Coronavirus US: polls put Biden ahead of Trump as deaths top 1,000 a day – as it happened

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

• US records more than 1,000 Covid deaths a day as Republicans mull relief. The US has recorded more than 1,000 deaths a day from Covid-19 for five days running, as cases surge in southern and western states, the national caseload nears 4.2m and the death toll approaches 150,000.
• John Lewis crosses Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma for final time. The civil rights leader and longtime congressman crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, for the last time on Sunday, as remembrances of his life continued.
  
  
• Trump aims barb at Reagan Foundation in fundraising coin kerfuffle. Donald Trump famously fell out with the Bush family and has regularly claimed to be the greatest Republican president since the first, Abraham Lincoln. He has largely avoided attacking another claimant to that title, Ronald Reagan. Until now.
• Hurricane Douglas: Hawaii prepares for high winds, rain and storm surge. Hawaii prepared for Hurricane Douglas on Sunday, with predictions of high winds, rain and storm surge. “It’s definitely going to be a triple threat,” said National Weather Service (NWS) meteorologist Vanessa Almanza, adding that rainfall could be anywhere from 5in-15in.
• Hurricane Hanna: storm hits Texas counties struggling with Covid-19. A day after roaring ashore as a hurricane, Hanna lashed the Texas Gulf coast on Sunday with high winds and drenching rains that destroyed boats, flooded streets and knocked out power across a region already reeling from a surge in coronavirus cases.
• Protesters in Portland bring down fence as confrontation with Trump agents rises. The confrontation between protesters and federal paramilitaries in the Oregon city escalated early on Sunday morning, when demonstrators finally broke down a steel fence around the courthouse after days of trying.
• Staff clear US Chengdu consulate as China’s closure deadline looms. Staff at the US consulate in Chengdu have been making final efforts to clear the premises before Monday closure ordered by Beijing as relations with Washington continue to worsen.
  
  

Arkansas senator Tom Cotton called the enslavement of millions of African people and their descendants “the necessary evil upon which the union was built” in an interview with the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette published on Sunday.

The Republican lawmaker was speaking in support of legislation he introduced on Thursday that aims to prohibit use of federal funds to teach the 1619 Project, an initiative from the New York Times that reframes US history around the date of August 1619 and the first arrival of stave ships on American soil.

The Saving American History Act of 2020 and “would prohibit the use of federal funds to teach the 1619 Project by K-12 schools or school districts”, according to a statement from Cotton’s office.

“The entire premise of the New York Times’ factually, historically flawed 1619 Project … is that America is at root, a systemically racist country to the core and irredeemable. I reject that root and branch,” Cotton told the Democrat-Gazette on Friday. “America is a great and noble country founded on the proposition that all mankind is created equal. We have always struggled to live up to that promise, but no country has ever done more to achieve it.”

He added: “We have to study the history of slavery and its role and impact on the development of our country because otherwise we can’t understand our country. As the Founding Fathers said, it was the necessary evil upon which the union was built, but the union was built in a way, as Lincoln said, to put slavery on the course to its ultimate extinction.”

Nikole Hannah-Jones, who was awarded this year’s Pulitzer Prize for commentary for her introductory essay to the project, did not respond to a request for comment from the Little Rock newspaper, but tweeted on Friday that Cotton’s bill “speaks to the power of journalism more than anything I’ve ever done in my career”.

In June, the Times was forced to issue a mea culpa after publishing an op-ed written by Cotton entitled “Send in the troops”, which advocated for the deployment of the military against protesters rallying against police brutality toward black Americans and drew widespread criticism.

Times publisher AG Sulzberger initially defended the decision, saying the paper was committed to representing “views from across the spectrum”. But the Times subsequently issued a statement saying the op-ed fell short of its editorial standards, leading to the resignation of editorial page director James Bennet.

Shortly before he departed on Air Force One from Morristown Municipal Airport en route to Washington, Donald Trump announced that he will not be throwing out the ceremonial first pitch before a Red Sox-Yankees game at Yankee Stadium next month due to scheduling conflicts.

“Because of my strong focus on the China Virus, including scheduled meetings on Vaccines, our economy and much else, I won’t be able to be in New York to throw out the opening pitch for the @Yankees on August 15th,” he wrote on Twitter. “We will make it later in the season!”

The US president, a native New Yorker who has yet to throw out a first pitch while serving as president, had first revealed the invitation by Yankees president and “great friend” Randy Levine during Thursday’s daily coronavirus briefing at the White House.

But Trump’s announcement was received with contempt by New York City mayor Bill de Blasio, who criticized the team on Friday for aligning “with hatred” by welcoming Trump to the stadium.

Di Blasio wrote: “After CONDEMNING racism, the next step isn’t inviting it to your pitcher’s mound. To the players that knelt for the BLM movement, we applaud you. To the execs that have aligned with hatred, you are on the wrong side of history and morality.”

If Trump does make the trip to the Bronx ballpark, it will mark his first appearance at a baseball game since he was infamously booed by a Washington crowd when he attended Game 5 of the World Series between the Houston Astros and Washington Nationals in October.

The news website ProPublica has published a database containing complaint information for thousands of New York City police officers days after a federal judge paused the public release of such records.

The Associated Press reports:

ProPublica posted the database Sunday, explaining in a note to readers that it isn’t obligated to comply with judge Katherine Polk Failla’s temporary restraining order because it is not a party to a union lawsuit challenging the release of such records.

