Joe Biden and Kamala Harris call for nationwide mask mandate – live

Hi there, it’s Maanvi Singh, reporting from the West Coast.

We’re expecting Trump to deliver his press conference in a few minutes — and will keep you updated with news and fact checks.

Here’s a quick summary of what’s been happening today:

• Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are continuing to make the rounds as a president-vice-president duo. The pair announced they are calling for a nationwide mask mandate and said every governor should implement a mask mandate in their state.
• The Senate adjourned today with no coronavirus stimulus package in sight and will be out of session until after September 8. This means that millions of Americans will be left with low unemployment insurance for at least a few more weeks.
• Donald Trump announced a normalization of relations between Israel and the United Arab Emirates, with Israel agreeing to halt plans to annex parts of the West Bank. While Trump called it a “historic peace agreement”, Israel’s prime minister said on Thursday that the country will still annex parts of the West Bank but had agreed to a temporary halt.
• Former Trump fixer Michael Cohen released a teaser for his new book, Disloyal, which is slated to be released in September after attempts to stop publication from the Trump administration.

Vice president Mike Pence is continuing to put out some jabs toward his new Democratic opponent, sentor Kamala Harris, this time criticizing remarks she made about Americans’ eating habits and the environment.

Speaking at the “Farmers and Ranchers for Trump” launch event in Iowa, Pence told the crowd that Harris said during her primary campaign that she was concerned about the impact Americans’ diet was having on the diet. “She would change the change the dietary guidelines of this country to reduce the amount of red meat that Americans can eat,” Pence said, the crowd booing in response.

“Well I’ve got some red meat for you: We’re not going to let Joe Biden & Kamala Harris cut America’s meat!”

That supporters of the Green New Deal are out to ban hamburgers altogether has long been a talking point of conservatives. While Green New Deal advocates have indicated they want to work with farmers and ranchers to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, a complete ban on red meat has not been a part of the plan.

The teaser for Michael Cohen’s book is now out after the justice department issued a gag order, which has since been dropped, to stop the book’s publication.

The book, titled Disloyal: The True Story of the Former Personal Attorney to President Donald J Trump, is slated to be released sometime in September, ahead of the presidential election in November.

The book’s foreword is now available online and details Cohen’s feelings of bewilderment at seeing Trump for who he really is after being “Trump’s first call every morning and his last call every night”.

“In some ways, I knew him better than even his family did because I bore witness to the real man, in strip clubs, shady business meetings, and in the unguarded moments when he revealed who he really was: a cheat, a liar, a fraud, a bully, a racist, a predator, a con man,” Cohen, Trump’s former fixer, writes.

Cohen was serving a three-year prison on federal charges of tax evasion, making false statements, lying to Congress and facilitating illegal payments to silence women about their affairs with Trump. But Cohen was released in May after fears of Covid-19 spreading in federal prisons.

After tweeting that he was nearly finished with his book in July, Cohen was sent back to prison. The ACLU ended up joining a suit on his behalf to get him out, which was ultimately successful. A gag order from the justice department to halt the book’s publication was also dropped.

The Trump administration has made very obvious efforts to stop the publication of high-profile tell-alls, all which have been ultimately unsuccessful. Former national security adviser John Bolton book The Room Where It Happened was published was published in June and Mary L Trump’s, Trump’s niece, book Too Much and Never Enough was published in July.

The Senate has adjourned its session this afternoon without reaching an agreement with House Democrats on a new stimulus package. The Senate is slated to go back into regular session 8 September.

The Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, told senators that they would be called back to Capitol Hill with a 24-hour notice if a deal is reached. McConnell said that he hopes that a bipartisan deal can be reached “in the coming weeks”.

Earlier today the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, said that Democrats will come back to the negotiating table when Senate Republicans agree on a larger stimulus package. “We’re not inching away from their meager piecemeal proposal,” she said.

At the press conference, Pelosi had beside her a chart comparing the Democrats’ $3tn Heroes Act, which passed the House in June, to the $1tn Heals Act in the Senate. One line indicated that House Democrats want $100bn for rental assistance while Senate Republicans want nothing.

Without a new stimulus package, millions of Americans are left with much lower unemployment insurance since the federal government stopped giving an additional $600 a week at the end of July. The steep drop in income is expected to lead to widespread evictions.

