Summary We’ll be shutting down today’s blog shortly. Here’s a glance at the day’s top news items: Trump celebrates Fourth of July by stoking division over pandemic and race. The US president celebrated America’s birthday by stoking divisions over a perceived culture war and dismissing the two most immediate threats to his presidency: a massive resurgence of coronavirus cases and a growing racial justice movement seeking an end to police violence across the nation. Ghislaine Maxwell to appear in court as fresh details of arrest emerge. More than 20 armed officers said to have taken part in raid leading to her detention at rural New Hampshire retreat. Bolton: Trump claim he wasn’t told of Russia bounty report is ‘not how system works’. Ex-national security adviser also says any decision to withhold intelligence would ‘certainly not’ be ‘made only by the briefer’. Texas mayors warn of ‘serious trouble’ as coronavirus cases surge across US. Two prominent Texas mayors have warned that hospitals in their cities will be “overwhelmed” by cases of Covid-19 inside two weeks, even as Trump continues to portray the coronavirus resurgence nationwide as the embers of a fire he is steadily extinguishing. Seattle police seek motive after driver hits protesters, killing one. One person died and one remained in serious condition after a car drove into protesters on a freeway in the Washington city. FDA commissioner says prospect of Americans refusing vaccines is ‘concerning’. Stephen Hahn appeared on ABC’s This Week and was asked about a poll that found 27% of Americans would be unlikely to accept a free coronavirus vaccine if it was available. Kanye West for president? Realities and rules say White House run unlikely. If the rapper is serious about running against Trump and Biden, he has significant obstacles to clear. Another of the former Minneapolis police officers charged in the killing of George Floyd has been released from jail, according to Hennepin County jail records. The Associated Press reports: Tou Thao, age 34, is the third former officer accused in Floyd’s death to be released on bond. He posted $750,000 bond on Saturday, the Minneapolis Star-Tribune reported. All four officers on the scene of Floyd’s death have been fired and face criminal charges. Floyd, who was Black and handcuffed, died on 25 May while being arrested. A white police officer used his knee to pin Floyd’s neck for nearly eight minutes as Floyd begged for air and eventually stopped moving. Besides the charges against the officers, Floyd’s death led to worldwide protests over police brutality and racial injustice. Thao is set to appear in court on 11 September on charges of aiding and abetting second-degree murder and aiding and abetting second-degree manslaughter. Two other former officers, J Alexander Kueng and Thomas Lane, face the same charges as Thao. Derek Chauvin, the officer who pressed his knee to Floyd’s neck, is charged with second-degree murder, third-degree murder and second-degree manslaughter with culpable negligence. He remains in police custody. The Grim Reaper made a return appearance on Florida’s beaches over Fourth of July weekend. Daniel Uhlfelder, an attorney who made national headlines in May for dressing as Death himself in an effort to warn Floridians of the dangers of gathering in too close a proximity, brought his scythe-wielding personal to Jacksonville Beach during the holiday, where a number of colorful exchanges with Donald Trump supporters ensued. Florida health officials said on Sunday the state has reached a grim milestone with more than 200,000 people having tested positive for Covid-19. State statistics released Sunday show about 10,000 new people tested positive. Saturday’s numbers, with more than 11,400 cases reported, marked a record new single-day high. More than 3,700 people have died statewide. About 43% of the cases are in three counties: Miami-Dade, Broward and Palm Beach. Study: Covid-fuelled spike in gun purchases led to firearm violence increase A spike in gun purchases during the early months of the coronavirus pandemic was associated with a nearly 8% increase in firearm violence in the US, according to a new estimate from researchers at the University of California, Davis. That increase translated into an estimated 776 additional shooting injuries in the US from March through May, the researchers found. The pandemic appears to have inspired Americans to make 2.1m more gun purchases than under typical circumstances. The new estimates, the first to quantify the effects of coronavirus gun-buying, come from the preprint of a study conducted by one of the leading US gun violence researchers. The results have not yet gone through peer review or been published in a research journal. “We wanted to get this research out as soon as possible, because obviously there are important implications for public health and public safety,” said Julia Schleimer, a research data analyst at the University of California Firearm Violence Research Center, and one of the study’s authors. The researchers looked at increases in gun purchases and changes in firearms violence across 48 states and the District of Columbia. They found that many demographic factors – including overall rates of firearm ownership, socioeconomic status, how urban a state was and levels of residential segregation by race – did not seem to make a difference in the relationship between increased gun purchases and firearms violence. But states that had lower levels of violent crime pre-Covid saw a stronger