Thursday, July 29 top stories
It is Thursday, July 29. Here are today’s top stories.
American gymnast Sunisa Lee won the gold medal for the Olympic all-around event, which was an inspiring moment for the U.S. team after Simone Biles withdrew from the competition. It is the fifth consecutive time that an American has won a gold medal.
Lee was born and raised in St. Paul, Minnesota and comes from a family of Hmong immigrants. Her family was seen cheering at a viewing party. Lee will attend Auburn University in the fall.
Actor Bob Odenkirk collapsed on the set of “Better Call Saul” on Tuesday. CBS News reported that he is now in stable condition after experiencing a heart-related incident. Odenkirk rose to fame from his role as a lawyer in “Breaking Bad,” with his role expanded in the “Better Call Saul” spinoff.
On Wednesday, over 754,000 people in the U.S. received Covid-19 vaccines. About 500,000 of those people received vaccines for the first time, which is the highest number reported since July 1. There is an 18% increase in vaccines compared with last week. President Joe Biden is encouraging states to pay $100 to Americans who haven’t been vaccinated. The money would come from the latest round of coronavirus stimulus packages.
Face masks are now required in all federal buildings in areas of high or substantial transmission, regardless of vaccination status.
The CDC has four indicators of community transmission of Covid-19: high, substantial, moderate, and low. The level is based on the amount of new Covid-19 cases per 100,000 people and the positivity rate over the past 7 days. It is supposed to represent the level of risk of contracting Covid-19.
You can see in this map that almost the entire southeastern U.S. and large parts of the country is in a period of high transmission. Red means high transmission, while orange is substantial.
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So, the U.S. map shows that we’re not doing good with controlling the spread of Covid-19. The World Health Organization said the U.S. has reported the highest number of new Covid-19 cases in the world over the past seven days with about 500,000 new cases.
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Axios reported that former Cardinal Theodore McCarrick has been charged with sexually assaulting a teenage boy in the 1970’s. He was defrocked in 2019 after the Vatican investigation found that he sexually abused both minors and adults. He is the first cardinal in the U.S. to be criminally charged with a sexual crime against a minor.
Actress Scarlett Johansson filed a lawsuit against Disney for breach of contract by releasing “Black Widow” on Disney+ at the same time it was released in theaters. Johansson said her contract states that a large part of her salary would be based on box-office performance and now she has lost out an estimated $50 million.
President Joe Biden asked Congress to extend the CDC’s national moratorium on evictions, which is set to expire on Saturday. The moratorium was put in place in September 2020 with the goal of protecting tenants who earn less than $99,000 a year from being evicted as a result of being unable to pay rent because of loss of income due to the Covid-19 pandemic. The moratorium was extended several times, but recently the Supreme Court ruled that the Biden administration couldn’t extend it past July 31 — saying only Congress can make that decision.
On the other side, a landlord group called the National Apartment Association is suing the U.S. government for back rent, saying the eviction moratorium caused them to rack up about $26 billion in rental debt. The landlords say they are unable to evict non-rent-paying tenants and they’re unable to generate income from the occupied rental units.
CBS News explained that the federal government has already authorized tens of billions of dollars in federal rental assistance funds that landlords can apply for, so it will be hard for landlords to prove that they suffered damages.
That is all the top stories for today. See you tomorrow and stay with the light.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/bob-odenkirk-hospital-stable-condition-heart-related-incident/
https://abcnews.go.com/Health/live-updates/covid-delta-variant-surge/?id=7905827
https://www.axios.com/eviction-moratorium-biden-congress-c7304c9b-4175-469c-be7b-8da0e794e926.html
https://variety.com/2021/film/news/scarlett-johansson-sues-disney-black-widow-1235030582/