The kangaroo was turned over to the South Florida Wildlife Center.

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Title: Florida man in viral Costco incident gets 'claustrophobic' in masks The Florida Costco shopper who went ballistic after an elderly woman asked him to put on a face mask said he refused because he’s “claustrophobic” and has trouble wearing one, according to a report. Speaking for the first time since the viral video emerged, Daniel Maples — who lost his job at an insurance firm over the outburst — said the face covering causes him “distress,” according to the Fort Myers News-Press. “After a while, I start to feel like I’m suffocating. I get claustrophobic and that’s an issue for me,” Maples said. “I prefer not to wear the mask. It’s something that causes me a lot of distress.” Maples — who said he’s received hundreds of threatening texts, emails and voicemails since the June 27 incident — denied shouting at an elderly woman, saying his anger was directed at other shoppers. “I remember someone saying something to me about ‘I have cancer, I have cancer.’ I replied, ‘Well, my father died of cancer,’” he said. “I didn’t understand why she was yelling at me about that.” He added, “I never yelled at an old lady.” Tense unrecorded interactions with other folks in the store — including people who confronted him for not wearing a mask — led up to the confrontation and made him feel threatened, he said. “It was like the mob was gathering around me and I felt threatened,” Maples said. “In that moment, I was scared. I’m not a fighter, I’m not a person that deals with this on a daily basis,” he said. “I don’t know how to manage this.” After the incident, Maples said, he was asked to leave the store by a Costco employee and he did so willingly. He said the heated footage doesn’t represent who he really is. “All I’m really asking for is a second chance at a first impression for people to know the real me and not take 15 seconds of my life and turn me into a demon,” Maples said. Last week, the person who posted the video to Twitter told The Post that Maples yelled at an elderly woman who asked him to put on a mask. A man then stepped in to defend her while citing the number of new coronavirus cases in Florida from the previous day. “You’re harassing me! I feel threatened!” Maples is seen in the footage raging at the man shooting the video.

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Title: Carl Heastie counting votes to legalize mobile sports betting in NY Leadership in the New York Assembly is polling members on whether they’d back the legalization of mobile sports betting, The Post has learned. The vote-counting survey comes after New York’s tax base has been decimated by the recession triggered by the coronavirus pandemic. Staffers for Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie and the Democratic majority started querying rank-and-file lawmakers Thursday — just days before the Legislature reconvenes on Monday. The Democrat-run state Senate has previously supported proposals to OK app-based sports betting, while Gov. Andrew Cuomo and Heastie have been resistant to the notion. One lawmaker who got called about his position Thursday from a program staffer overseen by Heastie’s office said the impact of the pandemic on New York’s finances changes everything. “I was not favorably inclined in the past. But I’m open to mobile sports betting now because of the economic environment we’re in,” said Assemblyman Tom Abinanti (D-Tarrytown). Mobile sports bets would generate tens of millions of dollars in license fees, taxes and other revenues for the state, supporters argue. “New Jersey is doing well with it. New Jersey is taking money from New Yorkers,” he said. Another Democratic Assembly member who requested anonymity said, “Yeah, they were calling. I got a call earlier. I think they’re counting votes to see if they can pass it.” “If it comes to the floor, I’d support it. We’re losing a lot of revenue.” Before the pandemic hit, sports bettors trekked across the Hudson River to the Garden State to place their bets on their smartphones. One dedicated fanatic even cycles over the George Washington Bridge from his home in Harlem to place his bets. Assembly Racing and Wagering Committee Chairman Gary Pretlow (D-Westchester) said he has secured 85 votes to pass a mobile sports betting bill — more than the 76 votes to need to pass the chamber. Pretlow claimed he had the votes to pass his mobile sports betting bill before the COVID-19 crisis hit and said “It’s a good sign” that Heastie is polling members about possibly passing it now. His legislation would require bettors to register with one of the upstate casinos in order to get a sports-betting app — the way horse race bettors sign up with the New York Racing Association to place bets. In-person sports betting is already allowed at the four upstate casinos: Rivers Casino, Del Lago, Resorts World Catskills and Tioga Downs. Betting in sports lounges is also authorized in full-service casinos operated by the Akwesasne Mohawk, Oneida, and Seneca nations. The casinos have been closed during the pandemic. Another proposal would amend the state constitution to allow mobile sports betting, which would take several years, requiring votes by two successive legislatures and then having to be put before voters in a referendum. The governor says a constitutional amendment is required, while Pretlow and the Senate disagree.

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Title: African American History Museum's 'Whiteness' exhibit raising eyebrows The Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History & Culture has a little-known but controversial section on “whiteness” that is creating a stir on Twitter. The museum’s online description of the exhibit was tweeted out on Wednesday by Byron York, chief political correspondent for the Washington Examiner. “The National Museum of African American History & Culture wants to make you aware of certain signs of whiteness: Individualism, hard work, objectivity, the nuclear family, progress, respect for authority, delayed gratification, more,” York tweeted. In an Examiner opinion piece on Thursday, York pointed out the oddity of so many universally positive attributes being ascribed to “whiteness.” “Most of the attributes listed seem to be a recipe for success for anyone,” he wrote. “Certainly millions of black Americans work hard every day, respect individual effort, plan for the future, are polite to others, and so on. It seems odd to attribute that to ‘whiteness,’ as opposed to, say, the everyday values of trying to lead a successful life. “Yet according to the National Museum of African American History & Culture, ‘whiteness’ it is.” The National Museum of African American History & Culture wants to make you aware of certain signs of whiteness: Individualism, hard work, objectivity, the nuclear family, progress, respect for authority, delayed gratification, more. (via @RpwWilliams)https://t.co/k9X3u4Suas pic.twitter.com/gWYOeEh4vu — Byron York (@ByronYork) July 15, 2020 The original tweet had been retweeted, and liked, more than 22,000 times by Thursday afternoon. “Not gonna lie, they nailed us in the food section: ‘bland is best,'” Washington Post data reporter and self-described “Born-again Minnesotan” Christopher Ingraham quipped in response. On Thursday, York noted that the DC museum, one of the most successful in the Smithsonian system, gets $33 million in federal funding and has been supported by “the Lilly Endowment, the Oprah Winfrey Foundation, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, American Express, Bank of America, 3M, Boeing, Michael Jordan, Kaiser Permanente, the Rockefeller Foundation, Target, UnitedHealth, Walmart, and many more.”

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Title: Cutout of Jeffrey Epstein appears in stands at UK soccer game Jeffrey Epstein has popped up in the unlikeliest of places — a soccer game across the pond. A cardboard cutout of the dead pedophile appeared in the empty stands during Wednesday night’s game between Nottingham Forest and Swansea, BBC News reported. Supporters have been banned from soccer stadiums during the coronavirus pandemic but have been invited to fill the seats with cardboard cutouts of themselves. An eagle-eyed fan spotted Epstein at City Ground in Nottingham alongside cutouts of Buzz Lightyear and soccer junkies in red Forest shirts. The teams, which compete in the EFL league, drew 2-2. Epstein committed suicide in jail last August weeks after he was arrested on federal sex-trafficking charges. He was long accused of sexually abusing young women and girls for decades. His alleged madam Ghislaine Maxwell — who holds UK citizenship and has an apartment in London — was busted on sex abuse charges in the US earlier this month. Tennants UK, which has been making the signs for Forest, declined to comment to the BBC. In another soccer snafu, a photo of Osama bin Laden made its way into the stands at Leeds United’s stadium in June.

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Title: Louisville mayor to be probed over Breonna Taylor's fatal shooting The mayor of Louisville will be investigated by his own city council over his handling of the Breonna Taylor case and a second fatal law enforcement shooting, according to a report. The probe will also include the mayor’s handling of the protests that wracked Louisville in the wake of the shootings, CNN reported. Those protests continue in Louisville, and have attracted local celebrities including “Real Housewives of Atlanta” star Porsha Williams and “Love & Hip Hop” favorite Yandy Smith, both of whom were arrested during a demonstration there Tuesday. The Louisville Metro Council’s decision to probe “action and inaction” by Mayor Greg Fischer and his administration was made Monday, the outlet said. There is as yet no timeline for the probe by the council’s Oversight and Audit Committee. But the investigation will include the death of Taylor, an EMT accidentally slain in her home as police executed a no-knock warrant, and the death of David McAtee, who was shot last month as police and the Kentucky National Guard dispersed a large crowd. Probers will subpoena Steve Conrad, the former Louisville police chief, and the current chief, CNN said.

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Title: Majority of Southern voters see Confederate flag as racist: poll A majority of Southerners consider the Confederate flag a symbol of racism rather than a token of “Southern pride,” a new poll found. Fifty-five percent of voters in the South said they associated the flag with racism, compared to 36 percent who said they instead saw it “more as a symbol” of Southern pride, according to a Quinnipiac University Poll survey released Wednesday. That figure closely aligned with the voters polled nationwide, 56 percent of whom said they consider the Confederate flag a symbol of racism. Thirty-five percent of national respondents said the flag more closely represented Southern pride to them, the poll found. That’s a significant change from polling as recent as last month that found 44 percent of registered voters nationwide saw the flag as a symbol of Southern pride, compared to 36 percent who said they primarily saw it as racist, according to a Morning Consult/Politico survey. Broken down by party, 74 percent of Republicans said the Confederate flag was more akin to a symbol of Southern pride, compared to 84 percent of Democrats who denounce it as a racist symbol, the Quinnipiac University Poll found. The poll released Wednesday — which surveyed more than 1,200 registered voters and has a margin of error of plus or minus 2.8 percentage points — also found that 54 percent of respondents support removing Confederate statues from public spaces, compared to 40 percent who do not. The debate over removing such statues is also still heavily split along party lines, with 80 percent of Republicans saying they oppose the move, compared to 81 percent of Democrats who support the removals, according to the poll. A similar survey conducted in 2017 found that just 39 percent of voters backed taking down Confederate statues from public spaces, Quinnipiac poll officials said.

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Title: Chuck Schumer unveils $350B bill to combat 'systemic racism' WASHINGTON — Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer on Thursday unveiled a $350 billion plan he said was intended to combat “systemic racism” as lawmakers return to negotiate a new coronavirus bill. The New York Democrat’s “Economic Justice Act” contains wide-ranging infrastructure and social spending and would redirect $200 billion in unused funds from a Treasury Department coronavirus loan program established by Congress in March. “Instead of allowing hundreds of billions of dollars in government assistance to sit idly at the Treasury, Senate Democrats said they would seek to re-program these dollars during negotiations for a fourth COVID-19 bill,” Schumer’s office said. The provisions aren’t for the exclusive benefit of racial minorities and could land in the new pandemic bill, which is likely to follow lengthy negotiations beginning next week among Democrats, the White House and Senate Republicans. Some elements, such as increased funding for high-speed internet infrastructure, had Republican support during past coronavirus bill negotiations. The Democratic bill follows large anti-racism protests last month over the killing of George Floyd by Minnesota police — and a subsequent deadlock on police reform, with Democrats blocking a Senate GOP plan they call threadbare and Republicans blocking a Democratic measure they say goes too far. “Our new plan would make a historic federal commitment to communities of color through ten major investments over the next five years,” Schumer’s office said in a press release. “Senate Democrats said this was an important down-payment to answer the calls to address systemic racism and historic underinvestment in communities of color.” Among the provisions are $115 billion for infrastructure including housing, internet and “environmental justice” efforts. There’s a $50 billion proposal to “stabilize child care providers in communities, including communities of color.” The bill offers a $15,000 tax credit to offset the cost of home down payments — to help close a near 30 percentage-point gap in homeownership between blacks and whites. Another $25 billion would go toward matching people with “in-demand jobs, like new contact tracing and immunization hiring programs and federal job training programs,” according to a fact sheet. “Community-based” health programs would get $40 billion and Medicaid programs another $30 billion. The bill has $17 billion in “capital support” for small businesses, and $30 billion to reduce the share of poor people’s housing costs to 30 percent. It also proposed steering more federal development funds to areas with “persistent” high poverty. Schumer’s office said the ideas are “in addition to” a $3 trillion coronavirus bill passed by the House in May, which Republicans repudiated as a Democratic wish list including bailouts for states and rent and mortgage assistance programs.

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Title: Tennessee doctor gets coronavirus at meeting about coronavirus A Tennessee doctor says he became severely ill with a case of coronavirus he caught from attending a meeting about how to prevent the spread of the disease, according to a report. Dr. Daniel Lewis, the chief medical officer for Greeneville Community Hospital, said he gathered with a small group of colleagues in mid-March about protocols for containing the virus, the Nashville Tennessean reported. A colleague was suffering at the time from a mild cough, which they wrote off at the time as allergies, the outlet reported. But the same evening, the man developed a fever, and soon Lewis began experiencing one also, the newspaper reported. Lewis, 42, tested positive for the virus on March 30, then checked himself into the hospital two days later when his symptoms dramatically worsened, the report said. He was later transferred to a larger hospital with a dedicated COVID-19 unit, where he fought for his life on a ventilator for 10 days. The doctor finally recovered from the virus and became strong enough to go to a rehabilitation center on May 2. He has since been released to his home but said he’s still suffering from lingering health issues. “I absolutely did not die from the virus, and I praise God for that daily,” Lewis told the outlet. “But I’ve now spent three months of life recovering from the virus with more to go … I will continue to seek care for this in follow-up visits probably for the rest of my life.”

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Title: Kim Yo Jong reportedly being investigated by South Korea Prosecutors in Seoul have launched an investigation into Kim Jong Un’s sister over Pyongyang’s move to blow up a liaison office last month, officials said Thursday. Seoul Central District prosecutors received a criminal complaint against Kim Yo Jong from a Seoul-based lawyer and started the probe, a spokewoman told Agence France-Presse. The news will likely infuriate North Korea, which has repeatedly condemned the South in recent months, including directing personal insults at President Moon Jae-in. Pyongyang blew up a joint liasion office on its side of the border last month shortly after Kim Yo Jong — one of her brother’s closest advisers — warned that the “useless” property would soon be “completely collapsed.” Demolition of the office was ordered by Kim Jong Un, who was reportedly furious over the “dirty, insulting” depictions of his wife in an anti-Pyongyang leaflet campaign initiated by defectors in South Korea. Lee Kyung-jae, the lawyer who filed the complaint, said the liaison office was South Korean property because it was renovated using the South’s government funds — despite being located in North Korea. Kim “used explosives to destroy” the South’s “quasi-diplomatic mission building that served the public interest,” the complaint said. Lee also filed the complaint against Pak Jong Chon, chief of the general staff of the North Korean military. The lawyer said damaging property or disturbing the peace using explosives was punishable by a prison sentence of at least seven years — or death — under South Korea’s criminal code.

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Title: 'Body' found alongside railroad tracks turns out to be sex doll Georgia cops thought they found a dead body alongside railroad tracks this week — and oddly didn’t realize it was actually a sex doll until the coroner showed up, according to a new report. Liberty County Sheriff’s Office authorities believe the life-like doll was placed there as a set-up for police, WSAV reported. Detective Mike Albritton found the fully dressed “body” in Allenhurst, near Dunlevie Road, around 2 p.m. Tuesday, the station reported. By policy, law enforcement officers aren’t allowed to touch a deceased person until the coroner arrives, so they placed a sheet over it and waited, according to the report. Once the coroner arrived, detectives began to check for injuries and instantly realized that the body was in fact a sex doll. The fully dressed, anatomically correct doll had realistic skin and features, authorities told the outlet. Albritton told the station he’d never encountered anything so bizarre during his time on the force.

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Title: NASA releases closest-ever photos of the sun’s surface Sizzling new photos of this star are hot off the press! NASA has released the closest images ever snapped of the sun’s surface — offering a rare glimpse of the glowing yellow orb, according to the agency. “These unprecedented pictures of the sun are the closest we have ever obtained,” Holly Gilbert, a NASA scientist who worked on the project, said in a press release. “[They] will help scientists piece together the sun’s atmospheric layers, which is important for understanding how it drives space weather near the Earth and throughout the solar system.” The out-of-this-world photos, which show lava-like swirls of scalding-hot hydrogen, were shot by the Solar Orbiter — a satellite operated by NASA and the European Space Agency — in June, as it came within 48 million miles of the sun. Scientists also noted that the photos show mysterious little flares dotted around the sun’s surface that they’ve dubbed “campfires.” “The campfires we are talking about here are the little nephews of solar flares, at least a million, perhaps a billion times smaller,” principal investigator David Berghmans said. “When looking at the new high resolution EUI images, they are literally everywhere we look.” It’s not exactly clear what the campfires are yet, NASA noted. Other dazzling images reveal the upper atmosphere of the sun, dubbed the corona — which has a temperature of more than a million degrees. To shoot the photos scientists used a cutting-edge remote-sensing telescope with a high-resolution camera. Scientists working on the mission were reduced to a skeleton crew due to the worldwide coronavirus pandemic, NASA said. But the remotely operated spacecraft completed its mission in time for a close “solar pass” on June 15. “We didn’t expect such great results so early,” said Daniel Müller, ESA’s Solar Orbiter project scientist. “These images show that Solar Orbiter is off to an excellent start.”

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Title: US unemployment boost ending as jobless claims top 51 million A boost in unemployment pay is about to run out for people who lost their jobs due to the coronavirus pandemic — as jobless claims pass 51 million. The $600-per-week federal supplement in unemployment insurance is a flashpoint ahead of talks next week on a new coronavirus relief bill. Republicans including Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell oppose extending the boost — though there are hints of a potential compromise. The supplement for weekly unemployment was intended to ensure that most people kept the same income if they were temporarily out of work, but it officially runs out at the end of July. If it’s taken away, people would only get weekly benefits from state governments, which range from less than $250 a week in Arizona and Louisiana to over $1,200 with dependents in Massachusetts. Many people have returned to work as states allow businesses to reopen, but another 1.3 million Americans applied for first-time unemployment benefits last week. From the start, Senate Republicans objected to the boost resulting in some jobless people earning more than 100 percent of their prior pay due to varying state rates, saying it created an incentive not to work. McConnell (R-Ky.) said this month that extending the boost won’t be in a new bill. “We’re hearing it all over the country that it’s made it harder actually to get people back to work,” he said. White House economic adviser Larry Kudlow is pushing for a “back to work” bonus to replace the unemployment bump. But signaling room for compromise, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, the top Trump administration negotiator on past packages, said last week a priority was changing the provision to ensure “no more” than 100 percent of pre-pandemic pay was awarded. House Democrats passed a unilateral $3 trillion relief bill in May that would include a continued boost in unemployment insurance, along with new rent and mortgage assistance programs. Republicans scoffed at the bill as an unserious wish list. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said Thursday that Republicans “have to do unemployment insurance.” She said the Federal Reserve spent trillions to prop up the stock market and that “we should have trillions of dollars to prop up workers.” Republicans “are like in a caste system mode,” Pelosi said. Republicans are pushing for a bill that includes liability protections for businesses with returning workers and a possible payroll tax cut — meaning there could be a tradeoff. Prior COVID-19 bills were the result of laborious late-night horse trading. Other items possible in the bill include funding for schools to reopen in the fall, and a possible additional round of direct stimulus payments.

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Title: Gov. Cuomo orders full investigation into massive Twitter hack New York is launching a “full investigation” into the massive Twitter hack that targeted big names including Elon Musk, Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos, Gov. Andrew Cuomo said Thursday. The probe will be run through the state’s Department of Financial Services. “Foreign interference remains a grave threat to our democracy and New York will continue to lead the fight to protect our democracy and the integrity of our elections in any way we can,” Cuomo said. On Wednesday, several high-profile Twitter accounts were taken over by anonymous hackers as part of a bitcoin scam. Gates’ account, for example, tweeted, “Everyone is asking me to give back, and now is the time. I am doubling all payments sent to my BTC address for the next 30 minutes.” At least one of the bitcoin wallets linked to the scam raked in about 12.8 bitcoin worth over $117,328 at the current exchange rate. Cuomo called the security breach “deeply troubling” ahead of the presidential election in November. “With more than 300 million users, Twitter is a primary source of news for many, making it a target for bad actors,” the governor said. “This type of hack by con artists for financial gain can also be a tool of foreign actors and others to spread disinformation and – as we’ve witnessed – disrupt our elections.” The hackers allegedly paid a Twitter employee to help them carry out the cyber attack, sources told Vice News’ Motherboard. That gave them access to an admin tool at Twitter, allowing them to change the email address associated with the accounts. Twitter accounts for public figures like Kanye West, Kim Kardashian, former President Barack Obama and presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden were affected.