Two new speakers slated to make appearances at next week’s Democratic National Convention were announced today. Billionaire and former NYC mayor Michael Bloomberg and entrepreneur Andrew Yang both announced today that they will be speaking at the virtual convention.

Yang and Bloomberg will be joining a list of former candidates including senators Bernie Sanders, Cory Booker, Elizabeth Warren and Amy Klobuchar. Pete Buttigieg is also slated to speak at the virtual convention.

After the Democratic National Committee, which runs the convention, announced the DNC’s speaker lineup, Yang tweeted that he was disappointed that he was not asked to speak. “I’ve got to be honest I kind of expected to speak,” he tweeted on Tuesday.

Ted Lieu, a US representative from California, tweeted in response his disappointment that there was little Asian American representation at the convention. “Asian Americans are the fastest increasing group in America, including in multiple swing states,” Lieu tweeted. “The gross underrepresentation of Asian American speakers in the four days of the DNC Convention is tone deaf and a slap in the face.”

In other mask news, Joe Biden and senator Kamala Harris emerged from a briefing with a panel of public health experts announcing their call for a nationwide mask mandate.

“Every single American should be wearing a mask when they’re outside for the next three months, at a minimum. Every governor should mandate — every governor should mandate mandatory mask wearing,” Biden said.

Biden, referring to Americans who refuse to wear a mask and say that it infringes on their individual rights, said “it’s not about your rights” but rather a person’s responsibility as an American.

“Be a patriot. Protect your fellow citizens,” he implored. “Protect your fellow citizens. Step up. Do the right thing.”

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) currently recommends that people wear masks in public to prevent the spread of Covid-19.

Georgia governor Brian Kemp has announced that he is dropping his lawsuit against the city of Atlanta for implementing a mask mandate, according to the AP.

The lawsuit against Atlanta mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms and the City Council was filed July 16, with Kemp claiming that it defied his executive order that said local governments cannot implement coronavirus measures that are stricter than the state’s regulations. While Kemp has strongly urged people to wear masks, he has not instituted a state-wide mandate.

Lawyers for the city argued that the city has the right to take action to protect the public. “In the absence of state leadership on this issue, local governments have stepped in to protect their citizens,” the city’s filing said.

Georgia has seen a spike of Covid-19 cases in the last month, seeing over 105,000 cases in the state in July alone.

Joe Biden told pool reporters in Wilmington, Delaware that Donald Trump’s comments about not giving more funding to the US Postal Service (USPS) to carry out mail-in voting was “pure Trump”.

“He doesn’t want an election,” he added.

On Fox Business today, Trump suggested that the $3.6 million Democrats say USPS need to carry out mail-in voting for the election in November is “something that will turn out to be fraudulent” and “election money, basically”.

He further outlined how not giving funding to “make the post office work” will mean not having universal mail-in voting, essentially confirming the motive Trump has to criticize and defund USPS.

In a statement, Biden campaign spokesperson Andrew Bates said that Trump’s attacks on mail-in voting is “an assault on our democracy and economy by a desperate man who’s terrified that the American people will force him to confront what he’s done everything in his power to escape for months”.

In a press conference earlier today, Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law and senior advisor, confirmed that he met with Kanye West in the wake of the rapper announcing his presidential run.

Kushner said that West is “a friend of mine” and that he has known him for 10 years. “He has some great ideas for what he’s like to see happen in the country and that’s why he has the candidacy that he’s been doing,” Kushner said. “There’s a lot of the issues that the president has championed that he admires.”

West has been a vocal support of Trump but announced he is running for president in July. His campaign has not gained momentum since he was too late to get on the ballot in most states. Instead, the campaign raised serious concerns about the state of West’s mental health in light of volatile statements West has made since announcing his run. West has been vocal about his experience with bipolar disorder.

It appears the normalization of relations agreement between Israel and the United Arab Emirates is not as ironed out as the Trump administration is suggesting.

According to Axios, Israel prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in a televised address Thursday night he is “committed to annexing parts of the West Bank” but temporarily suspended those plans to reach an agreement with the UAE. The plans to annex parts of the West Bank, which is Palestinian territory, has received global condemnation.

