US politics: Russian bounty payments claim sparks Trump briefing row – live updates

Nuff said.

America’s top US infectious disease expert, Dr Anthony Fauci, is addressing a top Senate committee in a hearing this morning. We’re live streaming it, above, but will bring you highlights here on a very lively news day.

Fauci has been director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases since 1984 and is the leading authority in the US on this topic.

As July begins, there are several coronavirus vaccine trials moving to a more advanced stage of clinical trials. There are many efforts to produce a vaccine for the virus going on around the world.

But the US is a leading medical and scientific force in this battle. Fauci just said that he is “aspirationally hopeful” and “cautiously optimistic” about progress towards a vaccine.

“There is no guarantee that we will have a safe and effective vaccine,” he reminded the public in his testimony to the Senate health committee.

“But we are cautiously optimstic that we will at least know the efficacy by early winter or the first part of next year, and hopefully [will have] doses available by the beginning of next year,” he said.

Fauci also told the committee (and one is tempted to make this all capitals, just like a presidential tweet, but we’ll settle for bold): “I think masks are extremely important. We keep hammering that home.”

House No. 2 Democrat, Steny Hoyer, said after a White House closed-door briefing earlier today that Democrats want a full congressional briefing on alleged Russian bounties on the heads of US troops serving in Afghanistan.

Hoyer said he believes that Russia “remains involved in a negative way in Afghanistan”. He called for a direct briefing from US intelligence officials, not just White House aides and said he had heard nothing that indicated the media accounts of the scandal were built around a hoax.

House intelligence committee chairman Adam Schiff (who led the Trump impeachment hearings in the House) has demanded that the US now weigh new sanctions on Russia to deter its “malign” actions.

Schiff said Trump should not be courting Russian President Vladimir Putin by inviting him to a Group of Seven (G7) summit of leading industrial nations – but rather should impose costs on Moscow.

“The president of the United States should not be inviting Russia into the G7 or G8. We should be considering what sanctions are appropriate to further deter Russia’s malign activities,” he told reporters after the White House briefing.

Meanwhile, in London, Britain’s defence secretary said he was aware of intelligence relating to reports that Russia paid the Taliban to kill US troops but declined to comment further.Asked about the reports in the New York Times, Defence Secretary Ben Wallace said: “On the issue of the reports which I think were in the New York Times, all I can say is: I’m aware of the intelligence.”“But I can’t comment on intelligence matters other than to say we take lots of measures to defend and make sure our soldiers … are kept safe when deployed,” Wallace told a parliamentary committee.He said he would not comment on whether the intelligence was true or not but that “we just take steps”.“It is absolutely true that countries like Russia have taken lots of malign activity against us,” Wallace said.

There won’t be a decision today on three eagerly-awaited cases involving Trump’s taxes, religious exemption for employers not wanting to cover employees’ birth control c

osts as part of their health insurance, and the constitutionality of partisan gerrymandering in a case aimed at stemming abuse by political insiders in charge of redrawing state legislative maps.

Instead, the court issued two rulings. One involved the travel reservation company Booking.com, a unit of Booking Holdings Inc. It deserves to be able to trademark its name, the supreme court decided, in a ruling issued moments ago, Reuters reports. The outcome overrules a federal agency that found it the .com name too generic to merit protection.

The court decided 8-1 that the US Patent and Trademark Office was incorrect when it denied the company’s application to trademark the name Booking.com, with the justices finding it distinctive enough that the agency should have approved it.

US law allows trademark registrations only on terms that are “descriptive,” or able to distinguish a particular product or service from others on the market. “Generic” words that refer to an entire category of goods or services, like “car” or “computer,” cannot be protected under the law because that would give an unfair competitive advantage to the trademark holder.

Booking.com, based in Amsterdam, began using its name globally in 2006, and filed US trademark applications in 2011 and 2012.

The ruling may guide how some other companies, such as Salesforce.com Inc and Home Depot Inc, protect their brands from potential copycats.

In the other decision issued today, the court ruled for parents in the state of Montana seeking tax-credit-funded scholarships for religious schools. Some more details on that shortly.

