Coronavirus US live: Georgia Senate candidate awaiting Covid-19 results after wife tests positive – as it happened

We’ll be shutting down today’s blog shortly. Here’s a glance at today’s major news items:

• America ‘staring down the barrel of martial law’, Oregon senator warns. The US is “staring down the barrel of martial law” as it approaches the presidential election, a senator from Oregon has warned as Donald Trump cracks down on protests in Portland, the state’s biggest city.
• Civil rights leader John Lewis remembered as ‘boy from Troy’ in memorial. In the rural Alabama county where he was born, the longtime Georgia congressman was remembered on Saturday as a humble man who sprang from his family’s farm with a vision that “good trouble” could change the world.
• Republicans continue Covid-19 relief talks as Democrat warns of catastrophe. The White House chief of staff, Mark Meadows, and the treasury secretary, Steven Mnuchin, were on Capitol Hill on Saturday, for talks with aides to Senate Republicans over the next coronavirus relief package.
• WNBA players walk off court during national anthem before season opener. The New York Liberty and Seattle Storm both left the court and returned to their locker rooms during the pre-game playing of national anthem in protest of racial and social injustice as the WNBA season tipped off in Florida.
• Hurricane Hanna moves towards Texas as storm Gonzalo nears Caribbean. Hanna rumbled toward the Texas Gulf coast on Saturday, lashing the shore with wind gusts and rain and threatening to bring storm surge and tornadoes to a part of the country trying to cope with a spike in coronavirus cases.
• Republicans say Milwaukee murder may be linked to support for Trump. The Wisconsin Republican party has called for a federal investigation of a fatal shooting, to ascertain whether it was motivated by animosity towards Donald Trump.
• John Roberts sides with supreme court liberals on Nevada church decision. The chief justice again sided with the liberals on the US supreme court on Friday, as it denied a rural Nevada church’s request to strike down a 50-person cap on worship services as part of the state’s response to the coronavirus pandemic.
• Sinclair delays interview containing Fauci Covid-19 conspiracy theory. The biggest owner of local TV stations in the US said it would delay airing an interview with a conspiracy theorist who claims baselessly that Dr Anthony Fauci, the country’s top infectious disease expert, created the coronavirus behind the current pandemic.
• New testing shortages hit California’s vulnerable hardest amid record Covid-19 infections. As coronavirus cases surge, California is once again facing testing shortages and delays reminiscent of the first weeks of the pandemic in March. Those issues, healthcare providers say, are hurting the state’s most vulnerable first.
• Monica Lewinsky ‘wins the internet’ with joke about internship. The former White House intern has made light of her affair with Bill Clinton with an ‘I have a joke’ tweet that quickly went viral.

Donald Trump has issued an emergency declaration for Hawaii as the state hunkers down for Hurricane Douglas, which is expected to hit the islands by the end of the weekend.

The declaration authorizes the Department of Homeland Security and Federal Emergency Management Agency to coordinate all disaster relief efforts and provide appropriate assistance “for required emergency measures … to save lives and to protect property and public health and safety, and to lessen or avert the threat of a catastrophe in the counties of Hawaii, Kauai, and Maui and the City and County of Honolulu,” the White House said. “Specifically, FEMA is authorized to identify, mobilize, and provide at its discretion, equipment and resources necessary to alleviate the impacts of the emergency.”

While Hawaii has some of the lowest coronavirus infection rates in the US, the numbers have been rising in recent weeks. On Friday, the state reported 60 new confirmed cases, a record high.

The uptick has created complications for the American Red Cross as it prepares, since many of the volunteers it enlists to staff emergency shelters are older or have pre-existing health conditions and are thus unavailable to work.

The National Weather Service’s Central Pacific Hurricane Center in Honolulu said the storm will likely hit the islands on Saturday night or Sunday morning.

An offensive lineman for the Super Bowl champion Kansas City Chiefs has become the first NFL player to opt out of the upcoming season due to the coronavirus pandemic.

Laurent Duvernay-Tardif, who has balanced his day job protecting the Chiefs’ $503m quarterback with his studies toward a medical degree from Montreal’s prestigious McGill University, said that his experiences on the front lines of the coronavirus pandemic in his native Canada convinced him that any risks taken with his health should instead be directed toward helping patients dealing with the virus,

“This is one of the most difficult decisions I have had to make in my life but I must follow my convictions and do what I believe is right for me personally,” Duvernay-Tardif said in an announcement shared on Twitter. “That is why I have decided to take the opt-out option.”

