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Local liquor shops were shut under a local coronavirus lockdown in a village in Andhra Pradesh.

Sen. Tammy Duckworth may be on Biden’s VP shortlist. But when it comes to childcare during the pandemic, she’s just as confused as the rest of us. “So my choice is five hours of homeschooling every day for my daughter and failing her, because I’m not a trained educator, or sending her to a school where she could very likely get this virus or bring it home and get her 2-year-old sister sick or my 79-year-old mom, who lives with us,” Duckworth tells Molly Jong-Fast and Rick Wilson on the latest episode of The New Abnormal. “That’s the problem: impossible choices.”Duckworth also opens up about just how hostile the Senate was to working moms until a hot second ago. One particularly ridiculous question stands out. “They want to know if you’re gonna breastfeed on the floor. [And I said,] ‘I’m not exactly planning on whipping one out in front of them. But if the baby is hungry, I’ll feed her.’” Then Princeton’s Sam Wang talks about how national polling works, what it means for Biden, and the out-of-the-way campaigns that could make a huge difference for decades to come. Oh, and the elephant in the room: the United States Postal Service.“My biggest concern this year is the post office,” he says.‘Pretty Close to a Hundred’ New Epstein AccusersPlus, a Trump ambassador goes to a Nazi cemetery—and gets all wistful. A Republican candidate swears “celebrities and Democrats catch COVID and magically heal.” The Stephen Hawking of the U.S. House of Representatives displays his genius—at infecting everyone around him. And finally, Rick asks the big questions: Who’s more popular, Zombie Bin Laden or Ron DeSantis? Was Tulsa Trump’s Jonestown? And does Chuck Schumer realize that “he’s got Mitch McConnell’s balls in a bag for once?”Listen to The New Abnormal on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and Stitcher.Read more at The Daily Beast.Get our top stories in your inbox every day. Sign up now!Daily Beast Membership: Beast Inside goes deeper on the stories that matter to you. Learn more.

A carjacking suspect who had already been arrested shot three Chicago police officers as they attempted to escort him into custody on Thursday morning, authorities said.The gunman was being taken out of a patrol van and walked into Northwest Side police station at around 9.30am when he opened fire, hitting the officers.

Lives likely could've been saved if the White House had focused on people rather than politics when the pandemic began, Vanity Fair reports.Unlike other countries, the U.S. has struggled to present a unified national strategy on COVID-19 testing, and the country now leads the world both in confirmed coronavirus cases and deaths. But it reportedly had experts developing a testing plan since the virus' beginnings -- and then scrapped it entirely once it appeared the virus was largely hitting Democratic states, one expert tells Vanity Fair.Despite his lack of scientific or governmental experience, President Trump's son-in-law and senior adviser Jared Kushner took charge of the testing plan and stacked a team with "bankers and billionaires," Vanity Fair writes. But diagnostic testing experts were eventually called in, and the team created a plan to tackle testing supply shortages and delays in reporting results."The plan, though imperfect, was a starting point," Vanity Fair writes, and "would have put us in a fundamentally different place" today, one person who worked on it said. But it faced resistance from the top of the White House, where Trump reportedly worried high test numbers would hurt the economy and his re-election prospects. And perhaps most disturbingly, one member of the team suggested there was no point in rolling out the plan because the virus seemed to be hitting blue states, an expert told Vanity Fair. "The political folks believed that because it was going to be relegated to Democratic states, that they could blame those governors, and that would be an effective political strategy," the expert said.All of that might explain why Kushner was so hopeful just a few months ago. > Jared Kushner, April 29: "I think you'll see by June a lot of the country should be back to normal and the hope is that by July, the country's really rocking again."> > July 31: > > .> > -- Edward-Isaac Dovere (@IsaacDovere) July 31, 2020More stories from theweek.com Could America split up? New Lincoln Project video imagines what it's like to wake up from a coma in 2020 St. Louis Cardinals are now the 3rd MLB team with positive COVID-19 tests

Mississippi also reported a record increase in deaths on Friday, with fatalities rising by 52. Florida also reported 9,007 new cases, bringing its total infections to over 470,000, the second highest in the country behind California. Florida's total death toll rose to nearly 7,000, the eighth highest in the nation, according to a Reuters tally.

The number of Americans researching how to move New Zealand, where the coronavirus pandemic has been kept under control, has risen 160 per cent.According to The New Zealand Herald, some 112,800 more Americans visited New Zealand’s immigration website last month compared to the same time last year.

U.S. President Donald Trump's top immigration enforcement official on Friday announced he will retire from the agency, a staffing shakeup in a key policy area for Trump as he faces re-election in November. Matthew Albence, acting director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), said in a statement that his plan to retire had been prolonged by the coronavirus pandemic. The pandemic has created challenges for ICE operations both in the field and in immigration detention centers, where nearly 4,000 immigrants have tested positive for the disease.

The former president used a portion of his eulogy for the late civil rights leader to endorse several voting reform policies.

