monitoring Trump and relevant contemporary events

“Under-counting deaths in this particular epidemic is happening all over,” said Dr. Daniel Lopez-Acuna, an epidemiologist and former top World Health Organization (WHO) official, who spent 30 years at the organization. "It’s almost inevitable."

Calculating the precise number of COVID-19 deaths is remarkably complicated for a number of reasons. But leading epidemiologists, pathologists, medical examiners, medical history professors and local, state, federal and global health officials told ABC News that more testing is the single most important factor in determining an accurate national death count.

“We need to have the testing available because the big question now with COVID-19 is the denominator -- of anything,” said Dr. Alex Williamson of the College of American Pathologists. “How many people get it? How many people recover? How many are hospitalized? How many died? We don't know the true denominator. More testing is the most important thing we need to do.”

On Wednesday, President Donald Trump retracted his claim that the U.S. will soon be able to administer 5 million COVID-19 tests every day after his own testing director on the White House task force, Admiral Brett Giroir, emphatically rejected the possibility of that goal.

“Somebody started throwing around five million,” Trump told reporters, referring to a Harvard University study that found that reopening the economy would only be feasible if the government were able to do at least five million tests daily by early June, and then ramp it up to 20 million tests each day by late July.

“I didn’t say 5 million,” Trump said, despite the fact that he had said exactly that the day before.

On Tuesday, Trump had told a reporter that “we’re going to be there very soon” when she asked if the U.S. would be able to carry out 5 million tests a day.

That was the same day Giroir told TIME that “there is absolutely no way on Earth, on this planet or any other planet, that we can do 20 million tests a day, or even 5 million tests a day.”

The 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled against Kansas’ proof-of-citizenship voter registration requirement in a decision issued Wednesday.

The appeals court backed the trial judge’s finding that the requirement, which was championed by then-Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach (R), violated both the Equal Protection clause of the Constitution and the National Voter Registration Act.

The appeals court pointed to the record that been established during the 2018 trial that showed that some 30,000 Kansans were removed from the rolls due to the requirement. Kobach — who led the trial arguments for the state — could only provide 39 examples of noncitizens being registers to vote in Kansas within the last 19 years.

The death rate has shot up over here

Coronavirus has now hit veterans homes in 16 states

that's been debunked.

Redacted FBI document hints at Israeli efforts to help Trump in 2016 campaign

Affidavit quotes Trump confidant Roger Stone being told by a Jerusalem contact: ‘He is going to be defeated unless we intervene. We have critical intell. The key is in your hands!’

Roger Stone, a longtime confidant of President Donald Trump who was convicted last year in Robert Mueller’s investigation into ties between Russia and the Trump campaign, was in contact with one or more apparently well-connected Israelis at the height of the 2016 US presidential campaign, one of whom warned Stone that Trump was “going to be defeated unless we intervene” and promised “we have critical intell[sic].”

The exchange between Stone and this Jerusalem-based contact appears in FBI documents made public on Tuesday. The documents — FBI affidavits submitted to obtain search warrants in the criminal investigation into Stone — were released following a court case brought by The Associated Press and other media organizations...

Trump Appointees Manipulated Agency’s Payday Lending Research, Ex-Staffer Claims

A former economist at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau accused Trump appointees of steering the bureau’s reversal on payday lending rules to gut a key provision.

Last summer, on his final day of work at the nation’s consumer finance watchdog agency, a career economist sent colleagues a blunt memo.

He claimed that President Trump’s appointees at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau had manipulated the agency’s research process to justify altering a 2017 rule that would have sharply curtailed high-interest payday loans.

The departing staff member, Jonathan Lanning, detailed several maneuvers by his agency’s political overseers that he considered legally risky and scientifically indefensible, including pressuring staff economists to water down their findings on payday loans and use statistical gimmicks to downplay the harm consumers would suffer if the payday restrictions were repealed. A copy of the memo was obtained by The New York Times from a current bureau employee...

that he considered legally risky and scientifically indefensible,