“For the first time since February, the U.S. is averaging more than 100,000 new cases a day.
Infections and hospitalizations are increasing rapidly as the highly contagious Delta variant spreads. The outlook is especially dire in the South. Louisiana is leading the nation in an explosion of new cases, and hospitals are overflowing and admitting more young people than before. But the crisis is also driving some to get vaccinated.
Right behind Louisiana is Florida, which is averaging more than 19,000 new cases a day. Gov. Ron DeSantis has been unyielding in his resistance to mask mandates. Now record Covid hospitalizations are raising the stakes — and could affect his political perch as a Republican Party front-runner.
And in Texas, cases driven by Delta swamped hospitals while officials were prevented from issuing mask mandates by order of Gov. Greg Abbott.
Vaccination rates have been slowly rising since the middle of July, and 58 percent of eligible Americans have received at least one dose of a Covid-19 vaccine.” Read more at New York Times
“The Delta variant is looming over the economy and the new school year.
A booming July jobs report offered good news for the country’s recovery: 943,000 jobs were added last month, the best showing in nearly a year. Yet sectors where the most growth occurred — leisure and hospitality — are especially vulnerable to Delta. Diners are flocking back to New York City restaurants, but the biggest concern for restaurateurs is that Delta’s advance in coming months could imperil the rebound in revenue they had hoped for.
Tens of thousands of 5-year-olds from the country’s poorest neighborhoods didn’t enroll in kindergarten last year, new data shows, hardening inequities in education. The challenge now is to re-establish relations between the schools and families who left them. That task is made harder by continued anxiety about infection in classrooms.” Read more at New York Times
Australia's athletes celebrate during the closing ceremony. Jewel Samad/AFP/Getty Images
“The closing ceremony has started in Tokyo, officially bringing the 2020 Summer Games to an end.
The Games, which had been delayed a year because of the Covid-19 pandemic, were unlike any other Games in Olympic history.
As coronavirus cases rose in Japan, spectators were banned from Tokyo venues and rules around mask wearing, personal hygiene and social distancing were implemented in the Olympic Village.” Read more at CNN
“The American women had been trending toward leading the medal count. In the Tokyo Olympics, they hit the accelerator.
The U.S. women finished these Games with 66 medals to lead the team. They also helped the U.S. finish first in the overall medal count with 113 to China's 88, including 39 golds to 38 for China.” Read more at USA Today
“Here’s a recap of the final weekend:
Allyson Felix is the most decorated American Olympian in track and field after the U.S. took gold in 4x400 women’s relay. Eliud Kipchoge of Kenya, the world’s most decorated marathoner, won gold in the men’s marathon to defend his title as Olympic champion.
The U.S. also captured gold in men’s and women’s basketball and women’s water polo.
Japan beat the U.S. to win its first gold medal in baseball. Brazil beat Spain in extra time to repeat as the Olympic men’s soccer champion.” Read more at New York Times
“As the #MeToo movement swept the world, Gov. Andrew Cuomo cast himself as an ally. But in private, hewas committing new offenses, according to a report.
Even as the New York governor signed protections and surrounded himself with feminists, he resumed his unwelcome pursuit of a female state trooper and asked a young aide to play strip poker, according to the report by the state’s attorney general last week, which detailed accusations of sexual harassment by 11 women.
The report was meant to be an investigation into Cuomo’s actions, but it also exposed the limits of what has been achieved since 2017, when the revelations about sexual misconduct by the producer Harvey Weinstein broke, our reporters write in a news analysis.
Cuomo and his lawyers have until Friday to submit any evidence in the governor’s defense to the New York State Assembly, which seems headed for a vote on impeachment.” Read more at New York Times
“The Senate is one step closer to passing the $1 trillion infrastructure bill.
The bipartisan bill cleared a key procedural vote on Saturday, breaking a filibuster to end debate on the deal before turning to an agreement on amendments. The vote was 67 to 27. The legislation, which would make far-reaching investments in the nation’s public works system, appears ready to pass with a small but significant share of Republican support — possibly even including Senator Mitch McConnell, the minority leader.
The bill has largely survived because most of the key Republican senators involved are not operating under Donald Trump’s influence, our congressional reporters write in an analysis. Can that last?” Read more at New York Times
Prime Minister Viktor Orban, right, meeting with the Fox News host Tucker Carlson in Budapest on Monday.Credit...Office of the Hungarian Prime Minister
“BUDAPEST — It’s been a meeting of conservative fellow travelers: a jovial host — who heads an authoritarian government bent on targeting liberal institutions, including universities, the judiciary and the media — and his American guest exchanging grins.
In a week in which he broadcast nightly from Budapest, the American talk show host Tucker Carlson posed for pictures with and interviewed Hungary’s authoritarian leader, Viktor Orban, and took a helicopter to inspect a Hungarian border fence designed to keep out migrants.
The visit by Mr. Carlson, the top-rated host on the Rupert Murdoch-owned Fox News, bolsters Mr. Orban’s mission to establish Budapest as an ideological center for what he sees as an international conservative movement.
For Mr. Carlson, the Hungary trip was an opportunity to put Mr. Orban, whom he admires, on the map for his viewers back home, a conservative audience that may be open to the sort of illiberalism promoted by the Hungarian leader. On Wednesday’s show, Mr. Carlson praised Hungary as a ‘small country with a lot of lessons for the rest of us.’'“ Read more at New York Times
WASHINGTON — Jeffrey A. Rosen, who was acting attorney general during the Trump administration, has told the Justice Department watchdog and congressional investigators that one of his deputies tried to help former President Donald J. Trump subvert the results of the 2020 election, according to a person familiar with the interviews.
Mr. Rosen had a two-hour meeting on Friday with the Justice Department’s office of the inspector general and provided closed-door testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee on Saturday.