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis on Friday declared a state of emergency for counties on the Atlantic coast with Hurricane Isaias expected to hit the state as early as this evening before moving up north into early next week. The hurricane, packing maximum sustained winds of 75 miles (120.7 km) per hour, is currently lashing the southeastern part of the Bahamas and the Turks and Caicos Islands, the U.S. National Hurricane Center (NHC) said on its Twitter feed. The NHC said heavy rains may begin to affect south and east-Central Florida beginning late Friday night, and the eastern Carolinas by early next week, potentially causing flooding in low-lying areas.

Former president Bill Clinton traveled with Jeffrey Epstein to his private island and stayed there with "two young girls" from New York, according to a recently-unsealed interview of prominent Epstein accuser Virginia Roberts Giuffre.“I remember asking Jeffrey what's Bill Clinton doing here kind of thing, and he laughed it off and said ‘well he owes me a favor,” Guiffre told lawyer Jack Scarola in a 2011 phone interview."He never told me what favors they were," Guiffre explained. "I never knew. I didn't know if he was serious. It was just a joke . . . He told me a long time ago that everyone owes him favors. They're all in each other's pockets."Giuffre then said that “orgies were a constant thing that took place” on the island, but did not say specifically whether Clinton was involved.The document was released with others as part of unsealing in the case against Epstein’s former girlfriend and alleged accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell, who has pled not guilty to charges that she recruited and groomed girls for the dead financier to sexually abuse.Last year, Clinton denied ever visiting Epstein’s island, Little St. James, and said through a spokesman that he “knows nothing” about Epstein’s crimes. But he acknowledged flying with Epstein on his private jet on four trips from 2002-2003, which “included stops in connection with the work of the Clinton foundation.”> Statement on Jeffrey Epstein. pic.twitter.com/98ha9YYd1l> > -- Angel Ureña (@angelurena) July 8, 2019Epstein’s lawyers said in a 2007 letter to federal authorities that the disgraced financier “was part of the original group that conceived the Clinton Global Initiative,” a wing of the Clinton Foundation which aimed to connect global leaders for solving “the world’s most pressing challenges.”

The next named storm of the 2020 Atlantic hurricane season is Isaias. Here's how tropical storms get their names.

Federal police forces will remain in Portland until Trump administration officials determine the Oregon governor, a Democrat, has a plan that is working to quell protests and violence there, says Acting Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf."Law enforcement officers that have been there over the past 60 days will remain there in Portland until we are assured that the plan that has been put in place by the governor and Oregon State Police will be effective night after night," Mr Wolf told Fox News on Friday morning.

First Read is your briefing from "Meet the Press" and the NBC Political Unit on the day's most important political stories and why they matter.

Christian Brückner's lawyer has described the excavation of a Hannover allotment by police as "a pure desperate act" in his first statement on the case. Friedrich Sebastian Fülscher, representing the 43-year-old lead suspect in the disappearance of Madeleine McCann, issued the statement in response to the two-day search by Braunschweig police at an allotment plot just outside Hannover earlier this week. Federal officers uncovered a sealed cellar on Wednesday. Locals said Brückner had stayed in the area in 2007, the year in which three-year-old Madeleine went missing from Praia da Luz in Portugal. Brückner is currently serving a sentence for drugs charges, but it was revealed on Friday that his lawyers have put in a new bid for his release, meaning he could walk free on January 7. In a statement on Friday, Mr Fülscher called the search "a pure desperate act of the public prosecutor's office". "Apparently, it's hard for investigators to admit they backed the wrong horse," the lawyer said. "My client is silent on the charges, but that doesn't mean he has anything to hide." Discussing the rape of a 72-year-old American woman for which Brückner was jailed for seven years last year, which he continues to deny, Mr Fülscher said it was "totally unusual" for someone to be a both a paedophile and a gerontophile.

A Chicago woman who became the nation's first COVID-19 patient to undergo a double lung transplant said, "I looked at myself and couldn’t recognize my body."

Russian authorities said on Friday they had opened a criminal case against an opposition Moscow city councillor who had planned a rally against President Vladimir Putin because she had allegedly violated laws on street protests. The Moscow branch of Russia's Investigative Committee, the body that probes serious crimes, said Yulia Galyamina had "repeatedly violated the established procedure" for organising and staging protests, rallies and pickets. Galyamina was involved in a campaign against what she said were Putin's illegal plans to remain in power.