connection between additional gun purchases and more gun violence. The study used data from the Gun Violence Archive, which publishes information on shootings and firearms deaths based on media reports. The study did not examine the effect of firearms purchase increases on gun suicide, which represent the majority of gun deaths in the US. States that ordered gun stores to be closed at some point during the pandemic, rather than naming them as essential businesses that could stay open, on average had smaller overall increases in gun purchases. The White House press pool reports that Donald Trump is back at the executive mansion after a morning of golf at Trump National Golf Club in Virginia’s Loudoun County, his 124th round since taking office. CBS News has shared a few images of Trump in action. No word on who rounded out Trump’s foursome. His playing partner last Sunday was South Carolina senator Lindsey Graham, who claimed the US president shot a two-over-par 74 on the day, which feels, er, charitable. Artists and volunteers in Maryland have been putting the finishing touches on a 7,000 sq ft mural of Breonna Taylor in a historically black neighborhood in Maryland’s capital city. Taylor, 26, was killed in her Louisville home in March by police who were serving a no-knock warrant. Protesters have been calling for the officers involved in her death to be charged. The sprawling depiction of Taylor, the latest work by muralist Jeff Huntington, has been organized by Future History Now in partnership with Banneker-Douglass Museum and the Maryland Commission on African American History and Culture. Huntington told the Capital Gazette his organization chose to paint Taylor to show support for the Black Lives Matter movement and to focus on a prominent female figure in the movement. Reuters has more on Kanye West’s surprise announcement on Saturday night that he will be running for president. Though it probably warrants mention that West released the lead single for his forthcoming 10th studio album God’s Country on Tuesday and he’s never been shy about cannonballing into the news cycle by hook or by crook for the sake of an album rollout. (Just saying.) If Kanye West is serious about running for president, the rapper and fashion designer will face major obstacles to mounting a serious campaign less than four months before the 3 November election. West said he was running in a Twitter post on Saturday, the Fourth of July holiday. If so, he will have to work fast to get his name on the ballot alongside Donald Trump and the presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden in all 50 states plus the District of Columbia. There are two routes to doing so, said James McCann, a political scientist at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana. West could try secure the backing of a smaller political party. Without it, he could try to appear as an independent. Donald Trump will reportedly hold an outdoor rally in New Hampshire on Saturday, lending support to the theory his campaign has increasingly seen the New England state as crucial in the president’s reelection bid. Hillary Clinton won the popular vote, and New Hampshire’s four electoral votes, by a narrower-than-expected 0.6% margin in the 2016 general election. One unnamed Trump adviser teased the campaign’s tactics, telling Politico that a win in New Hampshire combined with either Nevada or New Mexico (where Trump has also devoted significant resources), would create a path to victory even if Biden wins big in the Rust Belt. “We don’t need 306,” the person said. “We just need 270. We can lose Michigan and lose Pennsylvania and still win.” Austin’s Democratic mayor Steve Adler decried Donald Trump’s “ambiguous” messaging on the coronavirus pandemic on Sunday, calling on the governor to empower local governments to order residents to stay home amid an alarming surge in statewide case numbers. “It makes me angry,” Adler said on CNN’s State of the Union on Sunday. “You know, I understand he has a tough job, but it is dangerous not to be sending a clear message to Americans.” “When they start hearing that kind of ambiguous message coming out of Washington, there are more and more people that won’t wear masks, that won’t social distance, that won’t do what it takes to keep a community safe,” he added. Adler estimated the hospitals in the Texas capital are “within two weeks” of being overrun if his state doesn’t “change the trajectory”. ICUs could face the same problem even sooner, he said. The mayor’s sentiments were echoed by Harris County judge Lina Hidalgo, who has been front and center of Houston’s response and agreed a stay-at-home order is needed in the state’s largest city. Texas reported its highest daily increase in the number of confirmed coronavirus cases Saturday with 8,258. The Republican governor of Arkansas, Asa Hutchinson, may not have made many friends in the White House today, given his comment that if Donald Trump decides to hold a campaign rally in his state, attendees will need to wear masks. Appearing on NBC’s Meet the Press, Hutchinson said he would expect people to follow his state’s guidelines by practicing social distancing or wearing masks. He understood the value of having national Fourth of July celebrations such as that at Mount Rushmore in South Dakota on Friday, he said, and that some Americans may be experiencing “virus fatigue”. But people who attended Trump’s event on Friday should have been wearing face coverings to “set an example”, he said. Trump has also