On Friday, the NFL and the players’ union agreed to an opt-out clause for the upcoming season where players who volunarily choose to sit out the season will receive a $150,000 stipend while those abstaining for medical reasons will get $300,000.

The NFL is America’s richest sports league with an estimated $15bn in revenue last year, but Dr Anthony Fauci, the US’s top infectious disease expert, has described the sport as a “perfect setup” for spreading Covid-19 due to the full-contact nature of the sport on every play.

The Guardian sat down with Duvernay-Tardif earlier this year ahead of Kansas City’s playoff run, which ended with the team’s first NFL championship in 50 years.

Sinclair Television, the biggest owner of local TV stations in the US, said on Saturday it would delay airing an interview with a conspiracy theorist who claims baselessly that Dr Anthony Fauci, the country’s top infectious disease expert, created the coronavirus behind the current pandemic.

Dr Judy Mikovits, a former research scientist, is behind the widely discredited Plandemic video, which makes a string of false and outlandish claims including that any coronavirus vaccine will kill millions and that beaches should not be closed because the sand and ocean will somehow treat Covid-19.

Fauci is the 79-year-old director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. He has served six presidents, but Donald Trump has sought to keep him off television, called him “alarmist” and frequently undermined his work.

The US is in the grip of a worsening coronavirus outbreak in which more than 4.1m cases have been recorded and more than 145,000 people have died.

Hundreds of bar owners have said they will defy Texas governor Greg Abbott’s order to shutter amid a statewide surge in coronavirus cases.

The Fort Worth Star-Telegram reports that nearly 800 proprietors have pledged to participate in Freedom Fest in defiance of Abbott’s mandate at the risk of their state liquor licenses.

In Tarrant County, Arlington’s G Willickers Pub, Burleson’s Cooter Brown’s, the Rail Club Live and Fort Worth’s the Eight Ball Billiard and Bar will participate. Bars from Houston, Pasadena and Sabinal also are scheduled to participate.

Chris Polone, owner of Fort Worth music venue The Rail Club Live, says he organized Freedom Fest to make the voices of bar owners heard and to show people that bars can open safely.

“If you can get every single bar to stand up in solidarity, well, that’s a statement that won’t be ignored,” Polone said.

Polone said it isn’t right that Abbott deemed bars as the place where COVID-19 spreads while other high-traffic service industry locations still operate. The most ideal situation is if Abbott allows bars to open with a set of safety guidelines that they must follow, he said.

Abbott described his initial decision to allow bars to reopen with restrictions as a mistake when he ordered them to close down again on 26 June.

“If I could go back and redo anything, it would have probably been to slow down the opening of bars, now seeing in the aftermath of how quickly the coronavirus spread in the bar setting,” Abbott told KVIA-TV. “And how a bar setting in reality just doesn’t work with a pandemic. People go to bars to get close and to drink and to socialize, and that’s the kind of thing that stokes the spread of the coronavirus.

Civil rights hero and longtime Georgia congressman John Lewis, who died on 17 July at the age of 80, was remembered on Saturday morning at a memorial service in the southern Alabama city of Troy.

The AP reports:

Saturday morning’s service was titled “The Boy from Troy,” the nickname the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. gave Lewis at their first meeting in 1958 in Montgomery. King had sent the 18-year-old Lewis a round-trip bus ticket because Lewis was interested in trying to attend what was then an all-white university in Troy, just 10 miles (16 kilometers) from his family’s farm in Pike County.

It was the first of days of memorials and services.

On Sunday, his flag-draped casket is to be carried across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, where the one-time “Freedom Rider” was among civil rights demonstrators beaten by state troopers in 1965. He also was to lie in repose at the state Capitol in Montgomery. After another memorial at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, where he will lie in state, funeral services will be held in Georgia.

At the Troy University service, his brothers and sisters recalled Lewis who was called Robert at home as a boy who practiced preaching and singing gospel songs to the farm animals.

“I remember the day that John left home. Mother told him not to get in trouble, not to get in the way … but we all know that John got in trouble, got in the way but it was good trouble,” his brother Samuel Lewis said.

“And the troubles that he got himself into would change the world,” Lewis said.

The New York Liberty and Seattle Storm made a statement before tipping off the WNBA season on Saturday at the IMG Academy in Bradenton, Florida.

