What A Day: The most tragical place on Earth

White House officials have moved to publicly discredit Dr. Anthony Fauci, in retaliation for his increasingly urgent warnings that the country’s coronavirus response has careened off the rails. 
 

• Over the weekend, a few brave Trump aides anonymously provided news outlets with a memo formatted like opposition research, containing a cherry-picked list of statements Fauci made in the early days of the epidemic. That came a few days after President Trump told Fox News that Fauci has “made a lot of mistakes.” His real sin, of course, is calling out elected officials’ mistakes, including Trump’s. In recent weeks Fauci has recommended that areas experiencing infection surges shut back down, expressed concern over the administration’s push to reopen schools, and called on state and local officials to issue mask mandates. 
   
• While the Trump administration worked on undermining the nation’s top infectious-disease expert, the nation’s top infectious disease went cheerfully about its business. Florida reported 15,300 new confirmed cases on Saturday, the highest single-day total in any state since the pandemic began. Disney World reopened the very same day, and marked the occasion with a fittingly disquieting video. Meanwhile, Republicans still plan to gather at an in-person convention in Jacksonville next month, and Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) remains committed to fully reopening public schools based on the rock-solid Home Depot Precedent. 
   
• In pressuring governors and education leaders to force schools back open, the Trump administration has repeatedly cited guidance from the American Academy of Pediatrics stressing the importance of getting kids back into in-person classes. On Friday the AAP walked that back, stating that “science and community circumstances must guide decision-making,” and emphasizing that reopening safely will require more funding.

A growing number of state and local leaders are siding with the doctors on this one.
 

• California’s two largest school districts, Los Angeles and San Diego, announced Monday that all classes will be online-only this fall, as Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-CA) ordered indoor activities shut down across the state. Even the Trump-adoring governors of Arizona and West Virginia have delayed the opening of public schools, albeit only by a few weeks. On the higher-education front, 17 states have sued the Trump administration over its new rule that would revoke the visas of international students who take classes entirely online. 
   
• Those decisions reflect the reality that the epidemic has taken a turn for the worse. Texas, California, and Florida are now experiencing spikes in coronavirus deaths, as experts feared would happen following an initial lag. Long testing turnaround times have rendered contact tracing all but useless—when test results take a week or longer to receive, there’s no way to isolate an infection before it spreads. Those testing delays are the result of a lack of federal coordination, supply shortages, surging demand, and the absence of a standard digital process for reporting test results. In other words, response efforts have been foiled by a) Trump and b) fax machines.

The Trump administration undermined our chances at containing new outbreaks by failing to address the shortages and delays we’ve known about for months, and now hopes to undermine a top health official and the CDC for warning the public about it. All we can do is make sure to use the next few months more productively.

President Trump commuted Roger Stone’s prison sentence late on Friday night, in an extraordinary abuse of power to reward and buy the silence of a friend who was convicted of lying to Congress in order to protect him. Trump’s clemency order also commuted Stone’s two-year probation term and the $20,000 fine included in his sentence. Not only does the move send a clear signal to Trump allies that they won’t be held accountable for crimes committed to help him politically, it puts a convicted felon back to work doing just that: Stone has already pledged to do “anything necessary to elect my candidate, short of breaking the law” (lol). Former Special Counsel Robert Mueller published a Washington Post op-ed on Saturday defending his office’s prosecution of Stone: “Stone was prosecuted and convicted because he committed federal crimes. He remains a convicted felon, and rightly so.” A day later, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham said he would grant Democrats’ request to invite Mueller to testify before his panel.

• A new CBS News/YouGov poll shows Joe Biden just one point below President Trump in Texas, consistent with several recent polls suggesting Texas is in play as a swing state. 
   
• The Trump administration lifted a ban on sales of firearm silencers to private overseas buyers, under pressure from a gun industry lobbyist who now works at the White House. The ban was in place to protect U.S. troops from ambushes, which is evidently less important to the Trump administration than doing favors for special interests groups ahead of the election. 
   
• A federal judge has blocked federal executions that were set to resume this week for the first time in 17 years, citing concerns that the lethal injection method involved is “very likely to cause extreme pain and needless suffering.” The first execution had been scheduled for this afternoon.
   
• Japanese authorities are furious at the U.S. over a major coronavirus outbreak at two Marine bases in Okinawa, saying the military hadn’t taken adequate measures to contain the virus. Doesn’t sound like the U.S. military we know, but let’s hear these guys out. 
   
• Researchers at Harvard estimated that nearly 110,000 small businesses closed permanently between early March and early May. The known number is at least 66,000, based on data from Yelp.
   
• A federal financial regulator has quietly shelved at least six investigations into discriminatory lending since Trump took office, against staff recommendations that fines or penalties be imposed. 
   
• Authorities found the body of Glee actor Naya Rivera at Lake Piru in Southern California, after she went missing there on Wednesday.
   
• More than 300 workers at Los Angeles Apparel have tested positive for coronavirus, and four have died. Public health officials said the company initially refused to cooperate with its investigation into a potential outbreak at the factory. Another dazzling chapter in the career of Dov Charney.
   
• If you haven’t been on Twitter in a few days, firstly, congratulations, and secondly, just know that everything is cake now. Except for trendy jam, which is mold, and cabinets, which are (not) sex-trafficking. You are now caught up.

Oil and gas companies are on the verge of bankruptcy, raising fears of a potential environmental disaster as executives continue to rake in millions in bonuses. As these energy companies collapse, they could leave unprofitable wells abandoned and leaking pollutants for taxpayers to clean up. Those companies haven’t set aside enough funds to keep those unused sites from leaking, but they have made sure to pay out executives before filing for bankruptcy; one offshore drilling company did so with the $9.7 million tax refund it received under the March coronavirus stimulus bill. The environmental consequences would be severe, and yet even now the Trump administration is finalizing a plan that would release oil companies from requirements to detect and fix methane leaks.

If there is one thing that health experts agree on, it’s that the perfect diet doesn’t exist. 

Even when we eat super well, our daily nutritional needs are constantly changing due to depleted nutrients in the food we eat, stress, environmental toxins and more.

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Federal judges have blocked two of the strictest abortion bans in the country, in Georga and Tennessee. Georgia’s “hearbeat” abortion law was permanently struck down, and a judge issued a temporary restraining order to block Tennessee’s law just hours after it was signed. 

The Texas Supreme Court rejected the state Republican Party’s efforts to force an in-person convention in Houston after state officials canceled it. 

The Washington football team announced that it will finally change its name.

7-Eleven has opted to donate one million meals to Feeding America rather than give away its usual free Slurpees on July 11, so people don't crowd into its stores. That's right, "no free Slurpees" is good news, welcome to 2020.