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Title: Sen. Lindsey Graham calls for legislation on US-made PPE's Sen. Lindsey Graham on Thursday renewed his call for the US to buy personal protective equipment from companies in the US to reduce America’s reliance on China for supplies of crucial gear such as masks and gloves. The South Carolina Republican sent a letter to White House chief of staff Mark Meadows saying he would introduce legislation in the Senate next week that he wanted included in any Phase 4 relief package passed by Congress. “China has laid the groundwork required to dominate the PPE market as part of their effort to maintain a grip on the global public health industrial supply chains,” wrote Graham. “Unfortunately, we have seen in stark clarity the problems this placed on our ability to manufacture a robust and reliable supply of PPE. I urge you to support efforts in the upcoming COVID relief package to ensure the federal government is no longer reliant on China for the procurement of PPE.” In May, Graham visited the Milliken factory in Pendleton, South Carolina, which had switched from the manufacturing of textiles used for things like airbags for vehicles to making masks and other equipment. “The ultimate goal is for all of our protective equipment that our nurses and our doctors and our health care professionals depend on to keep us safe and to keep them safe will be made in America,” Graham told reporters after the tour, Greenville TV station WYFF reported at the time. His visit to Milliken comes a month after the fabric production facility signed a $20 million deal to switch production of flame-retardant clothing and the fabric used to make airbags to PPE for American doctors and nurses. “These are gowns that over the next two months, we’ll make 3 million of,” said Milliken division president Chad McAllister. “And these gowns will end up on the backs of nurses, doctors, EMT, health care workers on the front lines of fighting this pandemic.” Graham’s proposed US MADE Act in the Senate would give President Trump the authority to implement the “Buy American” provisions of the bill immediately. “American companies are reluctant to make long term investments in domestic PPE production because of the uncertainty in future market conditions,” Graham continued in the letter to Meadows. “However, the ability to supply our own PPE is an issue of national security. Just as we don’t rely on China to supply military uniforms we must not rely on them to supply our PPE.” Graham’s plan comes at a time of rising tensions between China and the US over Beijing’s crackdown on Hong Kong, increased military action in the South China Sea and the spreading coronavirus pandemic, which has sickened more than 3.4 million Americans and killed about 136,000, according to the CDC.

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Title: Trump's lawyers, Manhattan DA return to court for showdown President Trump’s lawyers returned to Manhattan federal court on Thursday to continue their fight to block the commander-in-chief’s long-sought tax returns from being made public — with a bullish Manhattan DA’s Office declaring “bring it on.” Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. was awarded a minor win last week when the Supreme Court ruled in his favor and declared the president was not immune from state criminal investigations — paving the way for a New York grand jury to subpoena Trump’s financial records. The final decision on a subpoena was sent back to Manhattan federal court, where the DA’s general counsel Carey Dunne on Thursday told Judge Victor Marrero: “Our position is bring it on.” On the teleconference call, Trump’s lawyers argued the subpoena from Vance’s office requesting the president’s accounting firm Mazars USA hand over eight years of tax returns was vague and a politically motivated attempt to harass him. Trump attorney William Consovoy called the subpoena a “wildly over-broad” carbon copy of a similar subpoena from congressional investigators that was also tossed out by the Supreme Court last week. “This is not a properly tailored subpoena. This subpoena is copied verbatim from a congressional subpoena,” Consovoy told Marrero. “It’s quite unclear how a congressional subpoena focused on issues ranging from international to the management of a hotel in Washington, DC could be related to a subpoena from the New York District Attorney,” he continued. But Vance’s office was confident in its case, mainly because it was already heard before Marrero last year, with the judge tossing out the president’s argument that he should be immune from investigation, calling it “repugnant.” Democratic-leaning New York prosecutors are seeking the Republican president’s tax returns as part of an investigation into whether he paid hush money before the 2016 election to several women with whom he allegedly had affairs. “I can’t help but observe that we’re in the same place nearly a year ago and that is what the president’s lawyers are seeking here: delay. I think that’s the entire strategy here,” Dunne said. “These exotic constitutional immunity claims have now been rejected by the Supreme Court,” he added, warning that “justice delayed becomes justice denied.” Dunne also said the idea that the president was being burdened by the subpoena request was nonsense because the onus is on Mazars USA to produce the records. The Supreme Court last week ruled that the president was “neither absolutely immune from state criminal subpoenas seeking his private papers nor entitled to a heightened standard of need.” The historic ruling will allow Vance to have a grand jury subpoena eight years of the president’s tax returns — but the matter will ultimately be decided by Marrero. “The Supreme Court noted that prosecutors cannot go on ‘arbitrary fish expeditions’ and the court must assess whether the Mazar subpoena is suitably tailored over overly broad,” Marrero said Thursday. “The second set of issues deals with questions of bad faith and harassment,” he continued. “The court may also need to consider whether the Mazar subpoena is motivated by a desire to harass or is conducted in bad faith as the Supreme Court noted,” he said. Trump lawyers tried to sue Vance’s office in 2019 before the move was thrown out by two courts, leading to an appeal to the Supreme Court, the highest legal authority in the United States.

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Title: GOP will limit attendance at Republican convention amid coronavirus The Republican National Committee will sharply restrict attendance on three of the four nights of its convention in Jacksonville next month as coronavirus cases are spiking in Florida. Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel said in a letter to RNC members that only the 2,500 or so regular delegates to the convention would be allowed to attend the opening three nights of the convention. Delegates, their guests and alternate delegates would be permitted to attend the final night, Aug. 27, when President Trump is set to deliver his acceptance speech. The move comes after the GOP was forced to move most of the convention from Charlotte, North Carolina, after Gov. Roy Cooper ruled out a full-capacity crowd amid the pandemic, angering the commander-in-chief, who had wanted a full house. “When we made these changes, we had hoped to be able to plan a traditional convention celebration to which we are all accustomed,” McDaniel said in the letter. “However, adjustments must be made to comply with state and local health guidelines.” In recent weeks, Florida has seen significant increases in confirmed cases, with Jacksonville instituting a face-covering mandate and the state limiting gatherings to 50 percent of a venue’s capacity. The RNC was still working to determine a lineup for the event, which a number of top lawmakers have decided to sit out. McDaniel said the convention was planning to use both indoor and outdoor spaces. GOP officials familiar with the planning said the marquee evening program, including Trump’s speech, were expected to take place outdoors to accommodate the largest crowd possible. The GOP will provide on-site temperature checks and face coverings, and will have COVID-19 testing available for attendees. “We can gather and put on a top-notch event that celebrates the incredible accomplishments of President Trump’s administration and his re-nomination for a second term — while also doing so in a safe and responsible manner,” McDaniel wrote. The formal business of renominating Trump will still take place in Charlotte, but with a far smaller group of delegates casting proxy votes. Democrats are planning a mostly virtual convention. With AP

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Title: COVID-19 hospital ICU deaths have dropped by a third: study The number of coronavirus patients dying in hospital intensive care units has plunged by roughly one-third since the beginning of the pandemic — a sign that health care workers now better understand the illness, according to a new study. Researchers reviewed data from thousands of adult COVID-19 patients in ICUs around the world and found that the death rate decreased from 60 percent in March to 40 percent in May, according to the study, published in the journal Anaesthesia. “As we learn more about this virus and its effect on the critically ill, we become better at treating it and its complications,” Dr. Eric Cioe Pena, director of global health at Northwell Health, told ABC News. Doctors attributed the promising research — which includes data from 10,150 patients — to the fact that they now know more about how the virus spreads, latches onto its host and causes infection, according to the station. “I think we are much better off now,” said Dr. Amesh Adalja, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins University Center for Health Security. “We have a better understanding of the pathophysiology of disease, we have better tools to improve patient care and we are more knowledgeable about ventilator management in these patients.” Along with the use of steroids and anti-viral drugs, which have improved treatment for some patients, advancements in testing have also helped doctors save more lives, he said. “We are diagnosing people earlier,” said Adalja — adding that ICU death rates may continue to decline as more treatments emerge. He added that “People are getting lower doses of viral inoculants” and are experiencing “lower exposure” largely due to public health strategies implemented to limit the virus’ spread. The study also found that there was no significant difference in ICU death rates in continents across the world. “The global sum of knowledge brought to bear on this problem is what has helped to reduce mortality,” said Pena, who warned that treatment needs to be “coupled with good public health measures.” To come to the conclusion that fewer people are dying in hospitals, the authors analyzed all published studies that looked at ICU deaths for adult patients around the world. This week, the number of people infected in the US soared past 3.5 million — with spikes in Southern and Western states such as Florida, Texas and California.

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Title: Bipartisan lawmakers push for White House cybersecurity czar Lawmakers from both parties want the White House to appoint a national cybersecurity director two years after the position was eliminated by the Trump administration, The Hill reported Thursday. The growing support came after an uptick in cyberattacks against everything from hospitals to research groups to federal agencies during the spread of the coronavirus pandemic, and as Congress looks to bolster federal cybersecurity. In the latest high-profile incident, a number of Twitter accounts, including those of former Vice President Joe Biden and former President Barack Obama, were hacked Wednesday in what appeared to be a bitcoin scam. “A national cyber director would better protect the country in cyberspace, and we must make sure we are prepared for and can respond effectively to cybersecurity incidents of national consequence,” Rep. Jim Langevin (D-RI) told The Hill on Wednesday. Langevin and a small group of bipartisan House members introduced legislation last month to create a Senate-confirmed position of national cybersecurity director at the White House. The director would serve as the president’s adviser on cybersecurity and other emerging technology issues, and the official would work to coordinate cybersecurity issues between agencies. The position of White House cybersecurity coordinator, previously held by Rob Joyce, was cut in 2018 by former national security adviser John Bolton to decrease bureaucracy after the position was created under the Obama administration. The decision led to bipartisan pushback on Capitol Hill, with lawmakers saying someone was needed to oversee national efforts to thwart such attacks, especially as more Americans move online. The 2019 Worldwide Threats Assessment compiled by former Director of National Intelligence Daniel Coats listed cybersecurity as the top global threat. Coats said nearly every foreign adversary would try to undermine American policies through cyberattacks and influence operations. The House Oversight and Reform Committee held a Wednesday hearing on the issue, with committee Chairwoman Carolyn Maloney (D-NY) throwing her support behind the bill. “A challenge as complex and pervasive as cybersecurity requires that our government be strategic, organized, and ready,” Maloney said during the hearing. “Democrats and Republicans agree we need a national cyber director to ensure we are fully prepared for, and coordinated in, our response to cyberattacks as our nation fights this silent war.” The legislation was introduced after the position of a national cyber director was proposed in a report from the Cyberspace Solarium Commission published in March. The commission was established by Congress and is made up of members, federal officials, and industry bigs, who were to issue recommendations to defend the US from cyber attacks. Langevin and Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-Wis.) are members of the commission, with Gallagher serving as co-chair alongside Sen. Angus King (I-Maine). Gallagher is also a co-sponsor of the legislation to create a cyber director position, and testified to the committee on Wednesday that the director would likely need at least 75 new staffers and a budget of between $10 million and $15 million. Committee ranking member James Comer (R-Ky.) and other committee Republicans expressed support for the position, but were cautious about creating more bureaucracy at the federal level. “We cannot afford to introduce inefficiencies or bureaucratic hurdles to the government’s ability to respond to a national cybersecurity incident in real time,” Comer said. “I want to ensure that we are not fostering redundant efforts across the cybersecurity sector.” But Gallagher and former House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers (R-Mich.) testified that the need for a central figure at the White House to coordinate cybersecurity issues superseded concerns about excess, The Hill reported. “We in Congress must sufficiently enable the federal government to create a sufficient cybersecurity plan,” Gallagher said. “When we fight, we will fight with all elements as one single, concentrated effort.” While the bill has not been proposed in the Senate, Senate Homeland Security Committee Chairman Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) said he backed the idea. Langevin said that while he and other sponsors were “reaching out” to the Trump administration for feedback, none was forthcoming.

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Title: Epstein was 'Pinocchio' and Ghislaine was 'Gepetto': accuser Ghislaine Maxwell was far worse than Jeffrey Epstein when it came to abusing young women and girls, according to their most outspoken accuser — in fact, she was “Gepetto” to his “Pinocchio.” “She was pulling the strings,” Virginia Roberts Giuffre told “CBS This Morning” of Maxwell on Thursday, calling Maxwell the mastermind, and a “monster.” “Ghislaine was much more conniving and smart than Epstein ever was,” Giuffre said. “I know that woman. I’ve known her really well. Put it this way — Epstein was Pinocchio, and she was Gepetto.” Giuffre had still more choice words for Maxwell. “She is a monster. She’s worse than Epstein. She did things even worse than Epstein did. She was vicious. She was evil. And she’s a woman.” Giuffre called Maxwell’s arrest two weeks ago, on charges that she recruited girls for Epstein, a moment that was “momentous” and “just surreal.” “It’s one of those life moments that I’ll never forget.” Also Thursday, it was revealed that Maxwell had secretly taken a husband in order to safeguard her fortune as prosecutors and lawsuit plaintiffs circled closer. Maxwell’s claimed romantic connection to Epstein himself was also a sham, Christina Oxenberg, a cousin to the British royal family and a one-time pal of Maxwell, has said recently. Giuffre has said in civil suits and interviews that she was “recruited” into Epstein’s revolving roster of young “slaves” by Maxwell when she was 16 years old. She has accused Maxwell of ordering her to bed Prince Andrew three times when she was 17, a claim the prince has denied. Maxwell remains held without bail at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn.

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Title: Fauci invites photographer to home for InStyle cover shoot Dr. Anthony Fauci can add cover model to his resume. Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, ditched his mask to pose for the September cover of InStyle magazine. The top infectious disease expert invited photographer Frankie Alduino to his home last month to capture him sporting sunglasses and a button-down for the glossy, poolside shoot. Fauci and his wife, bioethicist Dr. Christine Grady, also spoke with journalist Norah O’Donnell for an interview that will be featured in the issue. During the interview, the couple, who have been married since 1985, discussed their life during the pandemic, saying they try to incorporate exercise into their regimen. “I used to say ‘run,’ but I don’t run very much anymore because at the end of the run, various parts of my body hurt so much,” Fauci said. “Power walking is very enjoyable and relaxing, and we look forward to it.”

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Title: Statue of Jen Reid, Black Lives Matter protester, removed in UK A statue of a Black Lives Matter protester in the UK was removed Thursday — just one day after it replaced a monument of 17th-century slave trader Edward Colston. Video shows hardhats in Bristol carefully removing the statue of demonstrator Jen Reid with her fist in the air at around 5:20 a.m., the Guardian reported. The black resin and steel piece — titled “A Surge of Power (Jen Reid) 2020” — was erected early Wednesday by London sculptor Marc Quinn. It replaced a statue of Colston, which was torn down last month and tossed into the Avon River. Bristol Mayor Marvin Rees said the city was going through an “incredibly delicate time.” “This is not about taking down a statue of Jen, who is a very impressive woman,” Rees told BBC Radio 5 Live. “This is about taking down a statue of a London-based artist who came and put it up without permission.” Reid was photographed on June 7 on top of the plinth that held the Colston statue for 125 years. “When I stood there on the plinth and raised my arm in a Black Power salute, it was totally spontaneous,” she told the BBC. “I didn’t even think about it. It was like an electrical charge of power was running through me.”

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Title: Kanye West buys his way onto presidential ballot in Oklahoma Kanye West is on the presidential ballot in Oklahoma, but whether he’s running is still uncertain. A representative of the billionaire rap superstar filed the $35,000 filing fee on Wednesday, the deadline for appearing on the Nov. 3 ballot. The Oklahoma State Election Board confirmed his spot in a tweet. “Independent presidential candidate Kanye West has qualified for the General Election ballot in Oklahoma,” it said on Wednesday. The filing comes a day after election strategist Steve Kramer told New York Magazine that West was dropping out. But TMZ.com reported on Wednesday that West’s campaign had filed a “Statement of Organization” with the Federal Election Commission. West, who is married to reality star Kim Kardashian, announced his presidential bid in a July 4 tweet. “We must now realize the promise of America by trusting God, unifying our vision and building our future,” West said. “I am running for president of the United States.” But the “Late Registration” rapper has already missed the deadline to get on the ballot in a number of states. Kramer was hired by West to get his name on the ballot in states still open to filings.

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Title: Pompeo says 2020 summit between Trump, Kim Jong Un unlikely Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said another summit between President Trump and North Korea’s leader Kim Jong Un is unlikely to happen this year. “The truth is President Trump only wants to engage in a summit if we believe there’s a sufficient likelihood that we can make real progress in achieving the outcomes that were set forth in Singapore,” Pompeo told The Hill in a virtual interview Wednesday. But Pompeo said the US is attempting to hold “informed discussions” with Kim’s regime over denuclearizing the Korean peninsula. “But you need to have a willing partner,” he said. “And the North Koreans have chosen at this point in time not to engage in a way that can lead to a potential solution. We hope they’ll change their mind.” The US’ top diplomat said the US and other countries in the region want stability. “We’ve avoided having a long-range missile fired. We’ve avoided nuclear testing. Now it’s time to get to the harder problems and secure a better outcome, not only for the security of the American people but for the people of North Korea as well,” he said. The two leaders first met for a summit in Singapore in 2018, but talks broke down after their 2019 meeting in Vietnam and have not resumed.

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Title: Chris Evans hails Wyoming boy who saved sister from dog as 'a hero' There are no words. We are so, so thankful. A post shared by Nikki Walker (@nicolenoelwalker) on Jul 15, 2020 at 4:36pm PDT Heroes recognize heroes. “Captain America” star Chris Evans hailed a 6-year-old Wyoming boy who saved his sister from a dog attack as a real-life superhero — praising his fantastic feat this week as “so brave.” Evans sent a video message to Bridger Walker, who jumped in front of a German shepherd last week when it charged at his 4-year-old sister, CNN reported. Bridger suffered severe bite wounds that required about 90 stitches, but was able to grab his sister’s hand and bring her to safety. “Pal, you’re a hero, what you did was so brave, so selfless — your sister is so lucky to have you as a big brother. Your parents must be so proud of you,” Evans said in a message, which was shared by Bridger’s aunt. He said he’d send Bridger, who is a huge superhero fan, “an authentic Captain America shield — because pal, you deserve it.” The battered boy, who can’t smile yet because of his injuries, was transfixed as he watched the recording, perking up with every word. “Keep being the man you are, we need people like you,” Evans said. “Hang in there, I know recovery might be tough, but based on what I’ve seen, I don’t think there’s much that can slow you down.” Evans wasn’t the only star moved by Bridger’s heroic actions. Mark Ruffalo (who has played the Hulk), Tom Holland (Spider-Man) and Hugh Jackman (Wolverine) have all reached out to the young fan as he recovers from the brutal attack, the family said. Other celebrities poured in praise as well. “I’m not an Avenger, but I know a superhero when I see one. I can only hope I’m half as brave in my life as you are in yours, Bridger,” actress Anne Hathaway wrote on Instagram with photos of the siblings. “Wishing you an easeful recovery and many cool looking rocks,” she added. “Hey @markruffalo, do you need a teammate??”

