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Texas
The state is crucial for Republicans if they want to retain the presidency. Their opponents are hoping the young and people of color can help them to victory More
Movies
5 /
5 stars
5 out of 5 stars.
The gloves and training wheels come off as a group of smart, poignantly naive and utterly insufferable Texas boys get together to simulate government More
An older man in an orange apron greets customers at the Home Depot in College Station, Texas. Signs serving as a reminder they are living through a pandemic are plastered on the sliding glass doors: “Face covering required.”The reminder is much needed because to an outsider, Texas looked almost the same in July 2019 as it does in July 2020, despite Covid-19 having claimed more than 6,000 lives in the state and more than 150,000 lives in the US since March.Customers at the home improvement store walk in wearing masks, which have become highly politicized, only to lower them below their chins to speak or remove them altogether.In the upscale neighborhood of Montrose in Houston, the multi-story Agora coffee house is full of people hungry for coffee, pastries and conversation. It’s difficult to spot an open seat inside or outside on the patio. It’s also difficult to spot anyone wearing anything resembling a face covering.The Texas governor, Greg Abbott, a Republican, caught flak for allowing the reopening of bars, restaurants, movie theaters and shopping malls back in early May. In June, he said that Texas was “wide open for business”. Now in late July, more than four months into the Covid-19 pandemic, a mandatory mask order is in place across the state – a reversal from Abbott’s initial position that the government should not infringe on personal rights by telling citizens what to do. More
US deaths from the coronavirus were approaching 150,000 on Wednesday, the highest level in the world and rising by about 10,000 in just 11 days, as 21 states enter what the federal government considers the “red zone” of rising infection rates.The nation recorded the deadliest day of the summer in the last 24 hours, with more than 1,200 confirmed coronavirus deaths, the highest daily toll reported by the country since May, according to a tally by Reuters.Covid-19 deaths have risen in the US for three weeks in a row while the number of new cases week-over-week recently fell for the first time since June.The White House coronavirus taskforce coordinator, Deborah Birx, on Tuesday said hotspots threaten regions where cases are controlled.Birx warned: “We can see the virus moving north. What we’re seeing across the south right now is both rural infections, as well as small metros and major metros, simultaneously.”A surge in infections in Arizona, California, Florida and Texas this month has overwhelmed hospitals.Texas has recorded nearly 4,000 deaths so far this month, followed by Florida with 2,690 and California, the most populous state, with 2,500. The Texas figure includes a backlog of hundreds of deaths after the state changed the way it counted Covid-19 deaths. More
Seventy-two death notices sprawled across an entire page of the Monitor newspaper in Hidalgo county recently.The small-print entries, stacked in five tidy columns, didn’t mention Covid-19. But 27 residents of the south Texas community had died from the virus that day, 22 the day before, and 35 the day before that.“I’ve never seen that ever in my life,” recalled John M Kreidler, a local funeral director, whose family has run Kreidler Funeral Home in McAllen for over a century.That was earlier this month, but things have worsened since. The coronavirus pandemic haunts almost everything in this part of the Rio Grande valley, where more than 92% of the almost 900,000 strong population identifies as Hispanic or Latino.Hand-sanitizing machines and big bins with masks and gloves surround shoppers at the regional grocery store. Outside of Nomad Shrine Club, a rundown event space turned drive-thru pop-up, residents join a long line of people in cars in search of a Covid-19 test with rapid results. Even Tex Mex, a gentlemen’s club, has a somber message for patrons: “Clothed Again.”“The Rio Grande Valley has become the hotspot of a hotspot of a hotspot,” said Ivan Melendez, Hidalgo county’s health authority and a practicing clinician. “We’re at the epicenter of the coronavirus in the United States.”Melendez recalled recently encountering a critically ill patient with an alarmingly low pulse. He tried to warn someone, but nurses informed him that a different doctor had already decided not to intervene because they “didn’t expect for [the patient] to survive”.In the United States, where the prevailing mantra for physicians is “do no harm”, that kind of ruthless calculation strikes deep, especially when so many of the lives at stake are medically vulnerable and easily exploited. More
Florida reported another record one-day rise in coronavirus deaths on Tuesday, and cases in Texas passed the 400,000 mark, fueling fear that the United States is still not taking control of the outbreak and adding pressure on Congress to pass another massive economic aid package.Public health experts are becoming concerned about the levels of infection in states such as Ohio, Indiana, Tennessee and Kentucky, while the surge in Florida along with Texas, Arizona and California this month has strained many hospitals.The increase in cases has forced a U-turn on steps to reopen economies after the end of lockdowns put in place in March and April to slow the spread of the virus.Florida has had 191 coronavirus deaths in the last 24 hours, the highest single-day rise since the start of the epidemic, the state health department said.Texas, the second-most populous state, added more than 6,000 new cases on Monday, pushing its total to 401,477, according to a tally being kept by the Reuters news agency. Only three other states – California, Florida and New York – have more than 400,000 total cases.The widening outbreak has pushed the US death toll from Covid-19 closer to the bleak 150,000 milestone, which the country is expected to cross this week and comes just over three months before the 3 November election, where Donald Trump seeks a second term. The US has more than 4.3m confirmed cases, according to totals tracked by Reuters and Johns Hopkins University.The surge in cases in Florida prompted Trump last week to cancel the Republican convention events in Jacksonville in late August, which had already been rearranged from North Carolina.There is, however, a glimmer of hope in the data from Texas, where the state health department reported that current hospitalizations due to Covid-19 fell on Monday.Anthony Fauci, a top infectious diseases expert and the leading public health figure on the White House coronavirus task force, said there were signs the recent surge could be peaking in hard-hit states like Florida and Texas. But he warned that other parts of the country may be on the cusp of growing outbreaks.