As some states ease lockdowns, US COVID-19 death toll passes 50,000

Japan: Quality checks were being carried out on all the masks being doled out to every household India’s prime minister says the country’s 1.3 billion people are bravely fighting the coronavirus epidemic For weeks, advisers have been urging the president to scale back his appearances at the briefings, saying that he should come before the cameras only when there is major news or a positive development to discuss, according to the officials. Trump says his comments were misrepresented and that he's only posing ideas to battle the virus, but historians say a president's words carry such weight that musings are dangerous, especially during a pandemic. Among the legacies of the outbreak, a CBO report says, is a pile of trillions of dollars of debt, amassed by a political system that has proved incapable of taking even small steps to constrain this problem. The CBO said lawmakers eventually will be forced to tackle the government’s chronic financial woes, if for no other reason than the looming insolvency of Social Security and Medicare. The bill is the latest effort by the federal government to help keep afloat businesses that have had to close or dramatically alter their operations as states work to slow the spread of the virus. William Bryan of the Department of Homeland Security said at a White House briefing on Thursday “emerging results” from new research suggest solar light has a powerful effect in killing the virus on surfaces and in the air. The Pentagon says the USNS Comfort, a Navy hospital ship that has been in New York harbor for several weeks to help fight the coronavirus, will return to its home port of Norfolk, Virginia. Japanese government spokesman Yoshihide Suga said Friday quality checks were being carried out on all the masks being doled out to every household after some turned out to be dirty and defective. The handouts to 50 million households, have been pejoratively dubbed “AbenoMask” by the Japanese public, a take on Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s “Abenomics” economic policies.