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Title: Berkeley moves toward removing police from traffic stops The crunchy California city of Berkeley is going to remove cops from traffic enforcement and replace them with unarmed municipal workers. The city’s council green-lit the move late Wednesday after nine hours of debate over Mayor Jesse Arreguin’s plan to create a transportation department that handles planning as well as parking and traffic enforcement. Arreguin’s plan also calls for the formation of “new” Berkeley Police Department that does not respond to calls involving the homeless or mentally ill. Both revamps are set to be planned and executed by a steering committee tasked “to identify a more limited role for law enforcement, and identify elements of police work that could be achieved through alternative programs, policies, systems and community investments.” Berkeley is believed to be the first city in the county to revoke its police department’s authority over traffic since the May 25 death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis cops, which sparked nationwide calls for reform. “There may be situations where police do need to intervene and so we need to look at all that,” Arreguin said after the vote. “We need to look at if we do move traffic enforcement out of the police department, what does that relationship look like and how will police officers work in coordination with unarmed traffic enforcement personnel?” Arreguin’s initiative also slashes the city police department’s budget by 12 percent. Fans of the proposal cheered its passage, though it could take months or even years to execute. Critics warned taking cops out of traffic enforcement would put whoever replaces them in danger. “I think what Berkeley is doing is nuts,” said Mark Cronin, a director with the Los Angeles Police Protective League, a union for officers. “I think it’s a big social experiment. I think it’s going to fail and it’s not going to take long for, unfortunately, traffic collisions, fatalities to increase exponentially.” Similar proposals have been floated by safety advocates in New York City, where traffic enforcement has been a police responsibility for almost three decades. On Thursday, however, Mayor Bill de Blasio defended the NYPD’s current role, calling the police department “essential to Vision Zero,” his scheme to reduce traffic deaths to zero by 2024. “I don’t doubt for a moment the commitment of the NYPD and I just see these things differently than some of the advocates do. Traffic enforcement, I think, does belong in the NYPD,” de Blasio told reporters. With Post wires

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Title: Brute provoked homeless man into fatal backflip for $6: cops A Las Vegas man was arrested for “goading” a homeless person into performing a backflip for $6 — a cruel, livestreamed stunt that resulted in the victim’s death, police said. Keonte Jones, 28, was arrested Tuesday for felony willful disregard of a person’s safety in the death of 55-year-old Larry Coner, Las Vegas police said in a statement. Coner first approached Jones on June 20 while asking him for money, prompting Jones to offer the homeless man $6 if he could perform a “dangerous” backflip, police said. Video posted to Facebook shows Jones holding $6 in front of a camera as he laughs and says a man he’s filming is about to “hit a backflip” for money. Coner appears to land on his head as he tries to pull off the maneuver in a parking lot, eliciting screams from onlookers, video shows. Jones, who erupts in laughter, walks over to Coner as he’s motionless and another man appears to check on him, according to the footage. “He done hit a backflip and went to sleep,” a man believed to be Jones says in the clip. Jones tells other people at the scene to leave Coner alone as a woman standing nearby says he has “no remorse,” video shows. Police said Jones kept “laughing and filming” Coner for nearly 10 minutes as he urged others not to call for help. Coner eventually was taken to a hospital with a serious spinal injury, police said. Coner died from his injuries on June 30, police said. Police learned about the sick stunt when one of Coner’s relatives contacted investigators, KLAS reports. Jones, who has been released from custody after posting bail, is expected to return for a court appearance on Sept. 14, the Las Vegas Review-Journal reports.

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Title: Russian-backed 'Cozy Bear' hackers target coronavirus vaccine research Russian-backed cyberhackers are trying to steal coronavirus-vaccine research from pharmaceutical companies and academic institutions, the governments of the United States, Great Britain and Canada said on Thursday. Britain’s National Cyber Security Center, in coordination with security officials from Canada and the US, attributed the attacks to APT29, also known as “Cozy Bear,” which is affiliated with Russian intelligence services. “Cozy Bear” was identified by US intelligence as one of two Russian-backed hacking groups that infiltrated the Democratic National Committee computer network in the months before the 2016 presidential election. “It is completely unacceptable that the Russian intelligence services are targeting those working to combat the coronavirus pandemic,”″ British Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab said in a statement. “While others pursue their selfish interests with reckless behavior, the UK and its allies are getting on with the hard work of finding a vaccine and protecting global health.”″ Dmitry Peskov, the spokesman for Russian President Vladimir Putin, rejected the claims. “We don’t have information about who may have hacked pharmaceutical companies and research centers in Britain,” he said. “We may say one thing: Russia has nothing to do with those attempts.” The attacks are an effort to steal intellectual property rather than disrupt research, using tactics that include planting malware. With Post wires

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Title: Ghislaine Maxwell pal thinks she wed to 'protect the money she had' Ghislaine Maxwell secretly wed to safeguard her fortune amid her legal woes, a friend claims in a new report. The pal believes the hidden marriage — a bombshell revelation at Maxwell’s court hearing — was likely orchestrated “to protect the money she had,” the Times UK reported. Prosecutors say the British heiress is linked to 15 different bank accounts, some with balances of more than $20 million, and that she keeps other accounts in foreign countries containing more than $1 million. Jeffrey Epstein’s accused madam also snagged $15 million on a sale of an unidentified residence in New York City in 2016, prosecutors said. When the pal last saw Maxwell two years ago, Maxwell was tight-lipped about her living situation. “I asked her where she was living and she wouldn’t tell me,” the pal told the outlet. “She said, ‘A little bit of everywhere.’” Another former friend of Maxwell said she was completely unaware of the British socialite’s secret nuptials. “No one knew she was married,” the ex-chum told the outlet, adding that she had been in a relationship for a while with the tech entrepreneur Scott Borgerson. “I don’t know of any other guy who she has actually seen.” Maxwell was arrested earlier this month on a six-count indictment charging her with recruiting and grooming young women to be sexually abused by both her and Epstein. She was ordered held without bail on Tuesday.

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Title: UN warns abandoned oil tanker may explode, sparking humanitarian catastrophe An abandoned oil tanker in the Red Sea loaded with more than 1 million barrels of crude oil may explode or rupture, causing a major environmental and humanitarian disaster. The UN Security Council has highlighted the risks posed by the FSO Safer tanker, which is moored off the coast of Yemen. The tanker is loaded with 1.1 million barrels of crude oil. The Security Council told Fox News that it will be meeting to discuss the tanker at 3 pm ET on Wednesday. Houthi rebels, who control the area where the ship is moored, have denied UN inspectors access to the vessel. But in comments obtained by AP, last week UN spokesman Stephane Dujarric said, “The local authorities recently signaled they would approve a UN mission to the site.” “The members of the Security Council expressed deep alarm at the growing risk that the Safer oil tanker could rupture or explode, causing an environmental, economic and humanitarian catastrophe for Yemen and its neighbors,” the Security Council said, in a statement released on June 29. “They underscored the need for the Houthis to immediately grant unconditional access for United Nations technical experts to assess the tanker’s condition, conduct any possible urgent repairs and make recommendations for the safe extraction of the oil, ensuring close cooperation with the United Nations.” Internal documents obtained by The Associated Press last month show that seawater has entered the engine compartment of the tanker, which hasn’t been maintained for over five years, causing damage to the pipelines and increasing the risk of sinking. Rust has covered parts of the tanker and the inert gas that prevents the tanks from gathering inflammable gases has leaked out. According to the AP’s June 26 report, experts say maintenance is no longer possible because the damage to the ship is irreversible. Citing data from Yemen’s Central Statistical Organisation and the country’s Environmental Protection Authority, Yemeni environmental website Holm Akhdar warns that oil spill damage from the SFO Safer could result in 115 Yemeni islands losing their biodiversity. Holm Akhdar also warns that an environmental disaster could result in 126,000 Yemeni fishermen losing their source of income. Some 850,000 tons of fish stocks lie in the Yemeni waters of the Red Sea, Holm Akhdar said and 969 species of fish are endangered by the decaying tanker. Some 300 species of coral reefs are also in danger. The floating tanker is a Japanese-made vessel built in the 1970s and sold to the Yemeni government in the 1980s to store up to 3 million barrels pumped from oil fields in Marib, a province in eastern Yemen before it was exported. The ship is 1,181 feet long with 34 storage tanks.

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Title: China complains to US ambassador about Trump's Hong Kong support China complained to the US ambassador that the Trump administration’s recent actions on Hong Kong and trade is a “bullying” tactic that will be met with a “counterattack,” as Secretary of State Pompeo is predicting Beijing will “absolutely” pay a price for the spread of the coronavirus. Vice Foreign Minister Zheng Zeguang summoned US Ambassador Terry Branstad to Beijing on Wednesday to criticize President Trump’s signing of the Hong Kong Autonomous Act that revokes its special trade status. “I want to warn the US sternly that any bullying and unfairness imposed on China by the US will meet resolute counterattack from China, and the US attempt to obstruct China’s development is doomed to failure,” he said, according to state media. Trump signed the act Tuesday at the White House in retaliation for China’s imposing a draconian national security law on Hong Kong intended to quell pro-democracy protests and end dissent. It authorizes sanctions against Chinese Communist Party officials responsible for the crackdown and ends Hong Kong’s special trade status, meaning it will be treated the same as mainland China and will face the same tariffs the administration slapped on billions of dollars worth of Chinese products. Trump also said he has zero interest in meeting again with Chinese President Xi Jinping over trade issues because of the way Beijing handled the coronavirus pandemic. “We made a great trade deal, but as soon as the deal was done, the ink wasn’t even dry and they hit us with the plague. So right now I’m not interested in talking to China about another deal,” Trump told CBS News in an interview on Tuesday. “I’m interested in doing other things with China,” he said. Branstad, in a statement issued Thursday by the US embassy, said he expressed the US’ “deep concerns about China’s decisions to erode Hong Kong’s fundamental freedoms and to explain the details” of the president’s executive order on Hong Kong. “Hong Kong no longer warrants treatment under United States law in the same manner as United States laws were applied to Hong Kong before July 1, 1997,” Branstad said in the statement, referring to when Britain returned Hong Kong to China. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo echoed Trump’s sentiments about China’s handling of the pandemic, saying Beijing will “absolutely” pay a price for the spread of the coronavirus. “I think the world will absolutely make them pay a price,” Pompeo said in an interview with The Hill on Wednesday. “You can see it, every place I go, every foreign minister that I talk to, they recognize what China has done to the world.” The Trump administration has blasted China for downplaying the seriousness of the virus after it was first reported in Wuhan, China, in late December. “I’m very confident that the world will look at China differently and engage with them on fundamentally different terms than they did before this catastrophic disaster,” Pompeo said. With Post wires

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Title: Portland protester charged for attacking US Marshal with hammer A Portland protester is facing federal charges for attacking a US Marshal with a hammer in a brazen, caught-on-camera nighttime attack, prosecutors said. Harrowing video shows Jacob Michael Gaines, 23, wielding a hammer as he waits outside a door to the federal courthouse in downtown Portland around 1 a.m. Saturday. As Marshals begin pouring out the exit, Gaines allegedly bashes a deputy several times before he’s tackled to the ground and arrested. The deputy was struck three times with the hammer in the shoulder, neck and back but otherwise dodged serious injury, Oregon US Attorney Billy Williams said. Gaines, who is from Texas but currently lives in an RV in Portland, is charged with one count of assaulting a federal officer. Prosecutors said the building — the Mark O. Hatfield US Courthouse — has been vandalized during riots in the city. The Marshals had been staged inside the courthouse to protect it. The video shows one of Antifa’s favored slogans, “ACAB” — which stands for “All cops are bastards” — and “KILL COPS” scrawled in black spray paint along the building. Portland, meanwhile, endured yet another night of violent protests on Wednesday, with police deploying tear gas and stun grenades to break up groups in Lownsdale Square — where the Chinook Land Autonomous Territory was set up.

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Title: Georgia governor bans cities, counties from mandating masks Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp has banned cities and counties in his state from requiring people to wear masks in public places to prevent the spread of coronavirus. The executive order — which extends the state’s virus restrictions — voids existing mask mandates from at least 15 local governments across the state. The governor has previously tried to encourage voluntary mask-wearing, saying that requirements are “a bridge too far.” “We’ve been clear in previous orders and statements that local mask mandates are unenforceable,” his office told the Augusta Chronicle. “The governor has encouraged Georgians to wear them voluntarily for months now.” Georgia reported 3,871 new infections Wednesday, the second-highest daily count to date, and 37 deaths. The Peach State has seen 127,834 people test positive for the virus, including 3,091 deaths. With Post wires

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Title: Who is 'ISIS bride' Shamima Begum? “ISIS bride” Shamima Begum was 15 when she fled the UK to join the terror group in Syria — but now she gets to return home to fight for her citizenship. Begum was a student at Bethnal Green Academy in East London when she and two other girls decided to travel to Syria via Istanbul, Turkey, in 2015. Within two weeks of reaching Raqqa, the teen was married to a 23-year-old jihadist, Yago Riedijk, a Dutchman who had converted to Islam. The pair went on to have three children — all of whom have died. Begum was nine months pregnant with her third child when journalists found her at a refugee camp after she fled the collapse of ISIS’ self-styled caliphate. She said she wanted to return to the UK for the sake of her baby. “I just couldn’t take it. Now all I want to do is come home to Britain,” she told the Times of the UK. At the time, she said her two previous children died in a matter of three months — a daughter, Sarayah, who had become sick, and a son, Jerah, whose death was attributed to malnutrition. The third baby, Jarrah, died of a lung infection at 2 weeks old in March 2019. The newborn’s death came a month after Britain’s Home Office yanked Begum’s citizenship, deeming her a security threat. Had he survived, Jarrah would’ve been allowed into the UK. “Children should not suffer, so if a parent does lose their British citizenship, it does not affect the rights of their child,” former Home Secretary Sajid Javid said at the time. Javid, however, said Begum was Bangladeshi by descent and that she could go there instead. She launched a legal challenge to the decision to revoke her citizenship, arguing that it left her stateless and unable to mount a “fair and effective” fight. She also said she was at risk of “death, inhuman or degrading treatment” in Bangladesh, where her parents are from. On Thursday, Begum scored a victory in that fight, with Britain’s Court of Appeals unanimously agreeing that she could return to the UK to challenge the revocation of her citizenship. “Fairness and justice must, on the facts of this case, outweigh the national security concerns,” judge Julian Flaux wrote in a ruling. “I consider that Ms. Begum’s claim for judicial review of the decision of SIAC (Special Immigration Appeals Commission) … succeeds.” Britain’s interior ministry vowed to appeal the judges’ decision. Begum’s case mirrors one involving American-born Hoda Muthana, who ran off to Syria to join ISIS in 2014 but also begged to return to her home country, claiming she was “brainwashed.” In November, a federal judge ruled that Muthana is not a US citizen — and that she was born while her father was a Yemeni diplomat. Babies born in the US are usually granted citizenship, but those born to foreign diplomatic officers are exceptions under the Immigration and Nationality Act.

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Title: ISIS bride Shamima Begum can return to UK to fight for citizenship ISIS bride Shamima Begum — the British woman who fled to Syria to join the terror group in 2015 and quickly married one of its fighters — can return home to appeal the decision to strip her of citizenship, a court ruled Thursday. Begum, 20, was 15 when she took off with two other schoolgirls from Bethnal Green Academy in East London to join the terror group. The UK-born teen married an ISIS fighter two weeks later and lived in Raqqa, the capital of the self-declared caliphate. Begum turned up last year at a refugee camp in Syria, where three of her children died. She told reporters that she wished to return home. But former Home Secretary Sajid Javid stripped her of her citizenship months later, with its domestic intelligence agency considering her a security threat. He argued that she was Bangladeshi by descent and could go there instead. Begum has been challenging that decision since, saying she’s not a citizen of Bangladesh and that Javid’s decision left her stateless. Three judges from England’s Court of Appeals on Thursday unanimously agreed that she could have a “fair and effective appeal” only if she were allowed to return to Britain. “Fairness and justice must, on the facts of this case, outweigh the national security concerns,” judge Julian Flaux wrote in a ruling. “I consider that Ms. Begum’s claim for judicial review of the decision of SIAC (Special Immigration Appeals Commission) … succeeds.” The judges said if there’s sufficient evidence that Begum is a security threat, she could be arrested upon her return. Her lawyer, Daniel Furner, said in a statement, “Ms. Begum is not afraid of facing British justice, she welcomes it. But the stripping of her citizenship without a chance to clear her name is not justice — it is the opposite.” Begum drew backlash after appearing indifferent to the horrors committed by ISIS. “When I saw my first severed head in a bin it didn’t faze me at all. It was from a captured fighter seized on the battlefield, an enemy of Islam,” she said in a previous interview. “I thought only of what he would have done to a Muslim woman if he had the chance.” She also said the 2017 ISIS attack in Manchester that left 22 people dead was justified. Britain’s interior ministry said it was “very disappointed” by the court’s decision. “We will now apply for permission to appeal this judgment, and to stay its effects pending any onward appeal,” a spokeswoman said in a statement. “The government’s top priority remains maintaining our national security and keeping the public safe.” With Post wires

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Title: Wesley Ira Purkey lethally injected in second federal execution this week The US Supreme Court early Thursday cleared the way for the second federal execution this week, allowing a man convicted of raping and killing a 16-year-old girl to die by lethal injection. Wesley Ira Purkey, 68, was put to death at 8:19 a.m. in the Federal Correctional Complex in Terre Haute, Ind., for the killing of Jennifer Long in 1998. He confessed to killing Long while he was in jail awaiting trial for using a claw hammer to kill an 80-year-old woman, admitting he kidnapped the high school sophomore and then raped and killed her, leaving her burned and dismembered body in a septic pond. Purkey expressed remorse for the killing while he was strapped to a gurney inside the execution chamber. “I deeply regret the pain and suffering I caused to Jennifer’s family. I am deeply sorry,” he said. Long’s father, William, attended the execution. “I hope he rots in hell,” he said. The justices ruled 5-4 to allow Purkey’s execution to go forward, with the liberal wing of the court dissenting. “Proceeding with Purkey’s execution now, despite the grave questions and factual findings regarding his mental competency, casts a shroud of constitutional doubt over the most irrevocable of injuries,” Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote, joined by Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer and Elena Kagan. Purkey’s lawyers said he suffered from dementia and was unfit to be executed, arguing his condition had worsened so dramatically that he didn’t understand why he was being executed. Daniel Lee Lewis, who was convicted of killing a family of three, was put to death at the same prison facility on Tuesday, the first federal execution in 17 years. With Post wires

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Title: Supreme Court clears way for 2nd federal execution this week TERRE HAUTE, Ind. — The Supreme Court early Thursday cleared the way for a second federal execution in as many days. The vote to allow the execution of Wesley Ira Purkey to go forward was 5-4, with the court’s four liberal members dissenting. Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote that “proceeding with Purkey’s execution now, despite the grave questions and factual findings regarding his mental competency, casts a shroud of constitutional doubt over the most irrevocable of injuries.” She was joined by fellow liberal justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer and Elena Kagan. Purkey was convicted of kidnapping, raping and killing a 16-year-old girl before dismembering, burning and then dumping the teen’s body in a septic pond. He was also convicted in a state court in Kansas after using a claw hammer to kill an 80-year-old woman who suffered from polio. Purkey’s execution had been scheduled for Wednesday at the Federal Correctional Complex in Terre Haute, Indiana. On Tuesday, Daniel Lewis Lee was put to death at the facility after his eleventh-hour legal bids failed. It was the first federal execution after a 17-year hiatus. Lawyers for the 68-year-old Purkey argued that he has dementia and is unfit to be executed. They said his condition has deteriorated so severely that he didn’t understand why he was being executed. They also said that if Purkey’s execution did not take place Wednesday, the government would need to set a new date. But government lawyers said there was no obstacle to going through with the execution Thursday if the Supreme Court lifted the injunctions. The issue of Purkey’s mental health arose in the runup to his 2003 trial and when, after the verdict, jurors had to decide whether he should be put to death in the killing of 16-year-old Jennifer Long in Kansas City, Missouri. Prosecutors said he raped and stabbed her, dismembered her with a chainsaw, burned her and dumped her ashes 200 miles (320 kilometers) away in a septic pond in Kansas. Purkey was separately convicted and sentenced to life in the beating death of 80-year-old Mary Ruth Bales, of Kansas City, Kansas, who suffered from polio.

