First Thing: the US has passed a grim milestone – 100,000 Covid-19 deaths

Good morning.

More than 100,000 US citizens have died from the coronavirus, a toll almost three times that of any other country and more than the US lost in the Korean and Vietnam wars combined. The pandemic has laid bare the US’s brutal social faultlines – race, gender and poverty – writes Ed Pilkington, while the government’s abject failure to prepare for it exposed a broken politics. Here, loved ones pay tribute to a few of those who have lost their lives.

Donald Trump did not acknowledge the grim milestone on Wednesday, instead choosing to renew his attacks on the tech companies he claims are trying to censor him. Joe Biden released a video extending his condolences to all those who were grieving loved ones. Trump’s son Eric tweeted about the stock market, calling it a “GREAT DAY for the DOW!!”

• 20% of US citizens would choose not to get a Covid-19 vaccine if or when one is available, according to a poll. Even if such a vaccine were developed in the next 18 months, only 49% of respondents said they would agree to be immunised.  About one-third said they weren’t sure.

Trump is threatening to ‘close down’ social media companies

Days after Twitter slapped Trump’s tweets with a fact-check label for the first time, the president is set to sign an executive order that could expose Twitter and other large tech firms such as Facebook and Google to lawsuits over material posted by their users, according to Reuters.

On Wednesday morning Trump threatened to “strongly regulate” or “close down” social media platforms that he and his allies perceive as “silencing conservative voices”. In the evening, he tweeted again:

South Korea is locking down again after a new spike in cases

South Korea, one of the first countries to successfully contain the coronavirus, has reintroduced some lockdown measures in the capital, Seoul, after its biggest rise in infections for almost two months. The two-week closure of museums, galleries and parks in the city – which is home to half of the country’s 52 million people – comes after the Korean CDC reported 79 new infections on Thursday, 67 of them in the Seoul metropolitan area.

• France, Italy and Belgium have all taken steps to block the use of hydroxychloroquine, the anti-malarial drug that Trump has backed and says he is taking, as a Covid-19 treatment over concerns about the drug’s safety.

• Argentina’s security forces have cordoned off one of the country’s poorest slums after a surge of coronavirus cases, a move criticised by one of the leftwing government’s own ministers as “creating ghettoes for poor people”.

George Floyd’s sister says police should face murder charges

As protests over the police killing of George Floyd continued in Minneapolis on Wednesday, his sister, Bridget called for the officers involved in the incident to be charged with murder. Sports stars including LeBron James, Colin Kaepernick and Lewis Hamilton have expressed anger over the killing of another unarmed African American man by a white police officer.

• Everyday racism. A video of a man in Minneapolis questioning whether a group of black men were entitled to work out at his gym has gone viral. The men were entrepreneurs whose office is in the same block as the gym.

• Police abolition. The futile cycle of police killings, protest and promises of justice unfulfilled suggest police reform is not enough to address the problem, argues Derecka Purnell:

In other news …

• The US no longer considers Hong Kong autonomous and will cease to treat it as such for trade and economic purposes, Mike Pompeo has announced, as the Chinese parliament approved a new law stripping the territory of its freedoms.

• Brazil lost 4,633 sq miles of forest last year, according to a study that raises fresh alarm over the rate of deforestation under Jair Bolsonaro’s government. Another study noted a 27% increase in the destruction of tropical forests in eastern Brazil.

• The SpaceX-Nasa rocket launch was scrubbed owing to poor weather in Florida on Wednesday. The first crewed spaceflight from US soil since 2011 could now take off on Saturday.

• The US funded pro-democracy rock groups in Venezuela and encouraged them to write songs that would undermine the rule of the country’s late president Hugo Chávez, according to documents released after a Freedom of Information Act request.

Great reads

Gary Busey has a new reality show about pets

The star of Big Wednesday, who survived a serious Harley Davidson accident – and the Hollywood party scene – tells Simon Hattenstone about his new show, Pet Judge, in which he presides over a court in which litigants resolve quarrels about their pets. “None of the other judge shows hold a candle fire, bonfire or rocket to this.”

The free press is under threat worldwide

Journalists and publishers around the world increasingly face attacks on their work and on themselves, ranging from strategic lawsuits to targeted assassinations. Now the pandemic is being used as cover to crack down further on independent voices, as Gill Phillips reports.

Opinion: Lockdown turned my neighbourhood into Sesame Street

The lockdown has had an unexpected – and positive – effect on Krista Burton’s Minnesota neighbourhood, she says: she’s finally getting to know her neighbours.

Last Thing: RIP Larry Kramer, angry prophet of the Aids crisis

Larry Kramer, the gay rights titan and groundbreaking writer of the novel Faggots and the play The Normal Heart, has died aged 84, almost two decades after doctors gave him a year to live. Matthew Lopez pays tribute to the “angry prophet” of the Aids crisis.

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