Here’s House intelligence committee chairmen Adam Schiff:

My colleague Tom McCarthy reports that Donald Trump was given a written briefing months ago about intelligence suggesting Russia offered bounties for attacks on US forces in Afghanistan, multiple US media have reported on Monday night. The president said on Sunday he was not told of the allegations because the information was not “credible”.

The New York Times quoted two sources as saying details were included in a daily intelligence briefing the president received in late February. CNN said an official with direct knowledge told them it was included in the briefing – a written document – briefing “sometime in the spring”.

Senior White House officials were aware as far back as early 2019 and the intelligence assessment was included in at least one of the president’s written daily briefings, the Associated Press reported, according to multiple officials.

The House’s No. 2 Democrat, Steny Hoyer, also not impressed:

Most travelers from the United States will be barred from entering the European Union after it reopens its borders tomorrow, because the coronavirus is still far too prevalent in the US, European officials announced Tuesday, NBC reports.

The EU’s 27 members have been drawing up a list of countries whose virus levels are deemed low enough to allow people from those places to travel into the bloc, which has been mostly sealed off since March.

That list of safe countries was officially unveiled by European officials on Tuesday. The US — which has the most coronavirus cases and deaths in the world — was not on it.

The 15 countries that did make the list are: Algeria, Australia, Canada, Georgia, Japan, Montenegro, Morocco, New Zealand, Rwanda, Serbia, South Korea, Thailand, Tunisia and Uruguay.

China will also be included on the list if it allows entry to E.U. travelers in return.

Read more here:

“The human factor that we love so much about our jobs has nearly gone.” That’s what Dr. Jennifer O’Hea, an intensive care unit doctor overseeing 100 patients at the Banner University Medical Center in Phoenix, Arizona, told ABC News.

Arizona is one of the southern states seeing a record surge in coronavirus infections, after a rapid reopening for businesses despite a lack of cure, proven drug treatments or vaccinations against Covid-19. It quickly backtracked on its reopening last night.

O’Hea said the situation at her hospital “exploded” towards the end of May and, ABC reported, has now snowballed into a dire situation.

“Never, never, ever have I seen this many patients in our ICU,” O’Hea, who has worked at the hospital for 22 years, said. “We were using ICUs that we’ve never used before. Rooms that were vacant we’re now using as ICUs.”

Sitting in New York, where the virus peaked in April, New Yorkers have been watching and fearing this would happen in other states, dreading the tsunami of severely ill patients coming to overwhelm health care workers, as they did in the city when up to 1,000 people were dying ever day at the apex.

“Time to wake up, America,” New York governor Andrew Cuomo said yesterday.

Dr. Marjorie Bessel, the chief clinical officer for the Banner Health System, told ABC News she has “been concerned for weeks.”

“We’re not New York at this time. What we’re concerned is we don’t want to become New York,” Bessel said. “The curves suggest we could be headed there.”

Reuters are reporting that Google has said it has removed ads for companies that charge people large fees to register to vote or harvest their data, which appeared when users searched for voter information.

A Google spokeswoman told Reuters that the company’s misrepresentation policy barred such ads, which were found by the nonprofit watchdog Tech Transparency Project (TTP) when searching for terms such as “register to vote,” “vote by mail,” and “where is my polling place.”

A TTP report that nearly a third of the more than 600 ads generated by its Google searches took users to sites that try to charge large fees for voter registration services, extract personal data for marketing purposes, install deceptive browser extensions, or serve other misleading ads.

The report said: “Some people may find it difficult to distinguish Google ads from other kinds of content because as of January, search ads on Google feature the same type face and colour scheme as organic search results.”

A Google spokeswoman said the company did not yet know how the ads had got through its approval process, which uses a combination of automated and manual review.

“We have strict policies in place to protect users from false information about voting procedures, and when we find ads that violate our policies and present harm to users, we remove them and block advertisers from running similar ads in the future,” the spokeswoman said.

The move comes with social media and internet companies under increasing pressure to act over misleading and hateful content in the run-up to the November election.

Yesterday Reddit and Twitch became the latest social media companies to ban or suspend pro-Donald Trump accounts over hate speech.

Facebook, meanwhile, is coming under commercial pressure as big brands withdraw advertising money over the issue of hate speech on the platform.