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Title: Former Honolulu cop sentenced for forcing homeless man to lick urinal A former police officer in Hawaii was sentenced to four years in prison Wednesday for forcing a homeless man to lick a urinal to avoid being arrested. “I’m here to judge you on the worst thing you’ve done in your life,” US District Judge Leslie Kobayashi told the former Honolulu cop, John Rabago, at his sentencing. “You took from [that man] his only possession: his dignity as a human being,” Kobayashi told Rabago. Rabago, 44, and another officer, Reginald Ramones, had responded to a nuisance complaint at a shopping mall in 2018 when they found the man in a stall in a public restroom. The 37-year-old told the cops he would do “anything” to avoid getting arrested, according to court papers. “If you lick the urinal you won’t get arrested,” Rabago told the man. Rabago threatened to beat him and shove his face in a toilet if he didn’t lick the urinal, Kobayashi said. Both officers had been charged with depriving the man of his civil rights. Ramones, who also left the department, is scheduled to be sentenced next week. At Wednesday’s sentencing, Rabago apologized to the victim and his family. “Two years ago I made a decision I’m not proud of,” he said. “My actions changed the course of life for all of us.” The man, who filed a lawsuit against the Honolulu Police Department and the city, was “pleasantly surprised” by the four-year sentence, his lawyer, Myles Breiner, said. “He was under the impression that they would coddle him and give him a minimum term, a very low sentence,” said Breiner. With Post wires

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Title: Twitter blames 'coordinated social engineering attack' for hack A Twitter bitcoin scam that hacked the accounts of prominent users like Barack Obama and Elon Musk Wednesday was the result of a “coordinated social engineering attack” targeting employees, the social media company said. The attack led to fake posts from more than a dozen popular accounts and forced the company to race to delete the messages and lockout a much larger network of users as it tried to secure the site. “We detected what we believe to be a coordinated social engineering attack by people who successfully targeted some of our employees with access to internal systems and tools,” the company posted on its official Twitter Support account. “We know they used this access to take control of many highly-visible (including verified) accounts and Tweet on their behalf,” the company continued. “We’re looking into what other malicious activity they may have conducted or information they may have accessed and will share more here as we have it.” All hacked accounts were verified and sent posts out instructing followers to send bitcoin to a specific address in order to receive free bitcoin. The victims included billionaire Bill Gates, Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden, Kanye West and tech giants like Apple and Uber. Twitter said it “immediately” worked to take down the tweets and locked down the affected accounts. But the messages were likely widely viewed considering the prominence of the victims. We detected what we believe to be a coordinated social engineering attack by people who successfully targeted some of our employees with access to internal systems and tools. — Twitter Support (@TwitterSupport) July 16, 2020 The company acknowledged that shutting out a much larger group of users was “disruptive” but necessary. “This was disruptive, but it was an important step to reduce risk,” the company posted. “Most functionality has been restored but we may take further actions and will update you if we do.” Twitter said it was working to restore account access to their rightful owners but would only turn over the keys “when we are certain we can do so securely.” “Internally, we’ve taken significant steps to limit access to internal systems and tools while our investigation is ongoing,” the company said. “More updates to come as our investigation continues.” Wednesday’s attack also alarmed lawmakers responsible for oversight of Silicon Valley’s massive tech companies. Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) sent a letter to Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey requesting more information, with questions that include, “Did this attack threaten the security of the President’s own Twitter account?” “A successful attack on your system’s servers represents a threat to all of your users’ privacy and data security,” Hawley wrote.

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Title: Suspect in shooting death of Secoriea Turner surrenders to cops An Atlanta teenager sought in the shooting death of 8-year-old Secoriea Turner turned himself into police on Wednesday. Julian Conley, 19, turned himself in one day after prosecutors issued a felony murder warrant for him in the girl’s shooting death on July 4 near the Wendy’s fast-food restaurant where Rayshard Brooks was shot and killed by police on June 12, CBS News reported. Turner was riding in her mother’s car when she was shot and killed. Police said the woman’s vehicle turned into a nearby parking spot before she was confronted by a group of armed men, who opened fire on the car. The girl’s death prompted Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms to declare, “enough is enough.” “These aren’t police officers shooting people on the streets of Atlanta,” Bottoms said. “These are members of the community shooting each other. And in this case, it is the worse possible outcome.” The Georgia city was wracked by protests and confrontations with police following the May 25 police custody death of George Floyd in Minneapolis — but took a more violent turn after Brooks was shot twice in the back by police outside the Wendy’s. Protestors torched the eatery the following day. Gov. Brian Kemp called in the National Guard following Secoriea’s death, which came during a bloody weekend of violence that saw four other people shot dead in Atlanta.

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Title: BLM sculpture replaces toppled statue of British slave trader The sculpture of a Black Lives Matter protestor has replaced the toppled statue of a 17th Century slave trader in England. The model of BLM protestor Jen Reid was snuck onto the Bristol pedestal that housed the 125-year-old statue of Edward Colston until demonstrators hauled it down and dragged it into the nearby harbor on June 7, the BBC reported Wednesday. Reid told the network she was walking past the empty pedestal after the protest when she was inspired to climb on top and raise her fist in a spontaneous show of solidarity — with her husband taking a photo of the moment, the network said. “I think it’s something the people of Bristol really appreciate seeing,” Reid said. “When I stood there on the plinth and raised my arm in a Black Power salute, it was totally spontaneous,” she told the BBC. “I didn’t even think about it. It was like an electrical charge of power was running through me.” The gesture caught the attention of artist Marc Quinn, who said he got in touch with Reid through social media and teamed up with the activist to create the black resin statue, which he snuck onto the pedestal in the wee hours Wednesday. “I saw pictures of Jen on the plinth and she spontaneously made this gesture and I thought, ‘This is amazing,” Quinn said. “She’s made an extraordinary artwork just by doing that and it needs to be crystallized into an object and put back on the plinth.” “It had to be in that public realm and I wanted to put it in that charged spot where Edward Colston had been before,” the London-based artist said. The Colston statue had stood near Floating Harbor in Bristol since 1895. Colston was an instrumental figure in the growth of Bristol but built much of his fortune through the slave trade — and became an early target of BLM protestors in the wake of George Floyd’s police custody death in Minneapolis on May 25. However, it is now likely that Reid’s replacement statue may only stand in the harbor temporarily. “I understand people want expression, but the statue has been put up without permission,” Bristol Mayor Marvin Rees said on Twitter. “Anything put on the plinth outside of the process we’ve put in place will have to be removed,” Rees said. “The people of Bristol will decide its future.”

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Title: Maine to use ranked voting for president after repeal fails AUGUSTA, Maine — Maine voters are poised to become the first group of voters in US history to be able to use a ranked style of voting for president, following a ruling by the secretary of state Wednesday. Maine voters approved a switch to ranked-choice voting with a statewide vote in 2016. A state law change later extended the voting system to presidential elections in Maine. The Maine GOP gathered signatures to try to force a people’s veto vote on the law change. That would have kept ranked-choice voting off presidential ballots in the state this year, because voters would have had to decide then whether to retain the voting method. Maine Secretary of State Matthew Dunlap said that the Republicans’ effort doesn’t have enough valid signatures to force that vote. Republicans submitted 72,512 signatures, but only 61,334 were valid — more than 1,600 short of the threshold, he said. The Maine GOP vowed to challenge the ruling. “Let me be clear. This fight is not over,” said Dr. Demi Kouzounas, Maine Republican Party chair. “It is abundantly clear that the secretary of state used every trick in the book to throw out enough signatures through a litany of technicalities to keep this question off the ballot.” President Donald Trump’s campaign also weighed in. “The secretary of state does not have the right to silence voters and we will not let this stand,” said Justin Clark, senior political advisor and senior counsel. Ranked-choice voting allows voters to rank candidates when there are more than two in a race. It comes into play if no candidate cracks 50% of the first-place vote. That triggers another round of voting in which bottom finishers are eliminated, and those voters’ second choices are reallocated to the remaining field. The use of ranked-choice voting in Maine could impact the outcome of a tight presidential election. Maine has four electoral votes. It’s also one of two states that apportions individual electoral votes to the winners of its congressional districts. The other is Nebraska. The 2nd Congressional District is expected to be especially close. Trump won the district in 2016. Hillary Clinton won the rest of the state’s electoral votes. Maine also uses ranked-choice voting for US House of Representatives and US Senate races. Tabulations are expected this week to determine the winner of the state’s Republican primary in the 2nd Congressional District.

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Title: Baton Rouge PD investigating officer who used knee on 17-year-old The Baton Rouge Police Department is investigating a traffic stop early this month during which a cop used his knee to restrain and arrest a 17-year-old boy. A 37-second video of the arrest was shared by a bystander on Facebook, showing a small crowd watching as an officer pins the boy face-down with his knee as he arrests him on the ground next to a red sedan. The officer is then seen escorting the boy in handcuffs as the video cuts out. Chief Murphy Paul urged for residents’ “patience” this week as the investigation plays out, asking for faith in the “process.” Both officers have been placed on administrative leave as the investigation continues. “We cannot break the law in an effort to seek justice for this young man nor can we interrupt the process of judging whether or not the actions of the officers involved was legal,” said Paul during a news conference Monday. “I just spoke to the family of the young man, and I can tell you they are upset,” Paul said, who promised an “honest, clear and fully complete procedure of justice as it relates to this incident.” The arrest was made on July 6 following a 54-minute police chase of the vehicle that began when the cops tried enforce a seatbelt violation, the local CBS-affiliate reported. The 17-year-old was a passenger in the car and has been charged with principal to aggravated flight from an officer, criminal damage to property, possession of schedule 1 drugs and not wearing a seatbelt, the outlet reported. The video outraged residents and local officials, as it appeared to show the officer with his knee on the neck of the boy — a move banned by the police department. But on Tuesday the department released body camera footage from a different angle showing that the officer’s knee was actually on boy’s upper back, an approved technique taught to officers. “A knee on a back is used as a control method, but not on the neck. The neck is off-limits,” the department’s Internal Affairs Commander Sgt. Myron Daniels Daniels said. “And as you can see, based on that, at no point was the subject, the juvenile’s air restricted in any way.” Both Paul and the city’s mayor, Sharon Weston Broome, have pledged to review officers’ actions and tactics that are approved by the police. “Chief Paul and I have long been proponents of 21st Century policing practices including proper de-escalation and conflict resolution,” Broome said in a statement. “The methods and tactics used in any BRPD encounter is something we will continuously review in a comprehensive manner,” she added. The family of the boy said they are pleased with how the investigation is being conducted so far. It’s been very transparent,” Tenesha Cannon, the teen’s mother, told the station. [Chief Paul] is meeting with us … What we’re hopeful for is that after a thorough investigation, if there are at fault parties, that those parties are held to be accountable.”

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Title: Texas woman denied bail in death of Fort Hood soldier Vanessa Guillen A Texas woman charged in connection to the death of Fort Hood soldier Vanessa Guillen was ordered held without bail Wednesday, according to reports. Cecily Aguilar, 20, was arraigned on three counts of conspiracy in federal court in Waco, Texas, for allegedly helping to get rid of Guillen’s body after she went missing from the military base in April, DFWCBS-TV reported Wednesday. Aguilar was arrested earlier this month and charged as an accomplice in Guillen’s death after authorities found the soldier’s body dismembered and buried near the Fort Hood base June 30. Authorities said Aguilar’s boyfriend, Army Specialist Aaron Robinson, killed Guillen by hitting her in the head with a hammer on April 22, then allegedly enlisted Aguilar to help him get rid of the body in a shallow grave near the Leon River. Robinson, 20, committed suicide as police closed in on him on July 1. Aguilar, who was arraigned Tuesday, pleaded not guilty to the conspiracy charges. She faces up to 20 years in prison and a maximum fine of $250,000 if convicted. Meanwhile, the US Army last week announced an independent investigation into the “command climate” at the Texas military base in the wake of Guillen’s disappearance and death.

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Title: Trump demotes campaign manager Brad Parscale in shakeup President Trump announced a shakeup in his reelection campaign Wednesday night, saying in a social media post that campaign manager Brad Parscale has been demoted and replaced with Bill Stepien. “I am pleased to announce that Bill Stepien has been promoted to the role of Trump Campaign Manager,” the president announced in a statement posted to Twitter. Trump said Parscale will remain with the campaign as a senior advisor heading digital and data strategies. The president said both Parscale and his successor “were heavily involved in our historic 2016 win, and I look forward to having a big and very important second win together. “This one should be a lot easier as our poll numbers are rising fast, the economy is getting better, vaccines and therapeutics will soon be on the way, and Americans want safe streets and communities!” A source from Trump’s 2016 campaign told The Post that Stepien “has earned the trust of the president, which is crucial.” Stepien was appointed as Trump’s deputy campaign manager in May. A veteran Republican operative, he had served as Trump’s national field director in 2016 and later became the White House political director. Before working for Trump, Stepien, 39, successfully managed both of former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie’s victorious campaigns and was his deputy chief of staff for intergovernmental affairs in between. But Christie threw Stepien under the bus in January 2014 when e-mails emerged that showed Stepien downplaying the George Washington Bridge feeder-lane closures as they were underway and calling the mayor of Fort Lee “an idiot.” Christie fired Stepien from his job as a consultant to the Republican Governors Association, which Christie then chaired, and also withdrew his backing for Stepien to take over leadership of the New Jersey GOP. At the time, Christie said reading Stepien’s e-mails “made me lose my confidence in Bill’s judgment, and you cannot have someone at the top of your political operation that you do not have confidence in.” Christie remains a trusted confidant to the president and the pair talk regularly, one source said. Still, Bill Palatucci, national committeeman for the Republican Party of New Jersey, was the one who hired Stepien to guide Christie in 2009 and spoke highly of his appointment on Wednesday night. “Few have Bill’s deep, national experience and talents which will serve the President well,” he told The Post. A 2016 campaign source said Trump adviser and son-in-law Jared Kushner was behind the decision to install Stepien as campaign chief and selected someone who would be loyal to him. “Bill is a Jared person as was Brad,” the source said. The Trump campaign shakeup came about a month after The Post reported the president’s advisors were urging him to replace Parscale. Several people involved in the reelection effort described Parscale as being checked-out in recent months, with other staffers, including Stepien, shouldering more of the work. “People within his inner circle continue to question Brad’s ability to bring the campaign down the home stretch because of his inexperience,” one longtime adviser to the president said. “There’s no strategy, there’s no messaging,” the adviser noted. One person close to the campaign on Thursday said it had made the right decision in sidelining Parscale and returning him to the digital operation which he spearheaded so successfully in 2016. “I think it’s a good move to shove him in digital where he belongs. As a campaign manager you’ve got to be a people person, and he wasn’t,” the source said. Another GOP source said a number of people close to the president had warned him that Parscale was not up to the job, which several insiders described as the toughest role in Washington and akin to being “in the hot seat 24/7.” The final nail in the coffin is believed to have been Trump’s poorly-attended rally in Tulsa, Okla., last month which was supposed to serve as a comeback for the president after he spent months trapped in the White House amid the coronavirus pandemic. Parscale boasted online that the campaign had fielded more than a million ticket requests but the event ended up drawing only 6,200 people and an overflow stage the president was supposed to appear at outside the rally was broken down before Trump had arrived in Tulsa. The source close to the campaign accused Parscale of “messing up Tulsa” and creating a nightmare for Trump. “It’s a total embarrassment to the president. You can’t do that to the president of the United States,” he said. “It’s screwed up an entire week of news. It’s unacceptable and that has to fall on Brad’s lap.”

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Title: Canadian dad gets 3 months in college admissions scandal A high-profile Canadian dad who paid $200,000 to cheat his two sons’ way into California colleges — and helped craft a bogus admissions essay claiming one boy had been mugged by an LA street gang — is now headed to prison for three months, federal prosecutors announced Wednesday. David Sidoo, a Vancouver businessman and former Canadian professional football player, was sentenced to 90 days behind bars in a Massachusetts federal court for paying the hefty sum to college admissions scandal mastermind William “Rick” Singer. Sidoo, 61, first paid $100,000 to Singer in 2011 to have Harvard-educated test proctor Mark Riddell fly out from Tampa Bay to the Canadian city to take the SAT in place of his older son, according to prosecutors. The son had initially taken the test himself, scoring 1460 out of 2400. Riddell notched the boy a score of 1670, landing the student in Chapman University. Sidoo then made another $100,000 payment in 2013 to repeat the scheme the following year for his younger son. This time Riddell scored 2280. Later that year, Singer drafted a bogus essay for the second son claiming he’d worked with an organization that combats gang violence in LA — and that he himself had been held up by gang members, but was saved by a rival gangbanger named “Nugget,” prosecutors have alleged. “Sidoo wrote back with minor changes to the essay, and asked, ‘can we lessen the interaction with the gangs. Guns …? That’s scary stuff. Your call you know what they look for,’ ” court documents said. The part about guns was taken out, and the essay was submitted to multiple universities. The younger Sidoo son was ultimately accepted to the University of California-Berkley. In March, Sidoo pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to commit mail and wire fraud. In addition to his three-month prison sentence, Sidoo faces a year of supervised release and has been ordered to pay a $250,000 fine. Sidoo, who played professional football for the Saskatchewan Roughriders and B.C. Lions, was stripped of his prestigious Order of British Columbia title over his actions. The University of British Columbia also renamed “David Sidoo Field,” according to the CBC. Dozens of other wealthy parents, athletic coaches and others have been charged in the sprawling “Varsity Blues” scandal, which also included kids being accepted to schools as bogus athletic recruits. Others who have pleaded guilty include “Full House” actress Lori Loughlin and her fashion designer husband, Mossimo Giannulli, as well as “Desperate Housewives” star Felicity Huffman.

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Title: Liberty University sues NY Times over coronavirus story Liberty University sued The New York Times for defamation Wednesday, accusing the paper of publishing a “fictional tale” about the school reopening after spring break and causing a coronavirus outbreak. The Lynchburg, Virginia, school accused the paper of publishing a “click bait” story about a supposed coronavirus outbreak caused by the school reopening. The story spread rapidly across local and national news outlets and on social media, according to the Virginia Circuit Court lawsuit from Wednesday. The Times’ March 29 story, headlined: “Liberty University Brings Back Its Students, and Coronavirus Fears, Too,” was factually incorrect, the suit claims. The story reported that about 12 students “were sick with symptoms that suggested Covid-19,” when the school reopened, the Times reported. A doctor cited in the piece was misrepresented in the story — and also wasn’t the school doctor who would have been most knowledgeable on the subject, the court papers say. The doctor told the Times that the bulk of the students had “‘upper respiratory infection’ — that is, a cold — not the lower respiratory infection COVID-19,” the suit states. In fact, the students weren’t tested for the coronavirus because they didn’t meet the criteria for it, the suit claims. “There was never an on-campus student diagnosed with COVID-19,” the suit claims. “The only actual ‘viral’ element of this narrative that existed was the intense ‘viral’ internet attention it generated for the New York Times’ website and for those paying to advertise on that website.” When classes ended two months after spring break, there were still no on-campus students who had been diagnosed with the virus, the court papers say. Liberty claims in the suit that the Times writer was sent to Lynchburg “to engineer a specific fictional tale that portrayed Liberty and its President as a caricature the New York Times’ liberal audience would love: backward, irresponsible, anti-science, responsible for getting people sick in a pandemic, and closely tied to and mirroring President Trump.” Liberty President Jerry Falwell Jr. said in a statement: “They target us because the University is a conservative and Christian institution.” The Times did not immediately return a request for comment.

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Title: Congress debates whether magic mushrooms would make DC 'drug capital' Advertisement WASHINGTON — Congress took a break from the coronavirus pandemic, mass unemployment and surging violent crime on Wednesday — to debate the status of magic mushrooms in the nation’s capitol. “We certainly — I would hope — don’t want to be known as the drug capital of the world,” Rep. Andy Harris (R-Md.) told colleagues on the House Appropriations Committee. Harris proposed forbidding Washington, DC, from implementing a voter initiative to make natural hallucinogens the lowest law enforcement priority. Initiative organizers say they submitted enough signatures to appear on the November ballot. Fellow Republicans backed Harris, whose amendment would bar natural psychedelics used without a doctor’s recommendation as well as driving under the influence. “We all can agree that policies that increase the availability of psychedelic drugs in the nation’s capital — that’s dangerous,” said Rep. Tom Graves (R-Ga.) “As the nation’s capital, the District of Columbia, it should be a place where Americans come to see their government at work, for history and to go to a Braves-Nats game. It shouldn’t be a destination for illegal drugs,” Graves said. House Democrats who recently voted to make DC a state rallied against Harris. “If the district’s residents want to make mushrooms a lower priority and focus limited law enforcement resources on other issues, that is their prerogative,” said Rep. Mike Quigley (D-Ill.). Harris ultimately withdrew his amendment, saying it could be addressed later if DC residents approve the initiative. The DC initiative’s organizers were pleasantly surprised by what they heard from Harris — whose plan to interfere with their initiative was first reported by The Post. “Even Harris acknowledges the irrefutable science behind some of these psychedelics,” said initiative proposer Melissa Lavasani, who says she used shrooms to treat postpartum depression. “In his testimony, he mentioned research around psilocybin as promising for potential therapeutic use. I believe Initiative 81 will be the first step in reforming how this country treats mental health issues and we hope the amendment being withdrawn is a sign of more expansive research on psychedelics.” Denver last year led the charge with a ballot measure to make magic mushrooms the lowest law enforcement priority — a step that also was pursued for marijuana before the state legalized the drug. Oakland, Berkeley and Santa Cruz, California, followed. Harris argued that the DC initiative is broader than the Denver version because it includes more natural hallucinogens, including mescaline from cacti. “I think the District of Columbia is different from other cities because we have people coming in from all over the country,” Harris added. Harris is reviled by many local drug reform activists because of his still-active budget provision that blocks DC from regulating recreational marijuana sales, which 65 percent of city voters backed in 2014. In a statement, Harris said the fight’s not over on psychedelics. “This is a new issue to the committee,” Harris said. “Between now and the meeting of the conference committee this fall, the issue of whether this will be on the ballot will be resolved.  Fortunately, in that time, members will also have time to learn more about this complicated medical issue.”

