- Investigation: finding every US healthcare worker who dies fighting Covid-19
- US health secretary expects vaccine by December
- Cori Bush interview: ‘They don’t know what I know’
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3.10pm BST
Half of US residents know someone who has contracted coronavirus, according to an Axios-Ipsos poll.
According to Axios: “50% of respondents now say they know someone who’s tested positive for the coronavirus — up from 46% last week and 41% a month ago.”
We’ve hit a tipping point in the pandemic: Half of Americans now know someone who’s tested positive, according to this week’s Axios-Ipsos Coronavirus Index. https://t.co/sTP6qprekA
3.04pm BST
A US appeals court is considered today whether a federal judge must honor the highly unusual request by the Trump administration to drop the criminal case against his former national security adviser, Michael Flynn, Reuters reports.
Ten judges from the US Court of appeals for the District of Columbia are hearing arguments in the politically charged case after a three-judge panel ruled on June 24, that US district judge Emmet Sullivan must grant the Justice Department’s motion to clear Flynn.
2.54pm BST
Democrats have announced their full speaker schedule for the party’s national convention, which begins on Monday.
Bernie Sanders will speak on Monday, ahead of the Republican former Ohio governor John Kasich and Michelle Obama. On Tuesday the highlights include Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bill Clinton, while Hillary Clinton and “vice presidential nominee” take to the stage on Wednesday.
2.26pm BST
Good morning! This is Adam Gabbatt taking over from Martin.
Donald Trump is up and about this morning, and he’s posted a tweet which manages to be both misleading and offensive:
More Testing, which is a good thing (we have the most in the world), equals more Cases, which is Fake News Gold. They use Cases to demean the incredible job being done by the great men & women of the U.S. fighting the China Plague!
2.03pm BST
A coalition of religious leaders inspired by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s last organizing effort has said new data suggests low-income voters in key states could swing some US Senate races.
The Associated Press report that the Poor People’s Campaign is using the data to pressure candidates from both parties to focus on poverty and encourage poor and low-income voters in 13 states to register to vote.
1.55pm BST
The US Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar said this morning that it is more important to have a safe and effective vaccine against the coronavirus than to be the first to produce a vaccine.
Azar, on a rare US high-level visit to Taiwan, was asked by ABC this morning what he thought of Russia’s announcement that it had become the first country to register a vaccine against the virus.
Pres Trump holds news conference at 530pm/ET in the WH Briefing Room.
1.49pm BST
Donald Trump has been on Twitter repeating his regularly debunked claim that it is only because the US does more testing than anywhere else that it has more cases of the coronavirus than everywhere else. He claims that the test numbers are ‘fake news gold’ for the media.
For the record, the world has just recently passed 20m global confirmed cased of Covid-19, of which the US accounts for over 5 million – over a quarter.
….he will be successful, especially as the weather starts to warm & the virus hopefully becomes weaker, and then gone. Great discipline is taking place in China, as President Xi strongly leads what will be a very successful operation. We are working closely with China to help!
1.26pm BST
Terry Greene Sterling has been in Phoenix, Arizona for us, looking at 88-year-old Joe Arpaio’s failed attempt to re-gain the post of sheriff of Maricopa county. You might recall that he lost the post four years ago amid national outrage over his abusive policing tactics and immigration crackdowns. He had held it for the previous 24 years.
The vote was a close-run thing, as Greene Sterling reports, and may have a wider significance:
Arpaio lost by about 6,000 votes to his former right-hand man, a once blindly devoted chief deputy named Jerry Sheridan. That Sheridan beat his former boss by only one percentage point demonstrates to activists that Arpaio’s conspiracy theories, rightwing populism and sycophantic devotion to Trump – who saved him from a possible jail sentence with his first presidential pardon in 2017 – still resonates with many Republican primary voters.
What matters about Arpaio’s failed comeback bid, Latino activists say, is that Arizona’s experience with Arpaio has long presaged what could occur when Trump leaves office – and, by extension, what other countries might expect when their populist leaders, like Jair Bolsonaro, step down.
Related: ‘Never going away’: what Arpaio’s primary loss could tell us about Trump’s future
1.18pm BST
There’s a quick snap from Reuters after Kellyanne Conway spoke to Fox News this morning, to the effect that Donald Trump will be briefed on US Covid-19 vaccine efforts later on Tuesday and will likely give a public update.
It comes as Russia has announced that it is approving its Sputnik V Covid vaccine, despite testing safety concerns.
1.12pm BST
With pressure being put on the logistics of November’s election by the coronavirus pandemic plus Donald Trump’s repeated criticisms of mail-in voting, I suspect we are going to see a few stories like this blow up into examples being used on the national stage.