recently held events in Tulsa, Oklahoma; Phoenix, Arizona; and Washington DC. He and many attendees did not wear masks. Here’s Richard Luscombe’s report on Trump’s somewhat unorthodox approach to a weekend meant for national celebration: Bolton shoots down Trump claim not to have known of bounties plot Donald Trump’s claim not to have been briefed about intelligence suggesting Russia paid bounties to Taliban-linked militants to kill US soldiers is “just not the way the system works”, former national security adviser John Bolton said on Sunday. Bolton was appearing on Face the Nation, the Sunday talk show from ViacomCBS, the communications giant which owns Simon & Schuster, the publisher which put out Bolton’s Trump White House memoir, The Room Where It Happened, over the president’s objection. Elsewhere on Sunday morning, former Obama national security adviser Susan Rice said Bolton would have known about the bounties intelligence while he was in the role, which he left in September 2019. “I don’t buy this story that he was never briefed,” Rice told NBC’s Meet The Press. “I believe that over a year ago, when the information first came to light in 2019, that my successor, John Bolton, would have walked straight into the Oval Office, as I would have, and informed the president of this intelligence.” Bolton’s book, a bombshell tell-all which sold nearly 800,000 copies in its first week in stores, is named for the Oval Office. But it does not include mention of the bounties plot. “I’m not going to disclose classified information,” Bolton told CBS. “I’ve got the struggle with the president trying to repress my book on that score already. “I will say this. All intelligence is distributed along the spectrum of uncertainty. And this intelligence in 2020, by the administration’s own admission, was deemed credible enough to give to our allies. So the notion that you only give the really completely 100% verified intelligence to the president would mean you give him almost nothing. And that’s just not the way the system works.” Current national security adviser Robert O’Brien has said information about the Russian plot was withheld by a CIA officer, even though it was in the president’s brief. Bolton said any decision to withhold intelligence would “certainly not” be “made only by the briefer who briefs the president twice a week. That’s a decision that at least when I was there, would have been made by the director of national intelligence, the director of the CIA, myself and the briefer together.” Though his book is an extensive anatomisation of Trump’s personality and fitness or otherwise for office, Bolton sidestepped a chance to criticise O’Brien, saying: “I don’t want to make this a matter of personalities.” Nor would he say if he had known of the bounties intelligence or not. “What was made public in 2018,” he said, “was Russian assistance to the Taliban, and that’s been known for some time. That alone is troubling. “What is particularly troubling, if true, is this latest information that they were … providing compensation for killing Americans. And that is the kind of thing that you go to the president on and say, ‘Look … we may not know everything on this, but a nuclear power is reportedly providing bounties to kill Americans.’ “That’s the kind of thing you need to have in the president’s view so that he can think about it as he develops – well, at least as normal presidents develop strategy to handle Russia, to handle Afghanistan.” Maanvi Singh has news on California’s trouble coping with the Covid-19 pandemic: For a good while, it seemed California had skirted past calamity. It was the first US state to order residents to shelter in place in March, and its early, aggressive actions paid off. Despite it being the most populous state and an international hub with the largest number of direct flights to China, where the coronavirus first appeared, California’s death rate remained relatively low. By May, Disneyland announced plans to reopen. The nation’s top health official Dr Anthony Fauci praised Governor Gavin Newsom’s leadership. And as the weather warmed, Californians flooded back to beaches and bars. “We had reason to feel confident,” said Dr Bob Wachter, who chairs the department of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco. “And then, we hit some trouble.” A few outbreaks sparked an explosion, with an average of about 6,000 to 7,000 new cases each day over the past week. Los Angeles county began to count more residents sick with Covid-19 cases anywhere else in the nation and Disneyland postponed its reopening. As hospitalizations surged, the death toll climbed past 6,000, and ICU beds in some regions began filling to capacity, California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, ordered bars, restaurant dining rooms, cinemas and other indoor venues in the hardest-hit counties to close back up. Now, health officials and epidemiologists sifting through the rubble are left wondering how the Golden state lost its status as the public health golden child. You can read the full article below: CNN has offered a rather pointed response to Donald Trump after the president attacked the network for “manipulating the words and meaning of my 4th of July Speech.” CNN, in fact, had disproven reports on the internet that Trump had made a historical error in his speech. “What. Are. You. Talking. About? CNN fact-checked and dispelled the video clip that made it seem like you’d said Desert Storm happened in Vietnam,” wrote CNN’s PR department on Twitter.