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Title: Mail could be delayed as postmaster general pushes cost-cutting WASHINGTON — Mail deliveries could be delayed by a day or more under cost-cutting efforts being imposed by the new postmaster general. The plan eliminates overtime for hundreds of thousands of postal workers and says employees must adopt a “different mindset” to ensure the Postal Service’s survival during the coronavirus pandemic. Late trips will no longer be authorized. If postal distribution centers are running late, “they will keep the mail for the next day,″ Postal Service leaders say in a document obtained by The Associated Press. “One aspect of these changes that may be difficult for employees is that — temporarily — we may see mail left behind or mail on the workroom floor or docks,″ another document says. The changes come a month after Postmaster General Louis DeJoy, a major donor to President Donald Trump, took over the sprawling mail service. In a memo titled “PMG Expectations and Plan,″ the agency said the changes are aimed at “making the USPS fundamentally solvent which we are not at this time.″ The memo cites deep revenue losses from a decadelong decline in mail deliveries that has been exacerbated by the coronavirus pandemic and says an overdue “operational pivot” is needed to ensure the agency’s health and stability. Postal Service officials, bracing for steep losses from the nationwide shutdown caused by the virus, have warned they will run out of money by the end of September without help from Congress. The service reported a $4.5 billion loss for the quarter ending in March, before the full effects of the shutdown sank in. Single-piece, first-class mail volume fell 15 to 20% week to week in April and May, agency leaders told Congress. Losses will increase by more than $22 billion over the next 18 months, they said. Bills approved by the Democratic-controlled House would set aside $25 billion to keep the mail flowing, but they remain stalled in the Republican-controlled Senate. Congress has approved a $10 billion line of credit for the Postal Service, but it remains unused amid restrictions imposed by the Trump administration. A spokesperson said Wednesday that the agency is developing a business plan to ensure it will be financially stable and continue to provide reliable, affordable and secure delivery of mail and packages. While the plan “is not yet finalized, it will certainly include new and creative ways for us to fulfill our mission, and we will focus immediately on efficiency and items that we can control,″ said spokesperson Dave Partenheimer. The memo cites U.S. Steel as an example that the Postal Service is far from “untouchable.″ In 1975, the steel giant was ”the largest company in the world,” the memo states. “They are gone.” In fact, U.S. Steel remains a leading steel producer, with more than 27,000 employees as of earlier this year. The COVID-19 pandemic has put the Postal Service in a double crisis, said Mark Dimondstein, president of the American Postal Workers Union, which represents more than 200,000 postal workers and retirees. As many as 12,000 postal workers have fallen ill, with at least 64 fatalities, and the economic contraction has caused a dramatic drop in letter and other flat mail volumes. A spike in package deliveries that has buoyed the agency during the pandemic is likely to be temporary, Dimondstein said, adding that the outbreak has sharply increased expenses for personal protective equipment, deep cleaning of facilities and temporary workers to replace postal workers who get sick. “Postal workers are tremendously dedicated to the mission of getting the mail out,″ Dimondstein said, but the new policies could cause delays that will further drive down revenues. see also Republican donor and Trump ally named postmaster general “It’s the customer who will suffer if the mail slows down,″ he said. Democratic Rep. Bill Pascrell of New Jersey denounced the proposal to delay mail delivery, saying it would be a “stunning act of sabotage against our postal service.” “Trump and his cronies are openly seeking to destroy the post office during the worst public health crisis in a century,″ Pascrell said. With states increasingly relying on voting by mail to continue elections during the pandemic, destabilizing the Postal Service not only threatens the economy and the jobs of 600,000 workers, but is also “a direct attack on American democracy itself,″ Pascrell said. For most Americans, mail deliveries to homes or post boxes are their only routine contact with the federal government. It’s a service they seem to appreciate: The agency consistently earns favorability marks that top 90%. Esther Haynes, of Philadelphia, said she and her family get clothes, jewelry, perfume, food and more delivered by mail. “If it’s a day late, two days late, I’ll be looking for it,” she said Wednesday. “I’d be concerned.” Haynes, 53, shares a home with her sister, her son and a family friend. Haynes likes to shop — which means she’s been busy ordering things online during the pandemic. “Everybody wants their mail on time,” she said. The memo outlining potential mail delays was first reported by The Washington Post.

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Title: Biden widens lead over Trump, new polls show A new pair of polls out Wednesday show Joe Biden with a widening lead over President Trump with November’s election just over 100 days away. A Wall Street Journal/NBC News survey found that 51 percent of voters said they would vote for the former veep if the election were held now, with 40 percent backing Trump. Biden’s lead over the president rose to 11 percentage points from 7 percentage points last month. But the WSJ poll also showed that 54 percent of those surveyed approved of Trump’s handling of the economy, a record high in the poll despite the economic slump caused by the deadly coronavirus pandemic. A Quinnipiac University survey, meanwhile, showed Biden opening up his biggest lead this year over Trump. Registered voters back Biden over Trump 52 percent to 37 percent, according to the national poll. That compares to a June 18 Q poll that had Biden ahead 49–41 percent. Since March, Biden’s lead has ranged from 8 to 11 percentage points in Q polls. The polls also showed a drop in the commander in chief’s job approval rating. The WSJ poll showed Trump’s overall job-approval rating dropping 3 percentage points over the last month. Forty-two percent of voters approved of Trump’s performance, with 56 percent disapproving — his lowest job-approval rating since April 2018, the paper reported. In the Q poll, 60 percent of voters disapproved of the job Trump was doing, while 36 percent approved, a 6 point drop in his job approval compared to last month. In that June 18 poll, 55 percent disapproved while 42 percent approved. The WSJ/NBC News poll surveyed 900 registered voters from July 9 through July 12, and had a margin of error of plus or minus 3.2 percentage points. The Quinnipiac poll surveyed 1,273 self-identified registered voters nationwide from July 9 to July 13 and had a margin of error of plus or minus 2.8 percentage points.

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Title: Starbucks 'Karen' wants half of donations for barista who didn't serve her The California “Karen” who berated a Starbucks barista online for refusing to serve her without a face mask says she deserves half of the more than $100,000 in donations raised for the employee. Amber Lynn Gilles complained about the worker in a Facebook post last month, posting a picture of the man in one of the coffee giant’s San Diego locations who denied her service for not following the county’s coronavirus guidelines. “Meet lenen from Starbucks who refused to serve me cause I’m not wearing a mask. Next time I will wait for cops and bring a medical exemption,” she wrote in the now-deleted post. Generous readers opened their wallets to support the worker, Lenin Gutierrez, raising more than $105,400 in “tips” for him through GoFundMe. Gilles told ABC affiliate KGTV that she’s considering suing to collect half of those funds because she claims to have underlying health issues that make her medically exempt from mask mandates. “It was discrimination and everybody is OK with it and enabling and rewarding that behavior,” Gilles said. “I get shortness of breath, dizziness and it messes with the heartbeat,” she told the station. “And I do have asthma as well, and I do get mask-acne. So there’s several things going on and not only that but it doesn’t even work.” Gilles brought two documents to the outlet to prove her exemption. One document was a pelvic exam from 2015, reporting a “probable exophytic fibroid arising from the anterior wall of the uterus measuring 2.9 cm size,” and “simple 2.5 cm left ovarian cyst.” A second was a handwritten note on letterhead from a local chiropractor, reading, “Amber has underlying breath conditions that prevent her from wearing a mask or any type of facial covering whatsoever. Please contact me if have any questions.” Gilles asked for the chiropractor to not be named, and the practitioner declined to discuss Gilles when the outlet reached out for comment. She defended using a note from a chiropractor for a breathing-related condition because “They are dedicated to providing non-invasive personalized care and treatment. They are real doctors.” Gilles said she was not remorseful at all for her post and that she has started her own GoFundMe to raise money for legal fees should she decide to sue. “I feel like I need the apology,” she told KGTV. “I’ve been discriminated against, I’m the one who’s sick.”

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Title: Barack Obama, Joe Biden added to list of hacked Twitter accounts Former President Barack Obama and former Vice President Joe Biden are among the high-profile Twitter users whose accounts were hacked in a bitcoin scam Wednesday, according to a report. The cyber attack, which also compromised the accounts of Tesla CEO Elon Musk, Amazon chief Jeff Bezos, and Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, is believed to be the largest security breach ever on Twitter, the Hill reported Wednesday. The accounts posted similar messages offering to double bitcoin payments and included the address of the same bitcoin wallet, which saw up to $112,000 pour in over several hours Wednesday. It is unclear if the money came from unsuspecting users or the hackers, the outlet said. “Feeling greatful (sic), doubling all payments sent to my BTC address!,” the since-deleted tweets said. “You send $1,000, I send back $2,000! Only doing this for the next 30 minutes.” The tweets were quickly deleted but were likely viewed widely because of the large number of followers on the accounts. “We are aware of a security incident impacting accounts on Twitter,” the company said online shortly after 6 p.m. “We are investigating and taking steps to fix it. We will update everyone shortly.” “You may be unable to Tweet or reset your password while we review and address this incident.” Other celebrities whose accounts posted similar messages include Kanye West, Kim Kardashian, rapper Whiz Khalifa, Warren Buffet, and former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

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Title: Man tests positive for COVID-19 10 days after recovering An 82-year-old Massachusetts man appeared to have recovered from a serious battle with the coronavirus — only to test positive again 10 days later, according to a new case study. The unnamed man first tested positive for COVID-19 when he visited Boston’s Massachusetts General Hospital with a high fever in early April, according to the report published in the American Journal of Emergency Medicine. A high-risk patient who suffers from Parkinson’s, diabetes, chronic kidney disease and high blood pressure, the man’s health rapidly deteriorated. Doctors placed him on a ventilator and managed to save his life during a 39-day stay at the hospital. He tested negative for the virus twice when he was discharged, according to the study. But 10 days later, the man reported back to the hospital’s emergency department with a fever and trouble breathing. The hospital performed a chest  X-ray, which showed signs of COVID-19 infection in his lungs again — and he tested positive for the virus. After another stint in the intensive care unit, doctors managed to save the man’s life a second time and he was discharged after 15 days. The report calls into question the accuracy of certain coronavirus tests, its researchers said. The researchers wrote that while reinfection was “possible,” they added, “the most common alternative proposed explanations to true reinfection include prolonged viral shedding and inaccurate testing” — meaning that it’s likely that the man never fully recovered from his first infection. The scientists said age and severity of initial infection impacts “shedding,” or how long the virus will replicate and how long a person will be contagious. Older and more severely infected patients shed the virus longer than younger patients or those with more minor COVID-19 infections, according to the study. “Many viruses demonstrate prolonged presence of genetic material in a host even after clearance of the live virus and symptomatic resolution,” wrote the study’s authors, led by Dr. Nicole Duggan. “Thus, detection of genetic material by [a swab test] alone does not necessarily correlate with the active infection or infectivity.”

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Title: Man burned after blowing up cop car outside US Supreme Court Um there’s a car on fire at SCOTUS. pic.twitter.com/bY0lY9KZf4 — Marissa D. Barrera (@mdb2) July 15, 2020 A police car was set ablaze and exploded outside the Supreme Court on Wednesday and authorities quickly apprehended a suspect who allegedly burned himself while torching the vehicle. Supreme Court spokeswoman Kathy Arberg told the Washington Examiner that “an individual poured an accelerant on and set on fire an unmarked Supreme Court police vehicle” near the court’s front entrance. “The car was totally burned, and an adjacent Court vehicle was also damaged,” Arberg said. “The individual suffered burns in the process. He was taken into custody by Supreme Court Police and was transported by ambulance for treatment of his injuries.” The US attorney’s office for DC, which prosecutes most local and federal crimes in the city, did not immediately respond to a request for more information. Passerby Marissa Barrera, an aide to Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) tweeted footage of the flaming vehicle while on her lunch break. “Um there’s a car on fire at SCOTUS,” Barrera reported. “It’s still in the process of exploding periodically. Outdoor lunch break is OVER.” It’s unclear why the vehicle was attacked, though many DC police cars were vandalized or burned last month during unrest over the killing of George Floyd by Minnesota police.

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Title: Doomsday mom Lori Vallow wants $1M bond lowered Doomsday-obsessed mom Lori Vallow wants her $1 million bond reduced in the disappearance and death of her two children, according to new court papers filed by her lawyer. Defense attorney Mark Means said in papers filed Tuesday in court in Idaho that Vallow should have her hefty bail revisited because prosecutors in Madison County dropped two felony charges against her on July 2, and she now only faces misdemeanor counts, KIVI-TV reported Wednesday. “Defendant asserts felony charges regarding previous bond setting were dismissed and as such bond should be reset to reflect current charges evident in the newly filed Amended Criminal Complaint,” Means wrote. “Defendant requests this court to review applicable criteria under Criminal Statute and Criminal Rule as it pertains to bond reduction.” The document was posted on Twitter Wednesday by KSAZ-TV reporter Justin Lum. Vallow, 46, faces misdemeanor charges of resisting and obstructing an officer, solicitation of a crime, and contempt of court in the deaths of Joshua “JJ” Vallow, 7, and his sister, 17-year-old Tylee Ryan, whose remains were found buried on property belonging to Vallow’s husband, Chad Daybell. Vallow still faces new felony charges of conspiracy to destroy, alter or conceal evidence in neighboring Fremont County, and is being held on $1 million bond there as well. Daybell, 51, faces felony charges of conspiracy to commit destruction, and alteration or concealment of evidence in Fremont. The couple, members of a cult named Preparing a People, is accused of lying to investigators and refusing to conceal the whereabouts of the children after they went missing in September. Vallow was tracked down to Hawaii and arrested there in February.

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Title: Spirit airline employees injured in attack over delayed flight in Florida Three Spirit Airlines employees were battered in a wild melee at a South Florida airport over a delayed flight, according to a report. The attack captured on video broke out Tuesday night at a gate for a Philadelphia-bound flight from Fort Lauderdale International Airport, news station WPLG reported. The employees suffered minor injuries when three passengers “became combative following a delayed flight,” the airline said. In the clip, several women were seen hurling items at the workers before going behind the counter and attacking at least one of the employees. Among the items thrown at employees were phones, shoes, full water bottles, metal boarding signs and fast food, according to the Broward County Sheriff’s Office. Tymaya Wright, 20, Danaysha Dixon, 22, and Keira Ferguson, 21, were all busted on battery charges in connection with the violent encounter, authorities said. Wright also faces an additional charge for allegedly taking a Spirit employee’s phone. The trio declined to comment on the episode — other than to say they were trying to get home to Philadelphia, according to WPLG. Spirit released a statement Wednesday praising their employees for their “professionalism and quick actions.” “This violent behavior is completely unacceptable and has absolutely no place in airports or any other place of business,” the airline said. “We will not tolerate abusive behavior of any kind.”

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Title: Law firm offers free living wills to teachers amid COVID-19 A Florida law firm is offering free living wills to schoolteachers being ordered to return to class amid a resurgence of the coronavirus. Gallagher & Associates in St. Petersburg said this week that the firm wanted to give teachers some legal peace of mind when they return to school in August, saying that education officials in the Sunshine State were jumping the gun with cases of the global pandemic still on the rise. “G&A is happy to provide gratis living wills/advance directors for teachers involuntarily forced to return to the classroom,” the firm said on its Facebook page this week. “While we agree with medical experts that it is premature to reopen schools in this Tampa Bay hot zone, we want to do our part to help teaches that are forced to return.” A living will is a legal document that sets out your personal choices about end-of-life medical treatment. Charles Gallagher, the company’s managing partner, told WFLA-TV that he came up with the idea after reading about a teacher dying from COVID-19 after returning to school in Arizona. “I just thought, ‘My gosh, there is this need out there and we can help, definitely want to help,'” he told the station. “It’s not physically possible, with the room they have logistically, to distance and it’s not physically possible to be apart from other teachers, other kids.” On July 6, Florida’s Education Commissioner Richard Corcoran signed an emergency order mandating that schools reopen in August, citing advice from local and state health officials, WFLA said. “Upon reopening in August, all school boards and charter school governing boards must open brick and mortar schools at least five days per week for all students, subjects to advice and orders of the Florida Department of Health, local departments of health,” the order said. But the directive has not been popular with educators in parts of the state, the outlet reported. “We’re calling for a virtual return to school and that when we do ultimately go back we go back with 14 days of no new cases,” Pinellas County high school teacher Christy Foust told the station at a rally in that district Tuesday. “Teachers are not blind to the fact that for some of our most vulnerable students, virtual learning is not the most equitable, but our perspective on that is we want them alive,” Foust said. “They have no chance to learn if they’re dead or in ICU.” That’s where Gallagher is offering to step in and offer living wills for teachers taking the risk. “I think he’ll be getting a lot of phone calls, to be honest with you,” teacher Michelle Gibson told WFLA. “I don’t have [a will], I never really thought about it, as young as I am, that I would need, I mean, maybe I need to think about it.”

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Title: Trump overhauls environmental review as part of infrastructure plan President Trump is rolling back the nation’s main environmental review law in a bid to speed up the construction of freeways and other infrastructure projects, describing it as a job killer and “horrible roadblock.” Speaking before a crowd at a UPS warehouse in Atlanta, Trump announced he was signing an executive order overhauling the 50-year-old National Environmental Policy Act, or NEPA, which he said had stymied important projects and limited economic growth. “For decades, the single biggest obstacle to building a modern transportation system has been the mountains and mountains of bureaucratic red tape in Washington, DC,” he said. “Before I took office, reviews for highways ballooned to an average of nearly 750 pages in length and they were the good ones, they were the short ones,” he continued. The NEPA was signed into law by President Richard Nixon in 1970 and requires federal agencies to consider the environmental impacts of major projects before they are approved, allowing public groups and local communities to weigh in. Environmental groups accused the Trump administration of “gutting” important regulations protecting poor communities impacted by power plants and pipelines in their neighborhoods. “NEPA gives poor and communities of color a say in the projects that will define their communities for decades to come,” Sharon Buccino, a senior attorney at the Natural Resources Defense Council, told NPR on Thursday. “Rather than listen, the Trump administration’s plan aims to silence such voices,” she added. Speaking in Georgia, where local leaders have been lobbying for a lane expansion to the Interstate 75, Trump said permits which previously took 20 years to be approved would now be reviewed in two years or less. “I’ve been wanting to do this from day one, literally on day one,” Trump said, recounting his own experience with NEPA as a property developer in New York. According to the White House, federal agencies today take an average four and a half years to conduct the required reviews of major infrastructure projects like highways. The president has reversed more than 100 environmental rules since taking office, according to a New York Times analysis, including fuel efficiency standards which earned a rebuke from his predecessor Barack Obama.

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Title: Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg released from the hospital Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg was released from the hospital on Wednesday and was resting at home, the court’s press office said. Ginsburg, 87, was admitted to Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland, again Tuesday after experiencing fever and chills, her office said. “She underwent an endoscopic procedure at Johns Hopkins [Tuesday] afternoon to clean out a bile duct stent that was placed last August. The Justice is resting comfortably and will stay in the hospital for a few days to receive intravenous antibiotic treatment,” the statement continued, though she only stayed overnight. Ginsburg was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 2009, a decade after she had been survived a battle with colon cancer. Ginsburg had been hospitalized in the past, and her current stay came after the Supreme Court ended its spring term with key rulings on abortion and executive privilege.