Trump overestimated how much voters fear ‘antifa’ - and underestimated how terrible his ham-fisted authoritarianism would look Opponents of Donald Trump often describe him as a “political genius” who has a cunning understanding of the anxieties and fears of American society, and is able to create and use crises to his favor. The current standoff in Portland shows, yet again, that this is not the case. While his alleged fight against antifa will satisfy some of his far-right supporters, it increasingly risks further alienating the so-called “moderate” Republicans – which seems mostly used to describe better-off pocketbook Republican voters – who are already feeling uneasy over his Covid-19 handling and the economic fallout of the pandemic.An almost ignored aspect of the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic is that Trump failed to use it to push through his authoritarian agenda by increasing executive powers, weakening the powers of other institutions, like Congress, and marginalizing dissent, for instance by banning demonstrations. Almost all other countries implemented a more repressive approach to Covid-19, including those governed by progressive parties (like Spain), while most far-right governments used it to push through draconian repressive measures (such as Hungary and India).Of course, the explanation is that Trump initially denied and ignored the dangers of Covid-19, arguing that “it’s going to work out fine” and “the warmer weather” would take care of it. This made it difficult for him to later shift to an authoritarian approach. Difficult, but certainly not impossible. But clearly Trump never wanted to. Instead, he kept insisting on an economic approach to re-election, repositioning himself as the savior of the US economy, and aggressively pushing for the “reopening of America”.A second opportunity to push through an authoritarian agenda came with the Black Lives Matter protests in the wake of the killings of Ahmaud Arbery, George Floyd and Breonna Taylor this spring. Trump’s response was as expected, playing to the broader Republican electorate’s racialized fears about chaos and rioting. In the 15 days between Floyd’s murder and funeral, Trump tweeted 195 times about unrest, law enforcement and the threat of military use.But rather than prioritizing the race card, his natural response, Trump quite quickly redefined the Black Lives Matter protests as antifa protests. This redefinition was in line with two longer-term processes within the Trump camp. First, Trump seems to truly believe that he has a shot at significantly increasing his support among African Americans. For instance, he has long boasted that his administration “has done more for the Black Community than any President since Abraham Lincoln”. (Needless to say this is not true.)Second, antifa has become a popular bogeyman within the broader conservative movement, at least since the provocative campus visits of (former) rightwing darlings like Milo Yiannopoulos in the early days of the Trump presidency. The altercations between far-right and Antifa activists, blown out of proportion by mainstream media, were happily incorporated into rightwing propaganda, and Antifa became a favorite topic of many of the president’s favorite shows on Fox News.Trump became increasingly obsessed with antifa. He also spread conspiracy theories about antifa, parroting far-right media – like his new favorite television channel, One America News Network (OANN) – as well as far-right social media accounts. He even tweeted his intention to designate “ANTIFA” as a terrorist organization, an almost certainly unconstitutional move.Strengthened by the information from his rightwing bubble, the Portland protests must have looked like a golden opportunity to him. Portland has long been one of the main symbols of leftwing politics in the US – it’s viewed positively by progressives, despite slightly mocking programs like Portlandia, and negatively by the right wing.But the problem is that the Portland protests play only to one of Trump’s ideological strongholds: authoritarianism. Given that Portland is the whitest big city in the US, the vast majority of protesters are white, which leaves his biggest asset, racism, largely irrelevant. Similarly, populism is largely useless, as few people will believe that “the elite” live in, or deeply care for, Portland – unlike, for instance, New York.Portland is not only a bad choice because of the limited appeal to the broader Republican electorate. It could also seriously backfire. Police brutality against small, and even radical, groups of protesters could lead to broader support for the protesters.This happened, for instance, at the Euromaidan protests in Ukraine in 2013-14, and it seems to be happening now in Portland too. As Trump’s “little green men” are picking up peaceful protesters from the streets, without adequate identification and in unmarked cars, the discussion is moving away from the alleged violence by antifa to the threat to US democracy posed by the Trump administration.The redefinition of the protests goes hand in hand with the diversification of the protesters. No longer are the protesters just young, white “anarchists” who can count on little particular sympathy outside of small progressive circles; now stalwarts of America’s conservative society are represented too: mothers and veterans. And they are arrested, beaten and teargassed too.In a society as deeply militarized and patriarchal as America, vets and mothers are powerful symbols of the existing order. Seeing them protest against the government, and particularly a dubious and unnecessarily violent paramilitary unit, is a publicity problem for the Trump administration. These are the salt of the earth of the Republican electorate, who will not automatically assume these groups are in the wrong. Moreover, many Republicans will have much less tolerance for disproportionate repression to white moms and vets than they sadly have towards African Americans and white leftwing youths.In short, Trump’s decision to “unleash” authoritarianism in Portland was a poor one. Having ignoring much better opportunities like Covid-19 and the Black Lives Matter protests, he is caught in a confrontation that enthuses only a part of his base and increasingly worries the broader Republican electorate. And as the public image of the Portland protester is more and more reflecting some stalwarts of American society, and therefore the Republican electorate, Trump might be increasingly fighting himself.The fact that the federal police are now being withdrawn from Portland shows that even Trump has realized his mistake. * Cas Mudde is the Stanley Wade Shelton UGAF professor of international affairs at the University of Georgia, the author of The Far Right Today (2019), and host of the new podcast Radikaal

A search is on after an incident involving an amphibious vehicle from Camp Pendleton, near San Diego.

Daniel Perry's lawyers assert he did it in self-defense after the demonstrator aimed a rifle at him in his car. But some accounts say the driver was the aggressor.

The Florida PBA makes its first endorsement in eight years; PBA President John Kazanjian explains ahead of his meeting with the president.