Both teams left the court and returned to their locker rooms during the pre-game playing of national anthem in protest of racial and social injustice, then held a 26-second moment of silence in memory of Breonna Taylor, the 26-year-old certified EMT who was shot to death by plainclothes police officers while asleep in her Louisville apartment in the early hours of 13 March.

“We are dedicating this season to Breonna Taylor, an outstanding EMT who was murdered over 130 days ago in her home,” Liberty point guard Layshia Clarendon announced at mid-court alongside Storm star Breanna Stewart. “Breonna Taylor was dedicated and committed to uplifting everyone around here. We are also dedicating this season to ‘Say Her Name” campaign, a campaign committed to saying the names and fighting for justice of black women – black women are so often forgotten in this fight for justice, who don’t have people marching in the streets for them.

“We will say her name. Sandra Bland. Atatiana Jefferson. Dominique Remy Fells. Breonna Taylor. We will be a voice for the voiceless.”

My colleague Andrew Lawrence has written about how the WNBA has been at the forefront of social justice movements long before the current moment of athlete activism launched by Colin Kaepernick’s decision to kneel during the national anthem.

Reports are circulating about a shooting at a protest in Louisville, Kentucky, though the picture is confused to say the least. Reporters on the scene have tweeted pictures of what they say is a protester being carried away on a stretcher after a weapon was accidentally discharged.

The city has been gripped by protests since the killing of Breonna Taylor, a 26-year-old African American who was shot by police officers who entered her home with a no-knock warrant, though she was not suspected of any crime. No one has been charged.

Protests in Lousville have led to other shooting deaths.

A black barbecue stand owner, David McAtee, was shot and killed after police and national guard troops dispersing a crowd violating curfew far from the area of protests opened fire.

On 25 June, a 27-year-old photographer, Tyler Gerth, was shot and killed at the square where protesters have gathered by a man described by family and acquaintances as homeless and mentally ill.

Martin Pengelly

Among real storms blowing around the US today, hurricanes are approaching Texas and Hawaii while a tropical storm heads for the Caribbean. The Associated Press is keeping watch here.

Among other kinds of storm, the kinds that blow themselves out on Twitter, the billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk and his partner, the musician Grimes, appear to have had a public argument about pronouns.

In short, on Friday Musk tweeted “pronouns suck” and in response the mother of his unusually named child wrote: “I love you but please turn off ur phone or give me a dall [sic]. I cannot support hate. Please stop this.”

The couple appeared to be at odds over naming conventions. Grimes later deleted her tweet.

The couple have differed in public before, on similar territory. In May, they named their child X Æ A-12 but then changed the name to X Æ A-Xii. Asked why, Grimes, whose real name is Claire Elise Boucher, said: “Roman numerals. Looks better tbh.”

She also wrote: “It’s just X, like the letter X. Then AI. Like how you said the letter A then I.”

But Musk, CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, told podcast host Joe Rogan: “I mean it’s just X, the letter X. And then the Æ is, like, pronounced ‘Ash’ … and then A-12. A-12 is my contribution.”

So, as Kurt Vonnegut said and I increasingly like to type, it goes.

Tom McCarthy

With an election looming and the polls looking bad, Donald Trump was in need of a quick political boost.

Seizing on television images of a procession of refugees out of Honduras, the president announced an imminent “invasion” of the United States by a “migrant caravan” and said he would deploy 15,000 military personnel to stop it. For weeks, Fox News blared “coverage” of the emergency.

That was in October 2018, and as a political strategy ahead of the midterm elections, the gambit utterly failed.

The Democrats flipped 40 seats in the House of Representatives the next month and racked up the largest popular vote margin in midterm elections history, on the highest turnout in 100 years. The “caravan” emergency was heard of no more.

Now two years later, Trump is facing an even bigger election, with an even bigger need for a political masterstroke if he is to win a second term in November.

Instead of deploying troops to the border to confront a made-up threat, Trump has announced “a surge of federal law enforcement into American communities” to fight a supposed cataclysm of violence born of a Democratic plot to undermine local police.

“To look at it from any standpoint, the effort to shut down policing in their own communities has led to a shocking explosion of shootings, killings, murders and heinous crimes of violence,” Trump said at the White House on Wednesday. “This bloodshed must end. This bloodshed will end.”