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Title: Trump on Navarro slamming Dr. Fauci: 'He shouldn't be doing that' The White House on Wednesday distanced itself from an incendiary op-ed by trade adviser Peter Navarro trashing Dr. Anthony Fauci — with President Trump saying Navarro “shouldn’t be doing that.” The White House said that it had not approved Navarro’s article, which called Fauci “wrong” on just about everything regarding the coronavirus pandemic. “The Peter Navarro op-ed didn’t go through normal White House clearance processes and is the opinion of Peter alone. @realDonaldTrump values the expertise of the medical professionals advising his Administration,” tweeted White House spokeswoman Alyssa Farah. Trump on Wednesday said he disagreed with Navarro’s statements, and that he had a good working relationship with Fauci, 79, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases since 1984. “We’re all on the same team. Including Dr. Fauci,” he said as he left the White House for a trip to Georgia. Asked if Navarro had “gone rogue,” Trump replied: “Well he made a statement representing himself. He shouldn’t be doing that. No, I have a very good relationship with Anthony.” Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, who told Fauci he was unaware of the talking points during a sitdown this week, reportedly called Navarro on the carpet after the column ran. Fauci, meanwhile, fired back in an interview published Wednesday in The Atlantic. “I can’t explain Peter Navarro,” he added about the trade rep. “He’s in a world by himself.” Fauci also said he wasn’t going to quit because of criticism from the White House — which he called “bizarre” and “nonsense.” He was reacting to a series of talking points released by an unnamed White House official to reporters over the weekend that listed times he made statements that later turned out to be inaccurate. “I stand by everything I said. Contextually, at the time I said it, it was absolutely true … [The White House document] is totally wrong. It’s nonsense. It’s completely wrong. The whole thing is wrong. The whole thing is incorrect,” he said, adding that the move backfired because it generated criticism of the administration. “Ultimately, it hurts the president to do that,” Fauci told The Atlantic. “When the staff lets out something like that and the entire scientific and press community push back on it, it ultimately hurts the president.” He also appeared dismayed that they came at a time when coronavirus cases are spiking across much of the US, the magazine reported. The interview was published as more than 3.4 million Americans have been infected by the coronavirus pandemic and nearly 136,000 had died, according to the CDC. And Fauci also said it was a mystery to him why the White House would release the document. “I cannot figure out in my wildest dreams why they would want to do that. I think they realize now that that was not a prudent thing to do, because it’s only reflecting negatively on them,” he added. Asked his reaction to the White House statement and Navarro’s op-ed, he sounded a philosophical note. “Well, that is a bit bizarre. I sit here and just shrug my shoulders and say, ‘Well, you know, that’s life in the fast lane,’ ” he said, while adding that he had no intention of resigning. “I think the problem is too important for me to get into those kinds of thoughts and discussions. I just want to do my job. I’m really good at it. I think I can contribute. And I’m going to keep doing it,” he said. And he said that even though he rarely speaks one-on-one with Trump in recent weeks, the president still gets his input from others. “When we were having frequent press briefings, I had the opportunity to have a personal one-on-one to talk to the president. I haven’t done that in a while,” he acknowledged. “But a day does not go by that I am not in contact with Debbie Birx [the White House coronavirus-response coordinator], with Bob Redfield [the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention], or Steve Hahn [the commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration] and others. “My input to the president goes through the vice president. But clearly, the vice president — literally every day — is listening to what we have to say, there’s no doubt about that,” he said.

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Title: COVID-19 could be controlled in 2 months if people wear masks: CDC The coronavirus can be controlled in the US within two months if people diligently wear face masks, according to the chief of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “If we can get everybody to wear a mask right now, I really do think over the next four to six, eight weeks, we can bring this epidemic under control,” CDC director Robert Redfield said Tuesday in an interview with the Journal of the American Medical Association. “If we all rigorously did this, we could really bring this outbreak back to where it needs to be.” Redfield made the comments as infection numbers surge in states such as California, Texas and Florida — and as more than 3.4 million people nationwide have been diagnosed with the illness. The CDC director also suggested the current spike in Southern states may be linked to people in Northern states traveling there for vacations around Memorial Day — rather than reopenings. “I don’t think the reopening’s actually what’s driving the current Southern expansion [in cases] right now,” he said. “If you look at the South, everything happened around June 12 to June 16. It all simultaneously kind of popped.” He added, “We’re of the view that there was something else that was the driver. Maybe the Memorial Day, not weekend, but the Memorial Day week, where a lot of Northerners decided to go South for vacations.” He also stressed that wearing a mask is “not a political issue” but rather “a public health issue” and a matter of “personal responsibility.” In the interview — given to Dr. Howard Bauchner of the Journal of the American Medical Association — Redfield added that he was pleased President Trump recently wore a face mask. “I’m glad to see the president wear a mask this week, and the vice president,” Redfield said, referencing the first time Trump wore one publicly over the weekend.

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Title: Teen dies of bubonic plague after eating infected marmot A 15-year-old boy has died from the bubonic plague in western Mongolia, health officials said. The teen caught the often-fatal plague after hunting and eating marmot in Gobi-Altai province, according to Mongolia’s Ministry of Health. Two other teens were being treated with antibiotics after also consuming the large ground squirrel, which is believed to be a source of the highly infectious disease, officials said. Symptoms of plague can include sudden fever, chills, headache and nausea — though the illness can be treated with antibiotics if caught early enough, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The government imposed a quarantine in the Tugrug district of the province where the cases detected. Fifteen other people who had contact with the boy were quarantined and given antibiotics, officials said The Mongolian government warned the public not to hunt or eat marmots, which are considered to be a delicacy in some regions. The cases come after a Chinese hospital in the northern region of Inner Mongolia reported a patient was suspected of suffering from the plague. The US also detected a squirrel that tested positive for the bubonic plague in Colorado. With Post wires

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Title: Ghislaine Maxwell was guarded by ex-British soldiers in US hideout Ghislaine Maxwell was being guarded by British military vets while hiding out in a secluded New Hampshire estate, according to reports. Court papers filed by prosecutors in Manhattan said one of Maxwell’s brothers hired a security company staffed by British ex-soldiers to keep her safe in the 4,300-square-foot mansion on 156 acres in Bradford, where she was arrested earlier this month, the Times of London reported. “The FBI spoke with the security guard, who informed the agents that the defendant’s brother had hired a security company staffed with former members of the British military to guard the defendant in rotations,” the court papers said, according to the outlet. “The defendant provided on to the guards with a credit card in the same name as the limited liability corporation that had purchased the New Hampshire property in cash,” the papers said. “The guard informed the FBI that the defendant had not left the property during his time working there and that instead, the guard was sent to make purchases for the property using the credit card.” It was unclear which one of Maxwell’s three brothers hired the company, but it is believed to be either Kevin, 61, or Ian, 64. However, the socialite’s oldest brother, Philip, 71, had developed contacts in the security industry after setting up the Combating Jihadist Terrorism think tank in 2018. Maxwell, 58, is accused of recruiting young girls for millionaire pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, who committed suicide in a New York prison in August while awaiting trial. Maxwell was ordered held without bail Tuesday.

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Title: George Floyd's family sues Minneapolis Police Department The family of George Floyd filed suit Wednesday against the Minneapolis Police Department and the officers involved in his death. The suit specifically names Police Officer Derek Chauvin — who could be seen on video kneeling on Floyd’s neck — as well as the three other officers who were involved in the deadly arrest of the 46-year-old man on May 25. The lawsuit, which was filed in federal court in Minneapolis by family trustee Kaarin Nelson Schaffer, alleges that officers Thomas Lane, 37, Alexander Kueng, 26, and Chauvin dangerously kept Floyd in the face-down prone position with Chauvin kneeling on his neck for just under nine minutes — despite the fact that Floyd wasn’t resisting arrest. And “Mr. Floyd was unconscious for approximately four of those minutes, yet the Defendant Officers not only did not help him, but continued to cause George’s death and further extinguish any chance for Mr. Floyd’s survival,” the court papers charge. A fourth officer, Tou Thao, stood by and did nothing to stop the other three officers, even preventing concerned bystanders from intervening, the court documents claim. This all occurred while Floyd was groaning, crying and telling them he couldn’t breathe 20 times. All four officers have since been fired. Chauvin, 44, was charged with murder and manslaughter while the other three officers were charged with aiding and abetting murder and manslaughter. The MPD failed to properly train and supervise its officers and has inconsistent policies and insufficient training on the practice of putting suspects in the prone position and on using a neck restraint maneuver, the court papers say. And despite the fact that the law enforcement community knows how risky and potentially deadly the use of the neck restraint can be, “the MPD permitted and condoned the use of both conscious and unconscious neck restraints by its officers from at least April 15, 2012 until June 8, 2020,” the court documents say. Further, the MPD had a history of failing to fire dangerous officers, overlooking racially biased policing and had prior incidents of excessive force, the court filings say. For example, the department did not remove or discipline Lt. Bob Kroll — the head of the Minneapolis Police Federation — for allegations of publicly wearing a “white power patch” and for calling the Black Lives Matter movement a “terrorist organization,” the court papers allege. “By refusing to terminate or discipline Kroll or denounce his ideology, Minneapolis caused officers act with impunity and without fear of retribution,” the court papers say. “This complaint shows what we have said all along, that Mr. Floyd died because the weight of the entire Minneapolis Police Department was on his neck,” said plaintiff attorney Ben Crump. “The City of Minneapolis has a history of policies, procedures and deliberate indifference that violates the rights of arrestees, particularly Black men, and highlights the need for officer training and discipline,” Crump said. “This is an unprecedented case, and with this lawsuit we seek to set a precedent that makes it financially prohibitive for police to wrongfully kill marginalized people — especially Black people — in the future.” The suit is seeking unspecified damages. “George Floyd’s death is a tragedy,” Interim Minneapolis City Attorney Erik Nilsson said in a statement. “The City is reviewing the civil lawsuit filed by his family and will be responding to it. “Criminal charges are pending against four Minneapolis police officers and it’s very important that the criminal case proceed without interference.” A spokesman with the MDP declined to comment.

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Title: Florida mom left 2-year-old daughter in hot car to shop: deputies A Florida mother left her 2-year-old daughter in a locked car as she shopped at Macy’s, authorities said. Thamyres Maria Araujo Ponce, 32, was arrested Monday on a charge of child neglect after a Palm Beach County sheriff’s deputy smashed the window of a white Nissan parked at the Mall at Wellington Green to free the tot, the South Florida Sun-Sentinel reports. The temperature in Wellington that afternoon reached 96 degrees, according to an arrest report. The girl, who had a body temp of 102 when she was rescued, was treated by responding paramedics, deputies said. Security camera video from the mall indicated that the girl was inside the car for roughly 25 minutes. A deputy who found the car busted the driver’s side window to free the child, who was discovered in a car seat, the newspaper reports. Ponce returned to the car about 10 minutes after the deputy arrived and subsequently confessed to leaving the girl alone as she shopped at Macy’s, the Miami Herald reports. The arrest report did not indicate what happened to the girl — who was found “crying, sweating and appeared to be in distress,” deputies said — once Ponce was taken into custody, according to the newspaper. Ponce, of Belle Glade, was released later Monday after posting $1,000 bond, jail records show.

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Title: Lack of oversight causing issues for next coronavirus bill The lack of oversight for the multiple coronavirus relief packages has emerged as a roadblock to passing more legislation — as lawmakers prepare to return to Capitol Hill to debate another potential bill. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) outlined the details he wanted to see included in a new package earlier this month, pledging to release a new coronavirus bill to restart talks with Democrats when the Senate returns from recess. The Kentucky Republican said at the time that he couldn’t say for sure whether Congress would be able to pass another relief package, arguing that “the atmosphere is becoming a bit more political than it was in March. “But I think we will do something again. I think the country needs one last boost,” he added. Despite his desire to move on new legislation, other lawmakers have urged caution due to the major gaps in oversight. Three oversight branches were set up as a result of the CARES Act, the signature piece of coronavirus legislation signed into law in late March. The special inspector general for pandemic recovery (SIGPR) was tasked with overseeing coronavirus spending, the Pandemic Response Accountability Committee was designed to promote cooperation among the inspectors general and a third oversight body called the Congressional Oversight Commission. All three bodies have faced considerable hurdles since launching four months ago that have made it harder for all to operate as needed, according to The Hill. The SIGPR has had issues with staffing their unit, as the inspector general doesn’t have the authority to expedite the lengthy government hiring process. The Pandemic Response Accountability Committee has still not received data that should have been provided when the CARES Act was passed. The situation escalated when President Trump blocked Glenn Fine, then-acting inspector general for the Defense Department, from serving as chairman for the committee. The Congressional Oversight Commission still doesn’t have a leader, though the panel’s four other members have been meeting for over two months. The four members include Rep. French Hill (R-Ark.), Rep. Donna Shalala (D-Fla.), Sen. Pat Toomey (R-Pa.) and Bharat Ramamurti, a former aide to Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.). House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and McConnell were eyeing former Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Joseph Dunford to chair the commission, according to Politico, but he withdrew himself from consideration on Tuesday. “Ultimately, General Dunford decided his service on the CARES Commission was incompatible with his other commitments,” a source familiar with the developments told the outlet. Lawmakers will have a mere three weeks to address these problems and negotiate another potential relief package before they recess again for Labor Day.

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Title: Michael Avenatti wants sentencing pushed back 50 days Disgraced lawyer Michael Avenatti wants a federal judge to delay his sentencing for trying to extort millions from Nike by 50 days due to coronavirus concerns. His Miami-based lawyer, Scott Srebnick, wrote in the letter filed Wednesday that it would be dangerous and cumbersome for them to travel while Florida and California, where Avenatti is under home confinement, experience spikes in infections. “Miami is now considered the ‘epicenter’ of the virus in the United States,” wrote Srebnick in the letter to Judge Paul Gardephe. “Trends in Florida and California are not encouraging.” Avenatti — whose clients included porn star Stormy Daniels — has been riding out the pandemic at home in Venice, California. He was sprung from federal lockup in Manhattan in April over fears he could contract COVID-19 in custody. He’s due in Manhattan federal court Aug. 19 and faces up to 42 years in prison after a jury found him guilty of trying to extort nearly $25 million from Nike. In addition to the risks of travel, Srebnick argued that he, his client and any family members who planned to attend the sentencing would have to quarantine for two weeks since they are traveling from states with high infection rates. Avenatti faces a new trial in October for allegedly embezzling more than $300,000 from Daniels. He represented the adult film star in a failed 2018 suit against Donald Trump.

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Title: Kanye West reportedly still in the running for president Kanye West is reportedly still in the presidential race. The rap superstar filed with the Federal Election Commission, according to a report from TMZ Wednesday. West filed Form 1 — the Statement of Organization — that says the Kanye 2020 committee will act as the “Principal Campaign Committee,” the report said. The paperwork listed the party as “the Birthday Party,” the banner he said he would run under when he initially announced his intention earlier this month. The report noted that he had yet to file Form 2 — Statement of Candidacy — that confirms that he’s raised or spent more than $5,000 in campaign activities, which triggers his candidacy status under federal campaign laws. Wednesday evening, reporter Ben Jacobs tweeted that, “per Misha Mohr, the public affairs officer for the Oklahoma Board of Elections, a representative for Kanye West appeared at their offices to formally file to run for President in the past 45 minutes along with the necessary filing fee.” The developments come a day after a report said he was already bowing out of the race. West, who announced his entry into the presidential arena in a July 4 tweet, told election strategist Steve Kramer that he was out of the race, New York Magazine reported Tuesday.

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Title: Daniel Lewis Lee wanted three final meals before execution Death row inmate Daniel Lewis Lee wanted three last suppers — but what he ate may remain a mystery. Before his execution, the triple murderer rambled about his first, second and final meal and said his order request “should speak for itself,” news station WTHI reported. But the Bureau of Prisons declined to comment on what the 47-year-old white supremacist chowed down before he died by lethal injection Tuesday at the federal prison in Terre Haute, Indiana. “We will not be providing details of Mr. Lee’s last meal,” a BOP spokesperson told The Post. Lee was convicted of killing guns dealer William Mueller, his wife, Nancy, and her 8-year-old daughter, Sarah Powell, in 1996 in Tilly, Arkansas. He implored the media at his execution to ask the judge about DNA evidence that was left out of the trial, the outlet reported. “I’ve made a lot of mistakes in my life, but I’m not a murderer. You’re killing an innocent man,” said Lee, who was a member of the Aryan People’s Republic. Lee’s execution was the first carried out by the federal government since 2003.

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Title: Florida labs not reporting negative test results, report says Incomplete reporting from some Florida laboratories resulted in errors on the state’s report on virus positivity rates, according to a Fox 35 News report. “Countless labs have reported a 100 percent positivity rate, which means every single person tested was positive,” Fox 35 News reported Tuesday. “Other labs had very high positivity rates.” Orlando Health, for example, reported a 98 percent positivity rate. Lee Memorial Hospital Lab, PanCare of Florida, Inc and Advance Medical of Naples all reported 100 percent positivity rates; no negative results were included. That rate implies every person tested had a positive result. Fox 35 News said it investigated the numbers by contacting every local location listed in the report. Orlando Health confirmed to Fox News that the 98 percent figure is incorrect and the positivity rate is actually 9.4 percent. “Orlando Health understands this is confusing,” a spokeswoman for Orlando Health said, in an emailed statement sent to Fox News Tuesday. “As you look through the entire Department of Health ‘testing by laboratory’ site, you will see multiple Orlando Health hospitals listed.” It is not clear how the discrepancy between the two numbers emerged. An Orlando Health spokeswoman told the Orlando Sentinel that the organization is looking into how the 98 percent figure was reported. Lori Ann Martell, practice administrator at Advance Medical of Naples, wrote an e-mail statement to Fox News saying, “we report daily total tests done (positive and negative) along with the required information on positive reporting. Both pieces of information are sent together.” However, the state report did not have any data on negative virus tests for Advance Medical of Naples. A VA spokesperson told Fox 35 News that the Orlando Veterans Affairs Medical Center’s positivity rate is actually 6 percent, not 76 percent as seen on the report. Fox News has reached out to the Orlando Veterans Affairs Medical Center with a request for comment on this story. The Florida Department of Health confirmed to Fox 35 News on Tuesday that though private and public laboratories are required to immediately report both positive and negative cases, “some have not.” “Specifically, they said that some smaller, private labs were not reporting negative test result data to the state,” Fox 35 News reported. Rep. Brian Mast, R-Fla., in a Fox News interview, said county commissioners, schools and governors are among those making “real-time decisions” based off the numbers. “…So if you have some of these labs not reporting the negatives, only reporting the positives, skewing these numbers…they’re messing with the truth,” Mast said. “They’re not allowing information that allows Americans to manage their own risk, manage their own health and make the decisions that they need to make…” “The Department immediately began working with those labs to ensure that all results were being reported in order to provide comprehensive and transparent data,” a spokesperson for the Florida Department of Health told Fox 35 News. “As the state continues to receive results from various labs, the Department will continue educating these labs on proper protocol for reporting COVID-19 test results.” Florida recently set new national records for the largest daily increases in cases. On Sunday, the state reported 15,300 new cases and on Monday, officials announced the second-highest statewide increase at 12,624. In a Tuesday update, the state health department reported a total of 291,629 cases with 4,409 related deaths.

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Title: Portland protesters set up autonomous zone in city park Antifa in Portland set up walls and barriers in the street outside the federal courthouse to claim their own autonomous zone, calling it “CLAT” for “Chinook Land Autonomous Territory.” pic.twitter.com/ntQQPfCZAR — Andy Ngô (@MrAndyNgo) July 15, 2020 Protesters in Oregon are trying to establish their own autonomous zone in Portland, according to reports. Demonstrators and members of the anti-fascist group Antifa started setting up walls and barriers late Tuesday outside the Multnomah County Justice Center, where they’re calling the area the “Chinook Land Autonomous Territory,” according to video posted online. The 20-second clip posted by a reporter for the Post Millennial shows large appliances set up as makeshift road blockades and a wooden board painted with the letters “ACAB” — for “All Cops Are Bastards.” The protesters late Tuesday began putting up tents in nearby Lownsdale Square, where the so-called “Occupy Portland” encampment took shape in 2011, KATU reports. About 12 demonstrators remained in the newly declared autonomous zone as of 5 a.m. Wednesday, the station reports. Police in Portand, where protests have been held for seven straight weeks in the aftermath of George Floyd’s police-custody death in Minneapolis, removed some of the barricades early Wednesday, The Oregonian reports. But some of the demonstrators returned and threw glass bottles and pointed lasers at cops, who disengaged with the crowd, the newspaper reports. Federal officers then dispersed the crowd using tear gas and other less lethal munitions early Wednesday, but several tents remained set up in Lownsdale Park, according to the report. The newly decreed zone is similar to what protesters in Seattle created in the city’s Capitol Hill neighborhood in June, calling it the Capitol Hill Occupied Protest zone, or CHOP. The city saw a 525 percent spike in crime as a result of violence associated with the area, Mayor Jenny Durkan said earlier this month.