The investigations were opened after a New York Times article that detailed efforts by Jeffrey Clark, the acting head of the Justice Department’s civil division, to push top leaders to falsely and publicly assert that continuing election fraud investigations cast doubt on the Electoral College results. That prompted Mr. Trump to consider ousting Mr. Rosen and installing Mr. Clark at the top of the department to carry out that plan.
Mr. Trump never fired Mr. Rosen, but the plot highlights the former president’s desire to batter the Justice Department into advancing his personal agenda.” Read more at New York Times
A light pole melted from the heat of the Dixie Fire in downtown Greenville, Calif.Jungho Kim for The New York Times
“The Dixie Fire is now the largest blaze in the U.S., and the third-largest wildfire on record in California.
The town of Greenville has been reduced to scattered bricks. By Saturday afternoon, the fire was just 21 percent contained and 448,000 acres had burned, according to a Times wildfire tracker. Five people are missing, but some residents in a nearby town have refused to heed evacuation orders.
As southern Europe faces one of its worst heat waves in decades, firefighters battle blazes across Greece, prompting thousands more people to flee their homes and hundreds to be evacuated by sea.” Read more at New York Times
“SUSANVILLE, Calif. — As the Dixie Fire continues to ravage hundreds of thousands of acres in Northern California, a federal judge has now ordered Pacific Gas & Electric to explain the utility company’s role in starting what has become the largest wildfire burning in the United States.
The cause of the blaze remains under investigation, but U.S. District Judge William Alsup asked PG&E in an order issued late Friday to give information regarding the tree that fell on the utility company’s power line at the origin of the Dixie Fire. PG&E has said its equipment may have been responsible for starting both the Dixie Fire and the much smaller Fly Fire, which later merged with the Dixie Fire.
Alsup — who oversees PG&E’s criminal probation for felony convictions stemming from the deadly 2010 San Bruno gas pipeline explosion — also required that PG&E give details about the equipment and vegetation in the area where the fires started. The San Francisco judge said the company would have until Aug. 16 to respond.” Read more at Washington Post
More than $135 million was refunded to donors by former President Donald J. Trump, the Republican National Committee and their shared accounts in the 2020 cycle through June 2021.Credit...Cooper Neill for The New York Times
“The aggressive fund-raising tactics that former President Donald J. Trump deployed late in last year’s presidential campaign have continued to spur an avalanche of refunds into 2021, with Mr. Trump, the Republican Party and their shared accounts returning $12.8 million to donors in the first six months of the year, newly released federal records show.
The refunds were some of the biggest outlays that Mr. Trump made in 2021 as he has built up his $102 million political war chest — and amounted to roughly 20 percent of the $56 million he and his committees raised online so far this year.
Trailing in the polls and facing a cash crunch last September, Mr. Trump’s political operation began opting online donors into automatic recurring contributions by prechecking a box on its digital donation forms to take a withdrawal every week. Donors would have to notice the box and uncheck it to opt out of the donation. A second prechecked box took out another donation, known as a ‘money bomb.’
The Trump team then obscured that fact by burying the fine print beneath multiple lines of bold and capitalized text, a New York Times investigation earlier this year found.
The maneuver spiked revenues in the short term — allowing Mr. Trump to spend money before the election — and then caused a cascade of fraud complaints to credit cards and demands for refunds from supporters. The refunded donations amounted to an unwitting interest-free loan from Mr. Trump’s supporters in the weeks when he most needed it.
New Federal Election Commission records from WinRed, the Republican donation-processing site, show the full scale of the financial impact. All told, more than $135 million was refunded to donors by Mr. Trump, the Republican National Committee and their shared accounts in the 2020 cycle through June 2021 — including roughly $60 million after Election Day.” Read more at New York Times
“The Taliban captured two Afghan provincial capitals in two days last week as international forces begin their withdrawal, and overran a third on Sunday.
Sheberghan, the capital of Jowzjan Province, collapsed less than 24 hours after Zaranj, a city of 160,000 people on the Afghanistan-Iran border, was also taken over. The Taliban victories come despite continued American air support and are the result of a strategy that has exhausted Afghan government forces.
The Taliban also seized Kunduz, a major city in northern Afghanistan that would be a significant military and political prize for the insurgents.
The Biden administration had pinned its hopes on a peace deal that would halt the violence with a power-sharing agreement. But the prospects of a negotiated outcome, which could partly salvage the 20-year American project in Afghanistan, appear to be fading fast.” Read more at New York Times
“Bobby Bowden, who built Florida State football into a national powerhouse and directed the program with a folksy, southern charm, died early Sunday morning. He was 91.” Read more at USA Today
“Giraffes seem above it all. They float over the savanna like two-story ascetics, peering down at the fray from behind those long lashes. For decades, many biologists thought giraffes extended this treatment to their peers as well, with one popular wildlife guide calling them ‘aloof’ and capable of only ‘the most casual’ associations.
But more recently, as experts have paid closer attention to these lanky icons, a different social picture has begun to emerge. Female giraffes are now known to enjoy yearslong bonds. They have lunch buddies, stand guard over dead calves and stay close with their mothers and grandmothers. Females even form shared day care-like arrangements, called crèches, in which they take turns babysitting and feeding each others’ young.
Observations like these have reached a critical mass, said Zoe Muller, a wildlife biologist who completed her Ph.D. at the University of Bristol in England.She and Stephen Harris, also at Bristol, recently reviewed hundreds of giraffe studies to look for broader patterns. Their analysis, published on Tuesday in the journal Mammalia, suggests that giraffes are not loners, but socially complex creatures, akin to elephants or chimpanzees. They’re just a little more subtle about it.” Read more at New York Times