Deputy managing editor Eric Umansky said ProPublica requested the information from the city’s police watchdog agency, the Civilian Complaint Review Board, soon after last month’s repeal of state law that for decades had prevented the disclosure of disciplinary records.

Unions representing police officers and other public safety workers sued the city on July 15 to block Mayor Bill de Blasio from making good on a pledge to start posting misconduct complaints on a government website. The unions argue that allowing the public to see unproven or false complaints could sully officers’ reputations and compromise their safety.

A state judge who first handled the case had issued a narrower restraining order that temporarily blocked the public disclosure of records concerning unsubstantiated and non-finalized allegations or settlement agreements.

ProPublica said it excluded allegations that investigators deemed unfounded from the material it published. In all, the searchable database contains 12,056 complaints against 3,996 active NYPD officers.

Georgia’s department of public health reported 2,765 new coronavirus cases on Sunday, down from 3,787 on Saturday and Friday’s record high of 4,813.

Authorities reported three new deaths in the past 24 hours, down sharply from 53 on Saturday.

New hospitalizations also fell to 62 on Sunday from 277 on Saturday.

Nancy Pelosi, the Speaker of the House, has tweeted out a clip of her interview on CBS’s Face the Nation this morning in which she coined a new nickname for Donald Trump over his handling of the coronavirus pandemic.

“This president, I have a new name for him: Mr. Make Matters Worse,” Pelosi told host Margaret Brennan. “He has made matters worse from the start – delay, denial, it’s a hoax, it’ll go away magically, it’s a miracle, and all the rest – and we’re in this situation.”

Donald Trump made an impromptu visit with his supporters after the presidential motorcade departed Trump National Golf Club in the New Jersey suburb of Bedminster at 2.11pm, according to a White House pool report.

At 2.20pm, the motorcade stopped at an intersection where a group of about 50 supporters were assembled in the town of Bedminster, several miles away from the club. Trump, who was wearing a white ‘Make America Great Again’ ballcap but not a facemask, then stepped out of his SUV and tossed out red ‘Keep America Great’ hats to the crowd, keeping about six feet away from the mass.

At 2.21pm, Trump returned to his vehicle and the motorcade was away and rolling again.

Today marks the 11th day that Trump has spent time at one of his golf courses in the past 30 days.

Texas governor Greg Abbott, who issued an executive order requiring all Texans to wear face masks at public gatherings in a reversal from his previous stance, has offered some words of encouragement in the battle to contain the virus.

On Saturday, Texas reported 8,112 new coronavirus cases and 168 deaths, according to data from the state’s Department of Health and Human Services.

A total of 375,846 cases and 4,885 deaths have been reported across Texas since the start of the outbreak.

Martin Pengelly

Pelosi told CBS she and her party had been “anxious to negotiate for two months and ten days”, but though they have been waiting for Senate Republicans to do something, they will be willing to wait some more to get the next relief package done.

Asked about Republican cuts to the special unemployment payments which are now expiring, stoking fears of an “economic catastrophe”, she said: “The reason we had $600 was its simplicity.

“And figuring out 70% of somebody’s wages” – as Republicans have indicated they will do – “people don’t all make a salary. Maybe they do. They make wages and they sometimes have it vary. So why don’t we just keep it simple?”

Pelosi added that “over 60% the American people support that”, contrasted Republican intransigence on the issue with the party’s eagerness for tax cuts for the rich, and said that for Republicans, perhaps “this is an emergency that maybe they don’t understand. I don’t know what they have against working families in America”.

That said, the speaker would not say the $600 unemployment payments would be a “red line” in forthcoming talks.

“You don’t go into a negotiation with a red line,” she said. “But you do go in with your values.”

Pelosi also, as it happens, coined a new name for Donald Trump, saying: “This president – I have a new name for him. Mr Make Matters Worse. He has made matters worse from the start.”

Trump had called her “crazy” in a tweet on Sunday morning, so it was probably fair game to snap back.

Martin Pengelly

The Texas senator Ted Cruz – remember him – made an ordinarily outlandish claim on CBS’s Face the Nation earlier, saying Democrats want to shutdown businesses and schools in the face of a pandemic that is infecting around 70,000 and killing 1,000 Americans every day purely to defeat Donald Trump in November.

“I am onboard with restarting the economy,” Cruz said. “What Democrats want to do – we’re 100 days out from the presidential election. The only objective Democrats have is to defeat Donald Trump, and they’ve cynically decided the best way to defeat Donald Trump is shut down every business in America, shut down every school in America.

“You know, Nancy Pelosi talks about working men and women. What she’s proposing is keeping working men and women from working.”

Republicans say special unemployment payments of $600 a week should be cut, because they are a disincentive to work. Democrats disagree.

Pelosi’s bill, as labelled by Cruz, is the Heroes Act, a $3tn stimulus and relief package passed by the House in May but not taken up by the Senate. Republicans in the upper chamber and the Trump White House say they should be proposing their package on Monday. Here’s more on that.

And here, from Lauren Gambino in Washington, is a consideration of just where Trump stands, 100 days from that election:

Pennsylvania reported 800 news cases and four new deaths from Covid-19 on Sunday.

While those numbers are low compared to the peak in a state that was among the hardest hit in the early days of the pandemic, the state’s department of health said there has been a “significant” increase in cases among 19-24 year olds.

There have been more than 110,000 confirmed cases and 7,100 deaths from Covid-19 in Pennsylvania since the start of the pandemic.