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Cuomo: Restarting life will depend on testing
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New York sees highest single-day increase in death toll, Cuomo says
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White House press secretary reportedly leaving
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Surgeon general says he ‘never saw’ January memo warning of pandemic
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John Lewis endorses Biden, suggests running mate should be “woman of color”
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Wisconsin stages votes after day of political drama
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Trump was warned about pandemic in January – reports
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Cuomo: Restarting life will depend on testing
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New York sees highest single-day increase in death toll, Cuomo says
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White House press secretary reportedly leaving
09:52
Surgeon general says he ‘never saw’ January memo warning of pandemic
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John Lewis endorses Biden, suggests running mate should be “woman of color”
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08:32
Wisconsin stages votes after day of political drama
Here’s a report from Sam Levine, our voting rights reporter, on a dramatic and bizarre day in Wisconsin yesterday and what’s to come today:
Wisconsin voters are heading to the polls on Tuesday, to cast ballots amid a global pandemic after a stunning 24-hour period in which the state’s governor tried to cancel in-person voting because of the public health risk, only to be overruled by the state supreme court.
The US supreme court also weighed in, hours before the polls opened.
Even though the Democratic primary between Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders is winding down, Wisconsin has exploded in controversy. It is both the most significant battle so far between Republicans and Democrats over the right to vote in 2020 and a chaotic scramble to protect both the vote and public health.
In late March, Democratic governor Tony Evers issued an executive order instructing people to stay at home. There is such a severe shortage of poll workers that Evers asked the national guard to step in.
The Wisconsin Elections Commission has declined to project turnout, but it is expected to be low. Democrats say Republicans are banking on low turnout to help Daniel Kelly, a conservative on the state supreme court, hold his seat.
On Monday, after weeks of rebuffing efforts to delay the election, Evers issued an executive order seeking to delay in-person voting until 9 June.
Republicans, who have resisted calls to mail a ballot to every voter and ease restrictions on mail-in voting, challenged the order in the state supreme court, where conservatives hold a majority. The court overruled Evers. Kelly recused himself.
The US supreme court weighed in, upholding a lower court order extending the deadline by which mail-in ballots could be received from 7 April to 13 April. But in a 5-4 decision, the high court accepted a request from Republicans to require ballots to be postmarked by election day.
That rule is likely to disenfranchise thousands of voters who have not yet received ballots even though they requested them by the official deadline, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote for the four liberal justices who dissented.
Oddly enough, Donald Trump has a recommendation for Wisconsin conservatives:
Here’s more key reading from Sam, on Wisconsin and threats to the right to vote:
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08:01
Trump was warned about pandemic in January – reports
Donald Trump was warned at the end of January by one of his top White House advisers that coronavirus had the potential to kill hundreds of thousands of Americans and derail the US economy, unless tough action were taken immediately, new memos have revealed.
The memos were written by Trump’s economic adviser Peter Navarro and circulated via the National Security Council widely around the White House and federal agencies. They show that even within the Trump administration alarm bells were ringing loudly by late January, at a time when the president was consistently downplaying the threat of Covid-19.
The memos, first reported by the New York Times and Axios, were written by Navarro on 29 January and 23 February. The first memo, composed on the day Trump set up a White House coronavirus task force, gave a worst-case scenario of the virus killing more than half a million Americans.
According to the Times, it said: “The lack of immune protection or an existing cure or vaccine would leave Americans defenseless in the case of a full-blown coronavirus outbreak on US soil. This lack of protection elevates the risk of the coronavirus evolving into a full-blown pandemic, imperiling the lives of millions of Americans.”
The second memo went even further, predicting that a Covid-19 pandemic, left unchecked, could kill 1.2m Americans and infect as many as 100m.
This was not the first time Trump and his White House team were warned that the virus had the potential to devastate the US and needed to be dealt with quickly and firmly. Senior scientists, epidemiologists, and health emergency experts in the US and around the world delivered that message clearly early on in the crisis, only for Trump to continue belittling the scale of the threat which he compared falsely to the dangers of seasonal flu.
But the emergence of the memos from such a senior aide within the White House will make it much more difficult for Trump to claim – as he has done on multiple occasions – that nobody was able to predict the severity of the disease. As the pandemic has swept across the country, the president has come under mounting criticism for having done too little, too late in response, leading to mass shortages of diagnostic testing, protective gear for frontline health workers and ventilators for the very sick.
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Good morning…
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Source: Elections - theguardian.com