Eliana Willis

Trump calls election ‘inaccurate’ amid news of GDP plummet
Former presidential candidate Herman Cain dies from Covid-19
Economy suffers worst quarter since second world war as GDP shrinks by 32.9%
US passes 150,000 deaths
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Mourners arrive for John Lewis memorial service – watch live

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11.16am EDT11:16
Funeral for civil rights leader John Lewis begins in Atlanta

10.39am EDT10:39
Former presidential candidate Herman Cain dies from Covid-19

9.01am EDT09:01
Nasa successfully launches Perseverance mission to Mars

8.56am EDT08:56
Trump appears to call for delay to November election over his mail-in voting fears

8.41am EDT08:41
Mike Pompeo appears before the Senate foreign relations committee

8.34am EDT08:34
Grim GDP and jobless figures reveal extent of Covid-19 damage to economy

8.18am EDT08:18
Biden posts video with Obama criticising administration over approach to schools during Covid-19 crisis

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11.16am EDT11:16

Funeral for civil rights leader John Lewis begins in Atlanta

The funeral for civil rights leader John Lewis has just begun at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, Georgia.
The church’s senior pastor, reverend Raphael Warnock, is leading the service, which has dozens of attendees who are keeping social distance and wearing masks.
“Here lies a true American patriot,” Warnock said.
This morning, the New York Times published a powerful essay Lewis submitted two days before he died from pancreatic cancer at age 80.
The Guardian’s Ed Pilkington writes:

The essay rehearses several of the key moments that for Lewis shaped his life in non-violent protest and what he called “good trouble”. He said he was inspired into the movement against America’s brutal history of race discrimination by the lynching in Mississippi of Emmett Till, aged 15, in 1955 – when Lewis was himself just 14.
“Emmett Till was my George Floyd. He was my Rayshard Brooks, Sandra Bland and Breonna Taylor,” he writes.
He recalls how in his childhood in Alabama, the white supremacist threat was a fact of everyday life. “Unchecked, unrestrained violence and government-sanctioned terror had the power to turn a simple stroll to the store for some Skittles or an innocent morning jog down a lonesome country road into a nightmare.

Updated
at 11.22am EDT

11.00am EDT11:00

Julian Borger

The Guardian’s world affairs editor, Julian Borger, is watching secretary of state Mike Pompeo testify before the Republican-led Senate Foreign Relations committee.
Mike Pompeo has been questioned on the decision announced yesterday to pull nearly 12,000 US troops out of Germany, bringing 6,400 of them back to the US, and how that squared with Pompeo’s claims to be leading a tough policy towards Russia. He confirmed the state department was “very involved at the strategic level” but argued that bringing the troops home did not mean they were “off the field”
“These units will participate in rotational activity. They’ll be forward deployed. They won’t be stationed or garrisoned. But make no mistake about it they will be fully available to ensure that we can properly prosecute the challenges we have from the global powers.”Senator Jeanne Shaheen asked him whether the impact on relations with Germany had been taken into account, to which Pompeo replied: “This is personal for me I fought on the border of East Germany when I was a young soldier I was stationed there.”
Pompeo was stationed in West Germany as an army lieutenant in the late eighties. There was no fighting there.
Mitt Romney, who continues to be the only Republican senator to seriously challenge the administration, picked up the issue in his own remarks, saying: “I have heard from the highest levels of the German government that this is seen by them as an insult to Germany, and I can’t imagine, at a time when we need to be drawing in our friends and allies so that we can collectively confront China, we want to insult them.”
Pompeo was also questioned about Donald Trump’s suggestion that the election might be delayed.
Senator Tom Udall asked the secretary of state: “Will you respect the results of the certified election as the State Department typically does throughout the world?”
Pompeo replied: “Senator I’m not going to speculate. You had about 15 ‘ifs’ in there.. I’ve said repeatedly to this committee I will follow the rule of law, follow the Constitution. I’ve endeavored to do that in everything I’ve done and I’ll continue to do that every day.”

10.39am EDT10:39

Former presidential candidate Herman Cain dies from Covid-19

Former presidential candidate Herman Cain, 74, has died from Covid-19 after contracting the illness nearly one month ago.
His official Twitter account, which had been providing updates on Cain’s hospitalization due to Covid-19, posted an announcement of his death on Thursday morning.

Herman Cain
(@THEHermanCain)
You’re never ready for the kind of news we are grappling with this morning. But we have no choice but to seek and find God’s strength and comfort to deal… #HermanCain https://t.co/BtOgoLVqKz

July 30, 2020

Cain, the co-chair of Black Voices for Trump, had attended Donald Trump’s rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma in June, where he did not wear a mask.
“We’re heartbroken, and the world is poorer,” said a post on Cain’s website, which provided insight into his Covid-19 infection.
“There were hopeful indicators, including a mere five days ago when doctors told us they thought he would eventually recover, although it wouldn’t be quick,” the post said. “We were relieved to be told that, and passed on the news via Herman’s social media. And yet we also felt real concern about the fact that he never quite seemed to get to the point where the doctors could advance him to the recovery phase.”