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Title: MS-13 'animals' busted in NY, one faces execution for murders President Trump on Wednesday said dozens of MS-13 gang leaders were nabbed across the country in the Justice Department’s recent Operation Vulcan crackdown — with eight arrests in New York. Attorney General William Barr told reporters in the Oval Office that the Justice Department also will seek the death penalty in an older case involving MS-13 leader Alexi Saenz. He and his co-defendants are charged with multiple Long Island murders, including the infamous slaying of best friends Nisa Mickens and Kayla Cuevas in Brentwood in 2016. “We will not allow these animals to terrorize our communities and my administration will not rest until every member of MS-13 is brought to justice,” Trump said. Operation Vulcan netted 15 MS-13 suspects in Las Vegas, and the Justice Department filed terrorism charges in a Virginia federal court against alleged MS-13 ringleader Nell Garcia Diaz. The Salvadoran group is “a vile and evil gang of people,” the president said. “We’ve just concluded a historic operation leading to the arrest and indictment of dozens of savage MS-13 members and leaders all across the country.” Barr and Trump were joined in the Oval Office by assistant US attorney John Durham Jr. of New York, who is leading anti-MS-13 efforts. The 24-count indictment unsealed Tuesday in Central Islip federal court charges the eight gang members — who were nabbed in different states — with six murders, two attempted murders and kidnapping and narcotics trafficking conspiracies. “Victims were hacked with machetes, one shot numerous times and another decapitated,” said US Attorney for the Eastern District of New York Seth DuCharme. The defendants in the New York indictment — Carlos Alfaro, Jose Moises Blanco, Oseas Gonzalez, Jose Guevara-Castro, Victor Lopez-Morales, Ever Morales-Lopez, Sosa-Guevara and Kevin Torres — left a string of mutilated bodies in shallow graves across Long Island, officials said. Torres, 24, who goes by the nickname Quieto allegedly ordered the machete killing of 15-year-old Javier Castillo in October 2016 for his alleged membership in a rival gang. He’s also charged with orchestrating the murder of 19-year-old Oscar Acosta, a suspected member of a rival gang, in April 2016. MS-13 members lured the teen to a wooded area near an elementary school in Brentwood, beat him unconscious with tree limbs and bound his hands and feet, according to the Justice Department. The group allegedly moved him to a secluded area near an abandoned psychiatric hospital, hacked him to death with a machete and dumped him in a shallow grave. Saenz, who goes by the nicknames “Blasty” and “Plaky” was charged in a prior indictment for his role in Acosta’s brutal slaying. The feds announced Wednesday that they’d seek the death penalty for Saenz who is accused of seven murders, including the tragic killing of two teenage girls in 2016. Mickens, 15, and Cuevas, 16, were bludgeoned with a baseball bat and hacked to death with machetes over a dispute that erupted on social media. The girls were on their way home from school. Trump has twice visited Long Island to address MS-13 gang violence and met privately with Mickens and Cuevas’ families. The president called Saenz “a bloodthirsty MS-13 leader” responsible for the despicable killing of seven Americans including two teenage girls. “We believe that monsters who murdered children should be put to death,” Trump said. “We seem to have quite a good agreement on that.” The attorney general added that Saenz was involved in the“murder of two African Americans who they felt they just saw on the street and thought they were from a rival gang and just butchered.” Barr said Long Island “is one of the hotbeds of MS-13 activity — or at least was.” The announcement came one day after the US government carried out the first federal execution since 2003. Daniel Lewis Lee, who was convicted of killing a family of three, died by lethal injection in Terre Haute, Indiana, on Tuesday. If Saenz is convicted and put to death, it would mark the first federal execution for murder in New York since 1954, Newsday reported.

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Title: Ghislaine Maxwell faked being Epstein's girlfriend: former pal Christina Oxenberg — a cousin to the British royal family — said she believes Ghislaine Maxwell only pretended to be Jeffrey Epstein’s girlfriend despite reports they engaged in a brief romance in the ’90s. “She wanted me to believe she was Jeffrey Epstein’s girlfriend but I knew that she wasn’t,” Oxenberg told Australia’s “60 Minutes” news program. “She wanted that to be the storyline.” The interviewer asked, “How did you know that she wasn’t his girlfriend? “Because she’s not 12,” said Oxenberg, who has previously said she’s a former friend of Epstein and his alleged madam. Oxenberg — who is the daughter of Princess Elizabeth of Yugoslavia, Prince Charles and Prince Andrew’s second cousin — said the convicted pedophile and Maxwell used each other to boost their own status. “They were a perfect fit. They needed each other. They were both halves of a whole that they wanted to be,” Oxenberg said in the sit-down interview. “He had the money. She had the connections.” But Oxenberg claimed she never was aware of the allegations that Maxwell recruited and groomed young women to be sexually abused by the disgraced financier. “I didn’t even have the wherewithal to think of such tremendous evil,” she said. “I just thought she had [a] rancid personality.” Oxenberg also said she didn’t care “at all” for Epstein — writing him off as a “goomba from Queens.” “He was a typical greedy person who wanted more than they already had,” Oxenberg said. Maxwell was busted earlier this month on a six-count indictment charging her with grooming young girls for sex.

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Title: Is this Ghislaine Maxwell's mystery husband? Ghislaine Maxwell is secretly married — and refusing to reveal her husband’s name, prosecutors said this week at the accused madam’s bail hearing. Though the British heiress — who is accused of helping the late billionaire perv Jeffrey Epstein target underage girls — didn’t say the name of her mystery spouse, reports suggest it could be tech CEO Scott Borgerson. Maxwell was linked to the divorced dad last year when the Daily Mail said she was living at his oceanfront mansion in Manchester-by-the-Sea, Mass. Her matrimonial status was divulged Tuesday as Manhattan prosecutors accused her of purposely hiding her wealth. “The defendant also makes no mention whatsoever about the financial circumstances or assets of her spouse, whose identity she declined to provide to Pretrial Services,” Assistant US Attorney Alison Moe told Manhattan federal Judge Alison Nathan during a video conference. Borgerson, 44, denied the two were romantically linked last August, as well as the notion that Maxwell was staying at his home. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the co-founder and CEO of CargoMetrics Technologies, which specializes in analyzing data on global shipping, according to his LinkedIn page. His online résumé also says he spent four years in the US Coast Guard, as both a commanding officer and navigator, and worked as an assistant professor at the US Coast Guard Academy. Borgerson earned a Ph.D. from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University and “has advised the White House on maritime policy,” per LinkedIn. Last July, he was seen walking a dog on Boston Common near the apartment he keeps during the week while running his company. He has denied a report that said the dog belonged to Ghislaine. Borgerson, whose phone appeared to be off Wednesday, couldn’t immediately be reached. Maxwell, 58, was previously linked to Ted Waitt, the founder of Gateway Computers, until at least 2010, according to Britain’s The Sun, which said she began dating Borgerson in 2013. She also dated Epstein. Her lawyers have asked for her to be sprung on a $5 million bond. Maxwell was busted July 2 on a six-count indictment charging her with recruiting and grooming young women to be sexually abused by both her and Epstein. She has denied all allegations against her. Additional reporting by Sara Nathan

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Title: Trump criticizes Iran for executing three anti-government protesters President Trump on Wednesday called on Iran to halt the impending executions of three men who were detained last year for participating in anti-government protests. “Three individuals were sentenced to death in Iran for participating in protests. The execution is expected momentarily,” the president posted on Twitter. “Executing these three people sends a terrible signal to the world and should not be done!,” he pleaded, linking to “#StopExecutionsInIran.” The hashtag link identified the three men as Saeid Tamjidi, Mohammad Rajabi and Amirhossein Maradi, who were arrested in November 2019 and tortured to make confessions while they were detained. The State Department last month condemned Iran’s decision to sentence the men to death. “These protesters were reportedly beaten, denied lawyers, and coerced into false confessions. Iran must respect human rights and stop these executions,” spokeswoman Morgan Ortagus wrote in a tweet. Her post came a day after Iranian media reported that the Supreme Court of Iran upheld their death sentences handed down by the Revolutionary Court. A number of hashtags were started — in English and Farsi — urging Iran to end the execution of prisoners. Amnesty International in a tweet sent Tuesday urged Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei to intercede on their behalf. “Their trial was unfair & they said they were subjected to torture through beatings, electric shocks and being hung upside down,” it said in the message.

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Title: George Floyd's final words were 'I can't breathe', video shows George Floyd’s last words before he died during an encounter with Minneapolis police were “I can’t breathe,” according to transcripts from new police bodycam video. Two videos viewed Wednesday by CNN revealed Floyd’s final words as Police Officer Derek Chauvin put pressure on his neck after cops responded to a report of a “fake bill” used at a nearby market. “Man, I can’t breathe,” Floyd said about 16 minutes into the footage from the body cameras of fellow cops Thomas Lane and J. Keung, CNN reports. Paramedics then responded to Floyd — a black man who at that point was handcuffed — some 9 minutes after the knee was first placed on his neck, according to the report. Floyd’s motionless body was then loaded into an ambulance, the video shows. All four officers in the incident have been fired. Chauvin has been charged with second-degree murder, third-degree murder and manslaughter. Lane, Kueng and Tou Thao have been charged with aiding and abetting both second-degree murder and manslaughter. Bodycam footage of the May 25 incident that sparked nationwide protests against policy brutality has not been released by Minneapolis police amid an ongoing investigation by the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, CNN reports. The videos and accompanying transcripts were filed in court last week by Lane’s attorney, Earl Gray, as part of a motion to have the former officer’s case dismissed. Gray’s motion cited portions of the bodycam video that depicted Floyd “actively resisting and acting erratic” during the incident and also noted Floyd’s “request” to be put on the ground. But only the written transcripts were made public Wednesday by Hennepin County District Judge Peter Cahill, who is presiding over the cases against the four former cops, CNN reports. An attorney for Chauvin declined to comment Wednesday, according to CNN. With Post wires

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Title: ‘He’s a great gentleman’: Trump says he’d welcome Flynn back on campaign President Trump said Tuesday he would welcome ex-national security adviser Michael Flynn back with open arms to campaign for his re-election. “I would. I think he’s a great gentleman,” the president told CBS News. “He’s a great — he’s been in the military for many, many decades, actually. Highly respected. What General Flynn went through is so unfair,” he said of the former US Army lieutenant general. Flynn was fired by Trump in February 2017 and then pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about discussing sanctions and a UN vote in December 2016 with then-Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak. Flynn later said he did not intentionally lie and the Justice Department said in May it would drop the case, asserting that FBI agents had no valid basis to interview Flynn days into Trump’s presidency. A federal appeals court on July 10 stayed a decision ordering that a judge accept the Justice Department’s motion to drop its criminal case against Flynn. The US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit issued an order that gives Flynn and the Justice Department 10 days to respond to Judge Emmett Sullivan’s petition Thursday for a rehearing by the full appeals court. The filing also stated that the three-judge panel’s June 24 decision ordering Sullivan to grant the Justice Department’s motion to drop the charges against Flynn had been stayed “pending disposition of the petition for rehearing en banc,” which means by the full 11-member appellate court. The president said he did not think Flynn would need a pardon — days after he commuted the 40-month federal prison sentence given to his longtime pal Roger Stone. “I don’t think he’s going to need a pardon because he’s been proven to be innocent,” the president said. “I don’t think he’s going to need a pardon.” Trump stopped short of saying he regretted firing Flynn, blaming others in his administration for providing faulty information. “You have to understand. I was given information that he lied,” he said. Stone also said he would campaign for Trump leading up to the election. Asked whether he would allow that, the president told the network: “Hey, Roger’s free.” The Post reported Saturday that Flynn could be making a comeback on the campaign trail.

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Title: Trump has 'very good relationship' with Fauci despite op-ed President Trump said Wednesday he has a “very good relationship” with White House coronavirus task force member Anthony Fauci, despite an op-ed by one of his top advisers that trashed the immunologist. Trump distanced himself from trade adviser Peter Navarro’s op-ed that said Fauci “has been wrong about everything.” “I get along very well with Dr. Fauci,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office. “That’s Peter Navarro, but I have a very good relationship with Dr. Fauci.” Navarro criticized Fauci for opposing early travel restrictions on China and accused him of “flip-flopping on the use of masks.” On Wednesday morning, White House spokeswoman Alyssa Farah tweeted that Navarro’s op-ed “didn’t go through normal White House clearance processes and is the opinion of Peter alone.” Fauci’s blunt assessment of coronavirus pandemic developments and his willingness to contradict Trump have made the longtime director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease a target for far-right critics. Fauci said Monday that COVID-19 cases are surging because “we did not shut down entirely.” On Monday, White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany denied a Washington Post report that said reporters were given “opposition research” to discredit Fauci, including his past remarks early on in the pandemic that the public didn’t need to wear masks. “There is no opposition research being dumped to reporters,” McEnany said. “We were asked a very specific question by the Washington Post, and that question was President Trump noted that Dr. Fauci had made some mistakes, and we provided a direct answer to what was a direct question.” Trump summoned reporters to the Oval Office on Wednesday to speak about his administration’s efforts against the MS-13 gang. He spoke about Fauci in response to a reporter’s question. “We will not allow these animals to terrorize our communities,” Trump said of MS-13. He praised the Justice Department’s pursuit of a death penalty verdict for “a bloodthirsty MS-13 leader.” Trump said he would give an “exciting” news conference next week to address cities that have become “out of control” with crime and “like war zones.”

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Title: Video shows teens beating pregnant mom, kicking toddler A group of teens pummeled a pregnant Illinois mom — and even drop-kicked her helpless tot — during a caught-on-video brawl, according to footage and reports. The disturbing confrontation circulating on Twitter showed two young women attacking the woman as she stood with her young daughter outside a home Friday in the village of Brooklyn. Two of the girls are seen in the footage attacking the woman, pulling her hair and pushing her to the ground. A third girl filmed the attack on the mom, who is pregnant, The Sun reported. As the group clobbered the mom, a teen boy suddenly ran over and kicked the toddler in the head, the report said. He then proceeded to stomp on the mother’s head, as she struggled on the ground. The mom of the teen boy defended him on her Facebook, claiming the tot kick was an “accident,” the Mirror reported. “He didn’t try 2 kick that baby he tried 2 jump over the baby on to her and made a mistake…as y’all can see the baby ran from under the girl fighting while he was coming down,” said the mom, who was not identified in the report. “My kid is not that type 2 kick a baby…accident [sic] happen.” Brooklyn police said they responded to a “disturbance” involving both adults and minors Friday at the Thomas Terrance Apartments. They were able to speak to a female victim, who had suffered a minor head injury and was able to identify her assailants. The accused attackers’ names have not been released pending charges. Police said they are actively investigating and the case will be referred to the St. Clair County State’s Attorney’s Office.

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Title: Oklahoma's Kevin Stitt first US governor to get COVID-19 Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt said Wednesday he had tested positive for coronavirus, and was believed to be the first governor to have contracted the highly contagious virus as the pandemic spreads across the US. “I personally get tested periodically throughout this whole thing,” Stitt said during a news conference updating residents on the virus, the Oklahoman reported. “I got tested yesterday for COVID-19 and the results came back positive.” Stitt, a 47-year-old father of six, said he was feeling “fine” but had minor body aches on Tuesday. The revelation came as Oklahoma saw a surge of coronavirus cases. State officials said four additional people had died, bringing the total to 428, and that there were 546 people who are hospitalized with confirmed or suspected cases of the virus. Stitt, a Republican, has faced criticism for not doing more to respond to the state’s growing number of positive cases and hospitalizations, the paper reported. He encouraged Oklahomans to wear face masks in public when social distancing was not possible, but rarely wears a mask in public himself. The revelation came a day after Democratic state Rep. Jason Lowe called on Stitt to issue a mask mandate after the Oklahoma Department of Health reported Tuesday that almost 1,000 more people tested positive for coronavirus, according to Fox25 TV in Oklahoma City. “As a COVID-19 survivor, seeing the rapid rise in cases is alarming. Oklahomans must know that the pandemic is far from over and that we still must do what we can to protect ourselves and our community,” Lowe said. He commended the mayors of Oklahoma City, Tulsa and Norman for taking steps to enact mask mandates in public spaces and private businesses and believed the state should do the same. “In order to limit the spread of COVID-19, we must follow the directives of the CDC and our healthcare professionals, all of which who advocate for the widespread use of masks. Matters of public health should never be partisan. I urge Governor Stitt to follow in the steps of fellow governors and put the health and safety of Oklahomans first and mandate that masks be worn in public spaces and private businesses,” he said. Stitt has said he has no plans to issue a statewide mask mandate. President Trump staged a rally in Tulsa last month, and even though attendance was sparse, local health officials have linked it to a spike in cases in the region. Eight Trump campaign officials tested positive just prior to the event. Nationally, there are more than 3.3 million confirmed cases in the US, and more than 135,000 people have died, according to the CDC.

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Title: Prosecutor probing gun-toting couple says Trump 'came after' her A St. Louis prosecutor is accusing Missouri Gov. Mike Parson and President Trump of targeting her for investigating the white couple who brandished guns at Black Lives Matter protesters last month, saying they “continue to play politics” in the aftermath of the incident. St. Louis Circuit Attorney Kimberly Gardner made the pointed allegation in a statement released on Twitter late Tuesday after Parson told reporters earlier in the day that he spoke with Trump and US Attorney General William Barr about Mark and Patricia McCloskey. “Today, both the governor and Donald Trump came after me for doing my job and investigating a case,” Gardner said. “While they continue to play politics with the handling of this matter, spreading misinformation and distorting the truth, I refuse to do so.” Gardner said she was “reviewing all the available facts” regarding the June 28 incident that was caught on video, showing the personal injury attorneys protecting their Renaissance-style mansion with a rifle and a handgun as protesters marched toward the home of Mayor Lyda Krewson. “It is also incredible that at a time when our nation is dealing with a rapidly spreading deadly virus and our state reported a record number of new infections, they are launching these dog-whistle attacks against me,” Gardner’s statement continued. A message seeking additional comment from Gardner’s office Wednesday — including whether a decision has been made to criminally charge the McCloskeys — was not immediately returned. An attorney for the couple, Joel Schwartz, said he expected charges to be filed at some point Tuesday, CNN reports. Parson accused Gardner on Tuesday of trying to take the couple’s “constitutional rights away,” claiming they had “every right” to protect their property, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reports. Gardner, meanwhile, said in a statement issued one day after the viral standoff that she was investigating reports of “peaceful protesters” who were met with guns and a “violent assault” during the incident. “My office is currently working with the public and police to investigate these events,” Gardner said on June 29. “Make no mistake: we will not tolerate the use of force against those exercising their First Amendment rights, and will use the full power of Missouri law to hold people accountable.”

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Title: Trump lawyers prep for case with Cy Vance over tax returns WASHINGTON — President Trump’s lawyers on Wednesday renewed their year-long effort to block Manhattan District Attorney Cy Vance from subpoenaing eight years of Trump’s private tax returns. In a submission filed to a federal judge in Manhattan who originally presided over the case, the president’s attorneys argued that Vance’s subpoena was politically motivated and too broad. The letter comes after the Supreme Court last week paved the way for Vance to obtain Trump’s personal financial records, ruling that the president is not immune from subpoenas and criminal investigations and that a grand jury can seek his records. On Wednesday, Trump’s legal team wrote: “The President should not be required, for example, to litigate the subpoena’s breadth or whether it was issued in bad faith without understanding the nature and scope of the investigation and why the District Attorney needs all of the documents he has demanded.” In a small win for the president, the high court deferred the final decision on the issuing of a subpoena to a lower court, making it likely the records will remain under wraps until after the November presidential election. The court also dismissed a similar request from congressional investigators. Vance’s office last September subpoenaed Trump’s longtime accounting company Mazars USA for eight years of his financial records and tax returns as part of an investigation into whether he paid hush money before the 2016 election to several women with whom he allegedly had affairs. The president tried to fight the subpoena and sued Vance’s office to block him from enforcing the subpoenas, but Manhattan federal Judge Victor Marrero threw out the lawsuit. The decision was quickly appealed by Trump’s lawyers to the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, which also ruled against him, resulting in the appeal to the Supreme Court that came to a head last week.

