First Thing: US finally ‘turning the corner’ on the Covid crisis
Good morning.
More than a year after coronavirus hit the US, killing more than half a million Americans to date, the White House declared yesterday that the country was finally “turning the corner” on the pandemic. But with infections, hospital admissions and deaths dramatically lower, the Biden administration faces growing pressure to help countries that are still in the grip of Covid-19.
“We are turning the corner,” Jeffrey Zients, the White House Covid response coordinator, said. He also said the country was on track to meet Joe Biden’s goal of getting a minimum of 70% of Americans at least partially vaccinated by 4 July. “The light at the end of the tunnel is brighter and brighter,” he said. It comes after the World Health Organization (WHO) said the inequity in vaccine access was “grotesque” and a “moral outrage” as the pandemic continued to rage in India and across south Asia.
How many Americans have been vaccinated so far? About 58% of adults have had at least one shot and about 113 million are fully vaccinated. In stark contrast, in some countries in Africa only 1% of the population has been vaccinated.
But some people are reluctant to give up mask-wearing, writes Julia Carrie Wong.
Israeli police storm sacred Jerusalem site after all-night clashes
Israeli police stormed a sacred Jerusalem site that holds the Dome of the Rock after all-night clashes with Palestinian protesters. The violence came before a planned Jerusalem Day march today by hardline Israeli nationalists.
About 180 people were injured overnight, according to the Palestine Red Crescent, and 50 were admitted to hospital after officers in riot gear clashed with demonstrators in East Jerusalem.
Republicans are gearing up to oust Liz Cheney
Republican infighting is expected to come to a climax this week, encouraged by Donald Trump, as they prepare to remove Liz Cheney as the party’s number three leader in the chamber as punishment for her public criticism of the former president.
It comes after the congresswoman from Wyoming spoke out against Trump for his role in inciting the 6 January Capitol insurrection and his claims that the election was stolen from him. She was one of 10 Republicans to vote in favor of his second impeachment.
In a bad sign for Cheney, Kevin McCarthy, the House minority leader who has previously defended her, said he was endorsing her rival Elise Stefanik.
Despite his election loss, Trump has burrowed so far into the DNA of the Republican party that the two are now all but inseparable, writes our Washington DC bureau chief, David Smith.
Gunman kills six in Colorado
Colorado was today mourning the victims of yet another deadly shooting after a gunman opened fire at a birthday party, killing six adults before killing himself. Police said the shooting, in the early hours of Sunday, was in a mobile home park on the east side of Colorado Springs.
The suspected shooter was the boyfriend of a female victim at the party, which was attended by friends, family and children. It was the state’s worst mass shooting since a gunman killed 10 people at a supermarket in Boulder on 22 March. The Colorado governor, Jared Polis, said the latest shooting was “devastating”.
In other news …
The opioid crisis was “manufactured”, the maker of a damning documentary about its origins has claimed in an interview with the Guardian. Alex Gibney’s two-part HBO docuseries The Crime of the Century reframes the crisis, which killed nearly half a million Americans between 2000 and 2019, as a crime of fraudulent marketing and corporate greed. “The crisis was manufactured. It was not something that just happened,” he tells Adrian Horton.
The Biden administration issued an emergency declaration yesterday to avoid fuel shortages after the US’s worst ever infrastructure cyber-attack shut down a vital pipeline supplying the east coast. The pipeline, run by Colonial Pipeline, carries gasoline and other fuel from Texas to the north-east and carries about 45% of fuel used on the east coast.
The Myanmar poet Khet Thi has died in detention and his body returned with the organs removed, according to his family. His wife said they were both taken for interrogation on Saturday. Khet Thi, whose Facebook page stated he was 45, wrote the line: “They shoot in the head but they don’t know the revolution is in the heart.”
Stat of the day: more than half of restaurant workers are thinking about leaving their jobs, with most citing insufficient pay
Amid an unprecedented shortage of job applicants for restaurant jobs in the US, a survey by One Fair Wage of more than 2,800 workers, revealed that 53% were thinking about quitting. Of those, 76% said they wanted to leave because of low wages and tips, while 78% said they might stay if they were paid a “full, stable, liveable wage”.
Don’t miss this: my year of miscarriages and how I got through it
In this moving piece, Alexandra King describes finding comfort in baking after multiple miscarriages. The writer describes going between miscarriage message boards and bread-baking threads with “lots of men living in Wisconsin named Dave and Mike”. “No buns in my oven, at least not for long anyway. But I had to do something. So I banged out sourdough loaves by the dozen,” writes King.
Last Thing: how lockdown has transformed our hair
First there was the lockdown fringe, and more recently the shaggy mullet, but the latest haircut to hit Zoom screens? The hime. It has been worn by celebrities including Haim, Taylor Swift and Selena Gomez and the hashtag #hime has more than 126m views on TikTok. The style is of Japanese origin, writes Priya Elan, and features bluntly cut straight side-locks and a fringe. “The popularity of the cut is down to lockdown,” says Rachael Gibson, who runs the Hair Historian Instagram account, “and our ongoing communication through screens.”
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