Updated
at 10.49am EDT

10.10am EDT10:10

Dominic Rushe

More on the staggering drop in GDP figures from the Guardian US’s business editor, Dominic Rushe:
The fall came as large parts of the US economy shutdown in March in an attempt to halt the spread of the coronavirus across the US. The closures led to a historic number of layoffs and sent unemployment soaring to levels unseen since the 1930s Great Depression.
Lexie Testa, 26, from Lansing, Michigan lost her hotel job at the end of May and waited two months to receive her first unemployment payment. While her husband has retained his job, she said it had been a struggle since her layoff and that she was wary about finding new work as the virus continues to spread.
Testa said it was too early to cut benefits given how hard it remains to find work and the fact that the virus is still spreading. “I know a lot of people who aren’t really comfortable returning to work with children in their home and actually I have a few friends that cannot because they have no child care,” she said.
“I am lucky enough that I have a grandmother who usually babysits for me but I just am not really comfortable yet as I have always worked in the food service industry and I see places in my city of Lansing shut down and reopen due to Covid cases often.”

9.47am EDT09:47

The Guardian’s voting rights report, Sam Levine, notes that the president can’t unilaterally change the election date.

Sam Levine
(@srl)
The president cannot unilaterally move the election. The date of the election is set by Congress. The constitution says the President and Vice President’s term ends on January 20 https://t.co/LMVTeCOgRs https://t.co/LOz4qLjDBH

July 30, 2020

This is why people are speculating one of the reasons Trump asked whether the election should be delayed this morning is to distract from the very bad economic news this morning.
Government figures revealed Thursday morning that the US economy shrank by an annualized rate of 32.9% between April and June, its sharpest contraction since the second world war.

9.35am EDT09:35

Julian Borger

Secretary of state Mike Pompeo is appearing before the Senate foreign relations committee for the first time in more than a year, in what is already a particularly contentious hearing.
The ranking Democrat, Bob Menendez said the Trump administration had “at worst simply abetted Putin’s efforts” to undermine the US, and said the state department was “at risk of catastrophic failure.”
Menendez started his questioning on Trump’s admission on Wednesday that he had not confronted Vladimir Putin with intelligence reports that Russia was paying bounties to Taliban fighters for killing US soldiers in Afghanistan and asked Pompeo whether he had raised the issue with his counterpart, Sergei Lavrov.
Pompeo’s reply avoided confirming the reports, which Trump called “fake news”, but claimed that if it was true, he raised it.
“Anytime there was a tactical threat on the lives for the health of the safety and security or our assets in place, we have raised this with our Russian counterparts not only at my level but Ambassador Sullivan [US ambassador to Moscow], and every one of our team that interacts with the Russians we’ve made very clear our expectations.”

9.18am EDT09:18

One thing undermining Donald Trump’s ongoing quest against mail-in voting is that he and his officials have used it in the past.
Mother Jones reporter Ari Berman notes that at least 16 Trump officials have either voted by mail or requested absentee ballots, including the president himself. Others include attorney general William Barr, adviser and president’s daughter Ivanka Trump and White House press secretary, Kayleigh McEnany.
McEnany has voted by mail in every Florida election she has participated in since 2010, according to the Tampa Bay Times.
When asked about this in late May, McEnany said: “Absentee voting has the word absent in it for a reason. It means you’re absent from the jurisdiction or unable to vote in person. President Trump is against the Democrat plan to politicize the coronavirus and expand mass mail-in voting without a reason, which has a high propensity for voter fraud. This is a simple distinction that the media fails to grasp.”

Ari Berman
(@AriBerman)
16 top Trump officials have voted by mail or requested absentee ballots:TrumpPence Barr McEnanyConway IvankaMelaniaAzarRossDeVosMcDanielKushner GlassnerStepienAyersParscaleGOP only opposes mail voting when Dems use itpic.twitter.com/rBOKnJUoNe

July 30, 2020

9.01am EDT09:01

Nasa successfully launches Perseverance mission to Mars

On a brighter note, and sticking to their timetable, Nasa appears to have successfully launched the Perseverance mission, the third and final Mars launch from Earth this summer. China and the United Arab Emirates got a head start last week, but all three missions should reach their destination in February.
Nasa’s science mission chief, Thomas Zurbuchen, pronounced the launch the start of “humanity’s first round trip to another planet.”
“Oh, I loved it, punching a hole in the sky, right? Getting off the cosmic shore of our Earth, wading out there in the cosmic ocean,” he said. “Every time, it gets me.” More