The deployment against anti-racism protesters is a ploy to burnish his strongman credentials, critics say – Trump is pursuing made-for-TV fascism, with the imposition of federal forces into US cities against the will of local authorities. As with 2018, the unmistakeable bogeyman is people of color, whom Trump portrays, with the help of conservative media, as again posing an existential threat to the country that only he can defend against.

You can read the full story below:

Oliver Milman

The Wisconsin branch of the Republican party has called for a federal investigation of a fatal shooting on Thursday to ascertain whether it was motivated by animosity towards Donald Trump.

Bernell Trammell, a 60-year-old who was a well-known figure in Milwaukee’s Riverwest neighborhood, was shot and killed at around 12.30pm on Thursday. Police have yet to provide any details on possible suspects or motives for the killing.

However, the Republican Party of Wisconsin said the “senseless” murder may have been politically motivated and called upon federal investigators to become involved. Trammell, who ran a business called eXpressions Journal in Riverwest, regularly displayed signs on political and religious matters, including support for Trump as well as the Black Lives Matter movement, according to those who knew him.

Trammell, who was black, was pictured holding a sign calling for a Trump victory in the November election but community members have said he has supported politicians from both sides of the divide, including Lena Taylor, a Democrat who ran to become mayor of Milwaukee this year.

“He believed in democracy. He believed in his right to free speech,” local resident John Self told CBS58. “I don’t think he ever once tried to convert you or change you. He would just tell you what he thought, he would listen to what you had to think, and then he would respect that.”

Maryland has reported its highest daily total of new Covid-19 cases since 19 May. According to the state’s coronavirus website on Saturday, there were 1,288 new Covid-19 cases. More than 3,300 people have died from the virus in the state since the start of the pandemic.

Neighbouring Pennsylvania reported at least 1,054 new cases of the virus and 13 deaths from Covid-19 on Saturday.

As coronavirus cases surge, California is once again facing testing shortages and delays reminiscent of the first weeks of the pandemic in March. Those issues, healthcare providers say, are hurting the state’s most vulnerable first.

This week, California marked record numbers of Covid-19 cases and deaths, with more than 12,800 new cases on Tuesday and 159 deaths on Thursday. With medical centers and testing sites overwhelmed, supply shortages have left Californians in some counties waiting more than a week for an appointment to get tested, and and even longer while labs process their results.

“It breaks my heart when we have to say no, we can’t test you,” said Dr Grace Neuman, an internist who runs the testing program at the South Central Family Health Center, in Los Angeles.

The center, which serves about 25,000 patients, is now only able to administer 25 test kits a day. A few weeks ago, Neuman said she was able to test four times as many patients, but commercial labs, facing a shortage of supplies, have been pinched and unable to process more than a couple of dozen tests from the center each day.

The uncertainty can be harrowing for her patients, Neuman said, many of whom are Latino workers at warehouses, factories, restaurants and grocery stores – where the risk of catching coronavirus is especially high.

You can read the full story below:

For the 10th time since the start of the pandemic, Florida has recorded a daily death total of more than 100 people. The state’s department of health recorded reported 12,115 new cases of Covid-19 and 124 deaths from the virus on Friday. A total of 5,777 people have now died from Covid-19 in the state.

Hospitals in Florida, meanwhile, have been stretched by the influx of patients in recent weeks.

“The last three weeks have been some of the busiest shifts in my entire life,” Dr Mark Supino of Jackson Memorial Hospital’s emergency department told the Guardian. “We’ve seen some of the sickest patients we’ve ever seen.”

Meanwhile, Florida’s Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, has said the state is still open for business.

“We’re not going to restrict the businesses,” DeSantis said on Thursday, at a press conference. He also said the outbreak in south Florida had “stabilized”.

The wife of the Democratic nominee for the US Senate in Georgia has tested positive for Covid-19. Jon Ossoff’s campaign says Ossof has been tested himself after experiencing symptoms of the virus.

“Last night, Jon’s wife, Dr Alisha Kramer, an OB/GYN physician at a local hospital, received a positive Covid-19 diagnosis. Dr Kramer started isolation immediately after experiencing symptoms earlier this week. Jon is also experiencing symptoms and was tested for the virus this morning. His results are pending,” said Miryam Lipper, Ossoff’s campaign communications director.

Georgia is one of the worst affected states by the pandemic. More than 3,000 people have died from Covid-19 in the state, and cases have risen sharply in recent weeks. Eighty people coronavirus-related deaths were reported in Georgia on Friday, according to figures from the New York Times.