Crain’s Detroit Business is reporting that Michigan’s Sterling Heights had 165 absentee voter ballots for the 4 August primary election arrive in the mail six days late. This meant they couldn’t be counted, even though they were post-marked before election day.
12.57pm BST
Bernie Sanders has written for us today, responding to the news that the pandemic is helping some of the ultra-rich get richer. Apple’s Tim Cook has just joined the ‘billionaire club’ while last week, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg saw his net worth hit $100bn. Sanders writes:
Incredibly, thanks to President Trump’s tax giveaway to the rich signed into law a few years ago, billionaires now pay a lower effective tax rate than teachers, nurses, firefighters or truck drivers. The extraordinary wealth gains that billionaires have made during he pandemic come at a time when 92 million Americans are uninsured or under-insured and tens of millions of Americans are facing evictions or foreclosures.
At a time when so many of our people are struggling economically, it is morally obscene that a tiny handful of billionaires – the top 0.0001% – are using a global pandemic as an opportunity to make outrageous profits after receiving a de facto bailout by the Federal Reserve. It is time to change our national priorities.
12.51pm BST
NBC News this morning are carrying a story that voter registration has surged during the period that Black Lives Matter protests have been so high profile in the country. They report that, according to TargetSmart, a Democratic political data firm, there was “a surge of Democratic and unaffiliated voter registrations in June”. The firm says:
Despite a full or partial lockdown in large swaths of the country for much of the month, voter registration began to rebound as people took to the streets to protest
12.36pm BST
If you haven’t seen it yet, we’ve launched a series today called Lost on the frontline where we have partnered with Kaiser Health News in an effort to document every US healthcare worker who dies from Covid-19.
At the heart of it is our interactive where our journalists have so far profiled 167 of the 922 healthcare workers who have died during the coronavirus pandemic in the US, many of them under the age of 40, and some only in their 20s.
Related: Lost on the frontline: US healthcare workers who died fighting Covid-19
As long as the patients keep coming, there will be someone to care. Let’s give nurses and doctors a chance to catch their breath and go about healing our other issues. Let’s not ask more medical professionals to pay the price we don’t need to pay. They aren’t just medical professionals. They are our neighbors who get the early bus, our friends who always pick up the phone, our sisters who make us laugh, our dads who always know what to say. They have their own lives and we must give them that chance.
Related: Let us honor our healthcare workers by giving them the protection they need | Andy Slavitt
12.25pm BST
Some slow moves towards police reform in Seatlle continue. The city council approved proposals on Monday that would reduce the police department by as many as 100 officers through layoffs and attrition. It was, reports the Associated Press, an action supported by demonstrators who have marched in the city following the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, but strongly opposed by the mayor and police chief.
The measures that cut less than $4 million of the department’s $400 million annual budget this year passed out of committee unanimously last week. On Monday, only council member Kshama Sawant voted against the budget package, saying it does not do enough to defund the police.
12.12pm BST
Another lively race worth keeping an eye on today is in northwest Georgia, where a woman who’s been blasted for racist videos and being adamant support for the QAnon conspiracy theory faces a neurosurgeon who has campaigned on his experience to improve the health care system in the Republican primary runoff.
Related: Revealed: QAnon Facebook groups are growing at a rapid pace around the world
11.54am BST
Talking of Cori Bush, my colleague Poppy Noor has a great interview with her up today. Last week Bush won the her primary race in Missouri’s first congressional district, unseating the Democratic incumbent and ending a half-century family dynasty in Missouri. In it she talks about the struggle to keep fighting for racial justice in the US.
It’s hard looking at Michael Brown’s father and knowing that just last week he found out again that this officer won’t be charged. Just looking at him in his face, and seeing the other activists crying is tough. It has been six years and we keep coming back here every single year and we’re not seeing change
When I ask Bush what she thinks of Biden, she can barely keep herself from laughing. “I think … He is the nominee for Democratic president,” she replies, before shaking her head. She adds: “We have what we have, and we have to get Trump out of the seat.”
Related: ‘They don’t know what I know’: why Cori Bush is poised to change politics
11.45am BST
teve Karnowski and Mohamed Ibrahim at the Associated Press have more about the challenge Rep. Ilhan Omar faces.
They report that Omar will learn today whether voters in her Minneapolis-area congressional district support the mix of confrontational, anti-Trump progressivism and celebrity that she brings to the job.
11.31am BST
Good morning and welcome to the Guardian’s live coverage of US politics and the coronavirus crisis. Here’s a quick catch up of where we are, and what we might expect later on