Good morning. President Trump is pressuring schools to reopen in the fall. Civil rights groups are criticizing Facebook. And the virus outbreak in the U.S. Sunbelt is worse than in any country. |
Arizona is #1, Bahrain is #4 |
There is no country in the world where confirmed coronavirus cases are growing as rapidly as they are in Arizona, Florida or South Carolina. The Sun Belt has become the global virus capital. |
This chart ranks the countries with the most confirmed new cases over the past week, adjusted for population size, and treats each U.S. state as if it were a country. (Many states are larger in both landmass and population than some countries.) |
 | | By The New York Times | Sources: State and local health agencies and hospitals, Johns Hopkins University |
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The only countries with outbreaks as severe as those across the Sunbelt are Bahrain, Oman and Qatar — three Middle Eastern countries with large numbers of low-wage migrant workers who are not citizens. These workers often live in cramped quarters, with subpar social services, and many have contracted the virus. |
Other countries on the list — like Panama, Kazakhstan and Armenia — are substantially poorer than the U.S. |
Related: A few months ago, “the United States still seemed to have a chance of controlling Covid-19,” The Atlantic’s Ed Yong writes. “It didn’t. Instead, to the immense frustration of public-health advisers, leaders rushed to reopen while most states were still woefully unprepared.” |
In other virus developments: |
- President Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil announced that he had tested positive for Covid-19, after repeatedly denying the seriousness of the pandemic as it tore through his country.
- Sweden — which allowed the virus to spread largely unhindered — has Europe’s worst outbreak, and its economy has not benefited. “They literally gained nothing,” one economist said.
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- The federal government will pay the drugmaker Novavax $1.6 billion to develop a successful vaccine and produce 100 million doses by early 2021. It’s a big bet on a company that has never brought a product to market.
- Walt Disney World will reopen on Saturday, with special precautions to protect visitors. But as cases spike in Florida, some fans are urging Disney to postpone the return.
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 | | Jair Bolsonaro announcing his positive test result on Tuesday.Silvio Avila/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images |
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1. Trump pressures schools to reopen |
Many experts agree that the psychological and educational costs of keeping children at home full time would be steep. But schools also have the potential to spark new virus outbreaks if they are not opened carefully. And the Trump administration has offered no concrete proposals to help schools pay for testing, social distancing, improved ventilation and other measures to prevent outbreaks. |
 | | A fire in the Yakutia region of Siberia in early June.Yevgeny Sofroneyev/TASS, via Getty Images |
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Though some fires in the area are normal, the scale of the recent fires is not. Higher temperatures and drier soil seem to have made them worse, scientists said. And many studies have found that the changing weather in the Arctic may be influencing extreme weather events elsewhere. |
3. A Trump family tell-all |
The Times has obtained a copy of the forthcoming memoir by Mary Trump, the president’s niece and the first member of the Trump family to break ranks. The book describes him as a child in an adult’s body, whose “sociopath” father psychologically damaged him and who developed anger and distrust as defenses for insecurity. |
The book includes several family secrets, including the claim that a young Donald Trump paid someone to take the SAT for him. The White House denied that claim. |
4. Facebook meets with boycott organizers |
Facebook’s top executives, Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg, tried and failed to mollify civil rights groups that have criticized the company’s approach to hate speech and spurred a boycott by hundreds of advertisers. |
The groups, including the Anti-Defamation League and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, have asked Facebook to update its community standards, among other steps. “The company’s leaders delivered the same old talking points to try to placate us,” one participant told The Times. |
Another angle: An outside audit requested by Facebook found that it has not done enough to fight discrimination on its platform and has made some decisions that were “significant setbacks for civil rights,” according to a copy obtained by The Times. |
Here’s what else is happening |
 | | Postal workers in Los Angeles.Richard Vogel/Associated Press |
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- Hundreds of Postal Service trucks have burst into flames in recent years, Vice reports. Part of the problem appears to be the age of the fleet, which has been in continuous use since the early 1990s.
- Amy Kennedy — a former schoolteacher whose husband is a nephew of President John F. Kennedy and whom progressive groups backed but many party officials did not — won a House primary in New Jersey. She will take on Jeff Van Drew, a freshman Republican who won as a Democrat but then defected and pledged loyalty to Trump.
- Harper’s published an open letter signed by a multiracial group of prominent writers, academics and artists that warned against an “intolerant climate” that threatens the “free exchange of information and ideas.” Critics responded by calling the signatories privileged and not significantly concerned with injustice.
- Chief Justice John Roberts sustained a head injury last month that required a night at the hospital, a spokeswoman for the Supreme Court said. The chief justice did not disclose his fall until asked by The Washington Post.
- Lives Lived: When Mississippi needed her, Emma Sanders was there to house and feed the Freedom Summer volunteers. When the Black population had no Black representation, she stepped up to join the group challenging the all-white delegation of electors to the Democratic National Convention. And when Black candidates were needed, she ran for office. She died at 91.
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- How strong has partisanship become? This strong: Americans’ political party affiliation has had a bigger effect on whether they wear a mask or practice social distancing than has the level of the virus outbreaks where they live, Thomas Edsall explains in The Times.
- Germany’s reckoning with its Nazi past offers a blueprint for America’s reckoning with slavery and racism, the philosopher Susan Neiman argues. “Anti-racism, or facing up to your past, is not a vaccine. It’s not a one-shot option. It’s a process that you need to continue to go through, and it will change generationally,” she told The New Yorker’s Isaac Chotiner.
- Prosecutors have disqualified jurors for supporting the Black Lives Matter movement. Now some defense lawyers are fighting back, arguing that the disqualifications amount to unconstitutional discrimination, The Marshall Report’s Abbie VanSickle writes.
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 | | Julia Gartland for The New York Times |
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My family has a new pandemic ritual: Each weekend, we have a big grocery order delivered to our house, and my wife then drives some of it to her parents, who live nearby. It keeps us all out of the grocery stores and creates an excuse to see each other. It has also made me obsessed with sorrel. |
My father-in-law grows sorrel — a citrusy herb — in his garden and gives us a bunch each week. I drop it in a blender, along with lemon juice, olive oil, salt, pepper and sometimes cilantro, parsley or chives. Just like that, we have a brilliantly green sauce for the fresh fish that comes in our weekly grocery delivery. And I have to fight my kids to get my share. |
It’s been 14 years since America’s best-selling female band released a new album. And it’s been 17 years since “the incident,” as the trio formerly known as the Dixie Chicks calls it: when country-music radio stopped playing them after they criticized then-President George W. Bush. |
The Chicks are back now, though they never really left: They’ve won Grammys, done side projects and solo albums, performed onstage with Beyoncé and collaborated with Taylor Swift. Their superpower is what Natalie Maines, the lead singer, calls “a true ability to not care.” |
“In an industry that’s never really loved them or defended them, they became a testament to female self-reliance,” Amanda Hess writes in a profile of the band, whose new album is set for release. |
Introducing: The Decameron Project |
 | | The New York Times |
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There’s fiction written during quarantine by Margaret Atwood, Tommy Orange, David Mitchell and Yiyun Li, among others. If you’re unsure of where to begin, there’s a “surprise me” wild card located on the bottom right of the home page that’ll select a story for you. |
Thanks for spending part of your morning with The Times. See you tomorrow. — David |
Today’s episode of “The Daily” is about the coronavirus’s disproportionate effect on Black and Latino people in the U.S. |
Ian Prasad Philbrick and Sanam Yar contributed to The Morning. You can reach the team at themorning@nytimes.com. |
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