“They may be cresting and coming back down,” Fauci told ABC’s Good Morning America regarding the state of the outbreak in several southern states.But Fauci said there was a “very early indication” that the percentage of coronavirus tests that were positive was starting to rise in other states, such as Ohio, Indiana, Tennessee and Kentucky.Fauci added on the same TV show that he was not in “any circumstances” misleading the American public, after another attack on him by the US president.In New York, the state governor, Andrew Cuomo, added Illinois, Kentucky, Minnesota, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico to a list of places whose travelers must quarantine for 14 days when visiting New York. Thirty-one other states are on the list, which was unveiled last month. More
Diplomatic tensions between the US and China has escalated sharply with the Trump administration’s closure of the Chinese consulate in Houston to protect “American intellectual property and private information”.A Republican senator claimed that the Texas consulate, which covered several southern states, was an “espionage hub”. China described the closure as “unprecedented” and an “outrageous” escalation, and threatened retaliation.“China strongly condemns such an outrageous and unjustified move, which will sabotage China-US relations,” the Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin said at a regular news briefing on Wednesday. “We urge the US to immediately withdraw its erroneous decision, otherwise China will make legitimate and necessary reactions.”Fire services were called to the Houston consulate overnight after smoke was seen rising from the compound. US officials said staff, who were given 72 hours to leave the country, were burning documents in its grounds.It was unclear whether the closure of the consulate was triggered by a new development. During a visit to Denmark on Wednesday, the secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, suggested the move reflected a US decision to be less tolerant of Chinese behaviour.“President Trump has said ‘enough’. We’re not going to allow this to continue to happen,” Pompeo said. “We are setting out clear expectations for how the Chinese Communist party is going to behave, and when they don’t, we’re going to take actions that protect the American people, protect our security, our national security, and also protect our economy and jobs.”The state department spokeswoman Morgan Ortagus said: “The United States will not tolerate the PRC’s [People’s Republic of China’s] violations of our sovereignty and intimidation of our people, just as we have not tolerated the PRC’s unfair trade practices, theft of American jobs and other egregious behaviour.”Marco Rubio, the acting chairman of the Senate intelligence committee, said: “It’s kind of the central node of a massive spy operation: commercial espionage, defence espionage, also influence agents to try to influence Congress. They use businessmen as fronts in many cases to try to influence members of Congress and other political leaders at the state and local level. And so it’s long overdue that it’d be closed.”The consulate closure came a day after the US accused two Chinese nationals of trying to steal Covid-19 vaccine research, claims that China described as “slander” on Wednesday.This month the FBI director, Christopher Wray, said China was the “greatest long-term threat to our nation’s information and intellectual property and to our economic vitality”. The Chinese foreign ministry accused US authorities of targeting its diplomats in the US, including opening their pouches without permission “multiple times” and confiscating items intended for official use.The ministry said its embassy in the US had received bomb and death threats, the result of the US “fanning hatred against China”. Beijing accused US diplomats in China of “infiltration and interference activities”.“If we compare the two, it is only too evident which is engaged in interference, infiltration and confrontation,” it said.Ties between the two countries have deteriorated further in recent weeks as the US has taken a harder position against China and lobbied its allies to do the same. The closure of the consulate follows a tightening of restrictions for Chinese nationals working in state media in the US, which Beijing claims as the reason for it expelling more than a dozen western journalists over the last few months.On Wednesday Chinese state media suggested the possibility of closing US consulates, posting a poll on Twitter asking users to choose between missions in Hong Kong, Chengdu, Guangzhou and others.China has blamed international criticism of its passage of a harsh and broadly applied national security law in Hong Kong on the US, making the closure of the Hong Kong consulate a possible but escalatory measure.Nick Marro, a China analyst at the Economist Intelligence Unit, said: “In recent weeks we’ve seen some appetite on the Chinese side in trying to de-escalate tensions. Whether that agenda survives these recent developments will be a critical thing to watch.” More
Coronavirus outbreak
Record new cases in California, Florida, Texas and Arizona
Georgia governor suspends local mask mandates More