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Title: Jeff Sessions stands by Mueller probe recusal despite Senate loss Former Attorney General Jeff Sessions says he still stands by his decision to recuse himself from former special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia probe — despite his Senate bid being marred over the decision. Speaking to supporters after conceding to former Auburn University football coach Tommy Tuberville in Tuesday’s GOP primary, Sessions said he was ending his career in public service “with no regrets.” “Let me say this about the president and our relationship: I leave with no regrets. I was honored to serve the people of Alabama in the Senate and I was extraordinarily proud of the accomplishments we had as attorney general. On recusal, I followed the law. I did the right thing, and I saved the president’s bacon in the process,” the Alabama Republican said. “Any other action to try to squelch an investigation in that environment would not have worked, it would have really been a catastrophe and I’m so glad it finally ended after a prolonged time and the president has been cleared,” he continued. Sessions was trounced by Tuberville in the primary contest for his old Senate seat by a staggering 20 points. During his 2014 Senate re-election bid, Sessions ran completely unopposed. Despite this, he said he was leaving the public sector with no lingering thoughts about what he could’ve done differently. “I leave elected office with my integrity intact. I feel good about it. I hold my head high,” he told the crowd. “I took the road less traveled. I didn’t try to excuse myself or get in a fight or undermine the leader of our country and the great work he has to do. That was an honorable path, I believe.” Sessions said that while this chapter of his life was closing, he was grateful to the state of Alabama “for letting this country boy have the opportunity to be a United States senator.” The former attorney general pledged to help his former primary opponent take on Sen. Doug Jones (D-Ala.) this November. Sessions represented Alabama in the Senate for two decades before joining the Trump administration as the nation’s attorney general in 2017. He incurred President Trump’s wrath when he recused himself from the investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 campaign. Trump forced him from his job as attorney general in November 2018, right after the midterm elections led to Democrats retaking the House. Sessions maintained his loyalty to Trump throughout the campaign despite the ramped-up attacks on his recusal decision, as well as Trump’s endorsement of Tuberville. In an open letter published in May, Sessions defended himself to Alabamians. “As the world knows, the President disagreed with me on recusal, but I did what the law required me to do. I was a central figure in the campaign and was also a subject of and witness in the investigation and could obviously not legally be involved in investigating myself,” he wrote at the time. “If I had ignored and broken the law, the Democrats would have used that to severely damage the President.” At the end of his letter, Sessions argued that the people of Alabama could support him and still stand by the president. “We will vote overwhelmingly to give President Trump a second term, and we will choose who we send to the Senate. The people of Alabama do not have to choose between voting for the President and voting for me, they can do both.”

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Title: Egyptian oil pipeline fire injures 17 CAIRO – A major fire broke out after a leak of oil from the Shuqair-Mostorod pipeline next to a busy highway in a Cairo suburb on Tuesday and 17 people were injured, authorities said. The pipeline runs along a motorway on the outskirts of the capital and a spark caused by passing cars ignited crude that was leaking from the pipe, the petroleum ministry said. The pipeline’s valves were immediately closed in the area of the blaze and the flames were brought under control, it added in a statement. There was no immediate word from authorities on why the pipeline, located some 1.5-meter (5-ft) deep in the ground, had leaked. A witness at the scene said about two dozen cars were torched, apparently abandoned by motorists. A video posted online showed two residents pulling an injured person away from the highway while thick plumes of smoked billowed skyward. Petroleum Ministry spokesman Hamdy Abd El Aziz told local TV officials had cordoned off the pipeline and road when the leak had been discovered but motorists had kept driving by which probably sparked the fire. He did not say when pumping would resume or how much crude had been flowing when the fire broke out. He also refused to say how the underground pipeline could have been damaged, referring to a committee investigating the incident. The state prosecutor dispatched a team to investigate, a statement said. The crude pipeline runs from the Red Sea oil port of Shuqair to the called Egyptian Refining Co (ERC) complex of Mostorod in Greater Cairo. Egypt’s Qalaa Holding, Qatar Petroleum and state-run Egyptian General Petroleum Corp (EGPC) are invested in the refinery business with other partners.

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Title: France's Macron, wife confronted by protesters on Bastille Day French President Emmanuel Macron and his wife, Brigitte, were confronted by maskless protesters during a Bastille Day stroll in a public garden, raising new concerns about their security arrangements. A group of “gilets jaunes” — yellow vests — demonstrators spotted the Macrons and followed them, calling on the president to resign and shouting abuse as they walked with bodyguards in the Tuileries Gardens near the Louvre Museum in Paris on Tuesday, Agence France-Presse reported Wednesday. In a video posted on the Gilets Jaunes Infos page on Facebook, a few dozen protesters boo and shout “Macron resign!” as they surround the presidential party, many of them recording on their phones. “It’s incredible, we’ve stumbled upon the thorn in our side,” one protester is heard saying. Neither Macron nor the demonstrators — who have staged numerous strikes and sparked violent clashes in cities across the country — wore face masks, recommended for preventing the spread of coronavirus. The heated exchange, with security guards looking on, lasted about six minutes, the French news agency reported. “It poses a real security problem,” the head of the opposition right-wing Republican party, Christian Jacob, told French television. “How can the president of the republic take such risks?” Leftist leader Jean-Luc Melenchon said Macron should have been more “cautious” as “a president walking in the Tuileries where there are so many people should expect to come across detractors.” But Macron keeps his cool, and is seen repeatedly urging the group to “be cool,” while taking time to listen to their gripes. He says he understands their “feeling of injustice” but in response to complaints about alleged police abuses, he points out that “there are also violent people among yourselves.” “This is a public holiday, I am taking a walk with my wife, and you are heckling me,” Macron tells one of them. The exchange ends with one protester thanking Macron for listening, and saying, “I cannot even curse at him” as the president turns to leave. “All the better!” replies Macron, who had earlier presided over a ceremony commemorating Bastille Day, the anniversary of the storming of the Bastille on July 14, 1789, during the French Revolution. About 2,500 demonstrators and 1,800 law enforcement agents have been injured in weekly yellow vest protests that kicked off in November 2018. The protests largely faded by the summer of 2019, though sporadic protests drawing smaller crowds have continued almost weekly since then. The rallies, which started as a protest against a loss of spending power and Macron’s purported contempt for the common man, often sparked confrontations between rioters and police.

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Title: Competitive hot dog eaters close to peak human performance Joey Chestnut better ketchup. Competitive eaters are physically capable of gobbling down 84 hot dogs in ten minutes — nine more than the world record set by Chestnut earlier this month, according to a sports study published Wednesday. The theoretical speed eating performance standard, based on 39 years of data from Nathan’s Famous Hot Dog Eating Contest in Brooklyn, was outlined in research that used mathematical modeling to project trends over time. It predicts that the sausage chompers will continue to set records based on a so-called “sigmoidal curve” — a slow and steady rise, followed by an era of rapid improvement before leveling off, according to the study, published in the Royal Society journal Biology Letters. “Hotdog eating has definitely reached that second plateau,” the report’s author, James Smoliga of High Point University, told The Guardian. “Humans are able to eat faster than bears or coyotes.” The Nathan’s contest, which has been held annually for 104 years, started off mostly featuring “big obese guys” but they soon didn’t cut the mustard, the study notes. By the 1990s, extreme eaters from Japan — many of them in great physical shape, such as Takeru Kobayashi — began crushing wiener records. “It wasn’t just people with big appetites any more,” Smoliga said, adding that the number of hot dogs eaten by competitors has steadily gone up since then. These days, top dog speed eaters have nailed a combination of training and physical fitness, leading Smoliga to predict that performances will continue to improve. Smoliga said his prediction will prove to be true unless a “new kind of competitor” shows up — such as a person with gigantism or a rare metabolic condition — that allows him to go beyond the normal limits of human biology.

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Title: 6-year-old boy risks life to save sister from brutal dog attack Advertisement A 6-year-old Wyoming boy is being hailed as a hero after his family said he was mauled protecting his younger sister from a dog attack. Bridger Walker put himself in harm’s way when he jumped in front of a dog last week that was charging at his younger sister, according to his aunt, Nikki Walker, on Instagram. Despite being bitten several times on the cheek by the pooch, whose breed was not specified, the boy was able to grab his sister’s hand and bring her to safety, his aunt said. “If someone had to die, I thought it should be me,” he told his aunt, she said. Bridger — who was seen in photos with severe wounds on his mouth, left cheek and eye — required 90 stitches following the attack, his aunt said. His aunt said the boy is recovering at home and his wounds are “looking so much better.” “He’s in great spirits, and his awesome personality is intact,” she wrote on Instagram. She said the family holds no ill will against the dog owners, who are “really great people who have been nothing but kind to Bridger and his family.” “We feel no resentment toward them at all, and — if anything — there’s only been an increase of love between our families as a result of this incident,” Nikki said. The aunt said she was only sharing the story in hopes of getting “some words of encouragement from his favorite heroes” — including actors Vin Diesel, Mark Ruffalo, Tom Holland and Chris Hemsworth. “We love our brave boy and want all the other superheroes to know about this latest hero who joined their ranks,” she said.

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Title: White House 'does not stand by' scathing op-ed about Fauci The White House appears to be distancing itself from a blistering op-ed written by President Trump’s top trade adviser, Peter Navarro, about Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease expert. The op-ed, published Tuesday by USA Today, describes Fauci as having “a good bedside manner with the public, but he has been wrong about everything I have interacted with him on.” The White House communications team did not sign off on the op-ed, a Trump administration official told The Post. “Navarro went rogue and the White House does not stand by these unauthorized opinions,” the official said. Citing the doctor’s past positions on the wearing of masks and the use of hydroxychloroquine, as well as his original opposition to closing the US border, Navarro made the case that Fauci lacked credibility due to past errors. “In late January, when I was making the case on behalf of the president to take down the flights from China, Fauci fought against the president’s courageous decision — which might well have saved hundreds of thousands of American lives,” Navarro wrote in the brief piece. “When I warned in late January in a memo of a possibly deadly pandemic, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases was telling the news media not to worry,” he continued. Fauci, who has served as NIAID director since 1984, had sparred with Navarro previously while serving on the White House coronavirus task force. In April, reports emerged that Navarro and Fauci had come to blows during a meeting in the Situation Room. While discussing the potential use of hydroxychloroquine, the malaria drug Trump has touted as potentially helpful in fighting the virus, Navarro stood up and distributed reading materials on what he argued was the “clear therapeutic efficacy” of the drug. In response, Fauci stressed that there was only anecdotal evidence that the medicine could combat coronavirus. Fauci’s comment about anecdotal evidence “just set Peter off,” a source told Axios at the time. Navarro referenced their row in his op-ed, albeit indirectly. “When Fauci was telling the White House Coronavirus Task Force that there was only anecdotal evidence in support of hydroxychloroquine to fight the virus, I confronted him with scientific studies providing evidence of safety and efficacy. A recent Detroit hospital study showed a 50% reduction in the mortality rate when the medicine is used in early treatment,” he wrote in his piece. Despite their differences, Fauci has been able to maintain a better relationship with the president. Trump defended their working relationship Monday while speaking to reporters at the White House, saying they “have a very good relationship. “I have a very good relationship with Dr. Fauci, I’ve had for a long time, right from the beginning,” he said. “I find him to be a very nice person,” the president continued. “I don’t always agree with him — I closed the borders, as you know, to China, I did the ban on China, heavily infected and we saved tens of thousands of lives — and Dr. Fauci will admit that was a good decision,” he said. White House director of strategic communications Alyssa Farah said on Twitter that the op-ed “didn’t go through normal White House clearance processes and is the opinion of Peter alone. @realDonaldTrump values the expertise of the medical professionals advising his Administration.”

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Title: Asheville, North Carolina approves reparations for black citizens A city council in North Carolina unanimously approved reparations for black citizens while apologizing for the city’s role in slavery, according to reports. The historic measure was passed by the Asheville City Council in a 7-0 vote Tuesday night, the Citizen Times reported. “Hundreds of years of black blood spilled that basically fills the cup we drink from today,” said Councilman Keith Young, who is one of two black council members. The reparations won’t come in the form of direct payments to black residents — instead, investments will be made in areas that see racial disparities, the Citizen Times said. A Community Reparations Commission will be formed to recommend how those resources will be used. “The resulting budgetary and programmatic priorities may include but not be limited to increasing minority homeownership and access to other affordable housing, increasing minority business ownership and career opportunities, strategies to grow equity and generational wealth, closing the gaps in health care, education, employment and pay, neighborhood safety and fairness within criminal justice,” the resolution said.

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Title: Chinese state media editor-in-chief asks if US is ‘mentally retarded’ The editor-in-chief for The Global Times, a state-funded newspaper in China, asked Monday if the United States is “mentally retarded” for rejecting Beijing’s broad territorial claims in the South China Sea, a region with long-standing disputes between China and other Southeast Asian countries. In a retweet of an article about Washington’s statement, Global Times editor-in-chief Hu Xijin accused the US of trying to provoke a conflict between China and surrounding nations. “The US issued the statement four years after the South China sea ruling. Is Washington mentally retarded and slow in action?” Xijin wrote. “Who can’t see you want to instigate ASEAN-China clash and meak ASEAN the cannon fodder of US’ strategy against China? Do you think other people are fools?” Xijin has earned a reputation over the years for his belligerent rhetoric and inveterate support of the Chinese Communist Party. He has been particularly outspoken in his opposition to pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong, likening them to ISIS terrorists. The US issued the statement four years after the South China Sea ruling. Is Washington mentally retarded and slow in action? Who can’t see you want to instigate ASEAN-China clash and make ASEAN the cannon fodder of US’ strategy against China? Do you think other people are fools? pic.twitter.com/T0mNbfvqul — Hu Xijin 胡锡进 (@HuXijin_GT) July 14, 2020 In an editorial published last November, he told Hong Kong police they have nothing to be scared of because they have the backing of “Chinese soldiers and People’s Liberation Army in Hong Kong” who can “provide support at any time.” Xijin’s less than diplomatic rhetoric against Washington on Monday comes amid Beijing accusing the US of trying to sow discord between China and the Southeast Asian countries with which it has long-standing territorial disputes in waters that are both a vital international shipping lane and home to valuable fisheries. “The United States is not a country directly involved in the disputes. However, it has kept interfering in the issue,” the Chinese Embassy in Washington said on its website. “Under the pretext of preserving stability, it is flexing muscles, stirring up tension and inciting confrontation in the region.” US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, in a statement released Monday, said the US now regards virtually all Chinese maritime claims outside its internationally recognized waters to be illegitimate. The new position does not cover land features above sea level, which are considered to be “territorial” in nature. Pompeo’s statement marks a major shift in America’s South China Sea policy. Previously, the US had only insisted that maritime disputes between China and its smaller neighbors be resolved peacefully through UN-backed arbitration. Both Indonesia and the Philippines joined Pompeo in calling on China to abide by an international arbitration court ruling in 2016 that disqualified many of China’s claims. Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson Zhao Lijian reiterated China’s position that it has had effective jurisdiction over the islands, reefs and waters of the South China Sea for more than 1,000 years. China’s emergence as a military power and its ambitions to extend its offshore reach have come into conflict with the US, which has been the dominant naval power in the western Pacific in the post-World War II period.

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Title: Radio host out after telling workers to speak English in video View this post on Instagram A post shared by CrazyKarens (@crazykarens) A post shared by CrazyKarens (@crazykarens) A conservative talk radio host in New Hampshire is out of a job after posting video of herself telling Spanish-speaking landscapers to speak English, because “it is America,” video shows. The footage, which was posted last week by Dianna Ploss on Facebook but has since been removed, shows the now-former WSMN host berating a crew of landscaping workers in Nashua while asking for the name of the company that employed them. “It is America, you should be speaking English,” Ploss said. “You should be speaking English.” Ploss then asked if any of the workers were “illegal” and asked for the name of the company they worked for, video shows. “So your tax dollars up here in New Hampshire, that’s what’s going on here,” Ploss continues. “That’s what going on here. That’s what’s going on here … This communism, this is communism. Look at this. They’re taking over these streets. What they’re doing up here in Nashua is permanent. Permanent.” A foreman then approaches Ploss to ask why she was harassing the workers, but she insisted he had a “right” to do so, video shows. In a statement posted on its website, WSMN said Ploss was “no longer associated” with the station or Bartis-Russell Broadcasting. “We at WSMN value freedom of speech, freedom of expression and assembly,” the statement reads. “We will not tolerate discrimination, racism or hatred. We continue to present and offer on air opportunities for discussion, education and the exchange of opinions and ideas.” The footage from Friday prompted more than 13,000 people in a Change.org petition to call for Ploss’ ouster for her encounter with the workers from Morin’s Landscaping in Hollis. “She in no way represents this city, which needs MORE diversity, inclusion and appreciation for cultural history and differences — not less,” the petition reads. “We are asking WSMN Radio to do the right thing, suspend her radio program, and stop giving her a platform to spread hate, ignorance, and racist rhetoric.” Ploss, for her part, responded to the controversy in a lengthy Facebook Live statement Monday showing her alongside a cardboard cutout of President Trump while accusing Republicans and “leftists” of trying to destroy America. “You have seen what they have done to me,” Ploss said. “And you know what, fellas? I take it and I wear it as a badge of honor.” Ploss had her own show on WSMN 1590 on Monday and Wednesday afternoons, Boston.com reports. But the vocal Trump supporter was never an employee there, the station’s owner and operator told the Boston Globe. “She is a client as we only broker our air time,” WSMN’s George Russell told the newspaper. “I have plenty lined up to fill that air space.”

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Title: Trump admin. to ramp up coronavirus testing at nursing homes The Trump administration will ratchet up testing at nursing homes in coronavirus hotspots around the country, Health and Human Services said. “Access to rapid point-of-care testing in nursing homes will further protect our Nation’s most vulnerable patients,” said Assistant Secretary for Health Adm. Brett P. Giroir in a statement released Tuesday. Distribution of the tests will begin next week and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services will prioritize which nursing homes receive them. Initially, they will be provided with one diagnostic test instrument and associated tests. The facilities can get additional tests from the test manufacturers, HHS said. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends that nursing homes test residents and staff and continue regular screenings. “This new testing initiative is critical for keeping vulnerable older adults safe while delivering the quality of life they deserve,” CMMS Administrator Seema Verma said. “It gives nursing homes the ability to swiftly identify residents that need to be isolated and mitigate the spread of the virus. As one more tool in the toolbox, it represents an important step toward the long-awaited reunion of residents with their loved ones.” The action comes as coronavirus cases are surging across Southern states and the death toll from the virus has surpassed 136,000. There were more than 35,000 deaths among nursing home residents as of last Thursday, CMMS said.

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Title: California’s Death Valley expected to hit hottest temperature ever recorded Death Valley, Calif., could soon see its hottest temperature to date. The 3,000-square-mile area in the northern Mojave Desert recorded its second-highest temperature July 12 at 128 degrees Fahrenheit, in a peak following a string of four days that saw heat readings of 120 degrees, 124 degrees, 128 degrees and 124 degrees. The temperature hit 129.2 degrees on June 30, 2013, but there is some dispute in the meteorological community about the “real” hottest temperature recorded on the planet. Official records show the marker came in 1913 when the temperature hit 134 degrees, ABC7 pointed out. A 2016 analysis by weather historian Christopher Burt, however, argued that the 1913 record is “essentially not possible from a meteorological perspective.” It said the reading was likely a mistake. While Death Valley knocks on the door of a heat record, other US states are registering new highs, too. Borger, Texas, recently set a one all-time record set of 116 degrees. Springs, California, hit a daily record of 121 degrees. And Tucson, Arizona hit 113 degrees.

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