Tag Archives: WorldNews

States Are in Crisis. Why Won’t Trump Help?

Federal support for cities and states was a core part of the New Deal. The president is tearing it apart.

Trump offers rosy predictions for coronavirus testing as US passes 1m cases

Such a liar – and it harms rather than improve his standing – “The US has carried out 5.6m tests over the past two months, which as Trump pointed out was far more than any other country, but represented about 1.6% of the population, a higher percentage than most countries, though significantly below Italy.”

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President claims economy will rebound and suggests US, currently testing 200,000 a day, will be testing 5m ‘very soon’

Donald Trump has predicted a “great” economic rebound in the fall and claimed the country would soon be performing 5m coronavirus diagnostic tests a day, as the number of confirmed cases in the US surpassed a million.

Some health experts have suggested that the US would have to carry out 5m tests a day by June to reopen its economy safely. Others have suggested as many as 20m tests a day would ultimately be needed. The US daily rate is currently 200,000.

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Trump is unravelling – even his supporters can’t ignore it now | Arwa Mahdawi

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The president is leaning heavily on sarcasm to excuse a range of blunders, but US conservatives are unimpressed

I don’t know what kind of disinfectant Donald Trump has been injecting, but the man does not appear to be well. The president’s lethal medical musing has turned him into (even more of) a global laughing stock and the widespread ridicule has clearly bruised his fragile ego. While Trump has never been a paradigm of calmness or competence, he has become increasingly irate and erratic in recent days. Now even his diehard supporters seem to be cooling towards him. Is the “very stable genius” starting to unravel?

Let’s start with the president’s weekend tweetstorm, which, even by Trumpian standards, was spectacularly unhinged. On Sunday, Trump lashed out at what he called a “phony story” in the New York Times that claimed he spends his days eating junk food and watching TV. “I will often be in the Oval Office late into the night & read & see [in the Times] that I am angrily eating a hamberger & Diet Coke in my bedroom,” he tweeted. “People with me are always stunned.” He then deleted the tweet and replaced it with one in which hamburger was spelled correctly. (This was clearly a challenge for him: he has previously misspelled hamburgers “hamberders”.)

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Germans urged to stay home amid fears Covid-19 infection rate is rising again

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Disease control agency figures suggest that spread of pandemic is accelerating

Germans have been advised to stay at home as much as possible and continue to apply physical distancing as official data appeared to indicate the spread of the Covid-19 pandemic was once again accelerating.

The basic reproduction number (R), indicating how many new cases one infected person generates on average, has come to be seen as the key indicator over whether restrictions on public life can be loosened after Angela Merkel stressed the importance of keeping the number below one.

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World Leaders Launch $8 Billion Collaboration to Develop Coronavirus Vaccine. Guess Who Isn’t Participating.

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On Friday, the World Health Organization announced that leaders, including German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Emmanuel Macron, have agreed to an unprecedented $8 billion initiative to fight the coronavirus pandemic, an effort that will include a race to develop a vaccine and ensure equal access to it.

“The world needs these tools and it needs them fast,” WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said at a press conference Friday. “In the past, they have not been available to all. That cannot be allowed to happen again.”

If you’re thinking that such a collaborative sentiment would be anathema to President Donald Trump—who last month attempted to buy a German company in order to gain exclusive rights to a vaccine—you’ve guessed right. “There will be no US official participation,” a US spokesman told Reuters when asked about the WHO initiative.

This, of course, tracks with every other go-it-alone, “Make America Great” decision Trump has built his presidency on, as well as his recent accusation that WHO had “severely” mismanaged its handling of the pandemic, a claim widely viewed as an attempt to divert attention from his ongoing failures in dealing with the virus. Yet amid the current pandemic—a crisis the United States leads with the highest death toll in the world—Trump’s latest refusal to participate in a global effort, what could be a vital opportunity to develop a sorely needed vaccine, is still pretty stunning.