When announcing the agreement made between the US, UAE and Israel, Trump declared on Twitter that a “historic peace agreement” had been made. A tweet from UAE crown prince Mohamed bin Zayed al-Nahyan led on the fact that Israel agreed to “stop further annexation of Palestinian territories” and to begin creating a “roadmap” for a bilateral relationship between the two countries.

US representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez struck back at Donald Trump after comments he made this morning on Fox Business about US representative being “not even a smart person”.

Trump told Fox Business’ Maria Bartiromo that Joe Biden, if president, is likely going to fund the plans of Ocasio-Cortez. He then said, seemingly out of nowhere, said that “AOC was a poor student … this is not even a smart person.” He continued on saying that she says “good lines of stuff” and that “she yaps”.

In response, Ocasio-Cortez challenged Trump to release his college transcript.

College has recently become a sore topic for Trump with the publishing of “Too Much and Never Enough”, the book of his niece, Mary L. Trump, about the Trump family. In the book, Mary Trump divulged that her uncle paid someone to take the SATs for him to get into the University of Pennsylvania. Throughout the book, Mary Trump repeatedly remarks that her uncle was a bad student in school but cared about the credentials of a reputable college.

The massive waves of unemployment from stay-at-home order put in place to prevent the spread of Covid-19 has threatened the country with a potentially devastating mental health crisis.

Over the last few months, the federal and state governments have provided some protections to Americans suffering the worst economic effects from Covid-19, bolstering unemployment insurance and implementing eviction moratoriums. But those protections have expired for many, leaving a path to what could rapidly turn into disaster for the well-being of millions of people. The Guardian’s Nina Lakhani reports:

Covid-19 has upended almost every aspect of normal life for many people, resulting in an increase in multiple suicide risk factors while also weakening some of the protective ones.

“The pandemic has already generated a combination of factors associated with increased risk, including economic recession, access to firearms, and a generalized sense of anxiety and depression. I would not be surprised if this leads to an increase in suicide deaths,” said Jonathan Singer, president of the American Association of Suicidology and associate professor of social work at Loyola University in Chicago.

Kamala Harris will deliver her much-anticipated speech for the Democratic National Convention next week at the Chase Center in Wilmington, Delaware, the Delaware News Journal reported. The convention is set to be held virtually, with speakers such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the Obamas slated to make appearances online Monday through Thursday night. Biden will accept the nomination from Delaware on Thursday night.

Harris was announced to be a speaker at the convention earlier this week before it was revealed that she was Biden’s vice president pick.

The national conventions are usually the hallmark of the presidential election, marking the official end of the primaries and gearing the party toward the general election. The Democratic National Committee, which runs the convention, announced they would be holding a largely virtual convention due to the Covid-19 pandemic.

Biden announced last week that he would not be going to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where the convention was slated to be held. While the speeches and committee meetings will all be held virtually, the Democratic National Committee is still tethering the convention to Milkwaukee. The convention will gavel in and out from the city, and the role-call of states, where delegates from each states formally cast their votes for the nominee, will also be held in Milwaukee.

As Donald Trump is coming under fire for openly saying he refuses to support the US Postal Service since they will handle mail-in voting, a Trump campaign advisor retweeted a controversial op-ed questioning Kamala Harris’ eligibility to be vice president.

Jenna Ellis, a senior legal advisor on Trump’s campaign, retweeted an op-ed from Newsweek that argues Harris might not be eligible to be vice president since her parents were not born in the United States. Harris was born in Oakland, California, making her a citizen since birth.

Trump is, of course, remembered for feeding into the “birther” movement in 2008, furthering conspiracy theories that Barack Obama was not born in the United States, despite him being born in Honolulu, Hawaii. Such questions have never been raised so prominently for white presidential candidates, including the late John McCain, who was born in Panama.

In response to the op-ed and retweet from Ellis, Andrew Bates, a spokesperson for Joe Biden’s campaign, said that it is “unsurprising” that Trump and his campaign would “resort to wretched, demonstrably false lies in their pathetic desperation.”

Editors from Newsweek responded to the backlash to the op-ed, saying that the author was raising “a long-standing, somewhat arcane legal debate” about the wording of the 14th Amendment’s citizenship clause and has no connection to the birther movement.