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Virginia's governor says the monument to the Confederate general will be taken down in Richmond.

Protesters particularly in cities that have struggled to control the novel coronavirus should "highly consider" getting tested for COVID-19, the illness caused by the virus, a top U.S. health official said on Thursday. "Those individuals that have partaken in these peaceful protests or have been out protesting, and particularly if they're in metropolitan areas that really haven't controlled the outbreak...we really want those individuals to highly consider being evaluated and get tested," Robert Redfield, director for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, told a U.S. House of Representatives committee. Redfield also said the World Health Organization (WHO) continues to be a close colleague in public health efforts.

Travis McMichael used the phrase while Ahmaud Arbery was on the ground, a Georgia court hears.

The DOT has now banned Chinese airlines from the U.S., an added burden for Chinese students already stuck here because of their own government’s policies.

Three former Minneapolis police officers charged as accomplices to the killing of George Floyd are set to make their first court appearance on Thursday after Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison announced that they face charges of abetting and aiding second-degree murder and second-degree manslaughter.J Alexander Kueng, Thomas Lane and Tou Thao are each charged with one count, considered "unintentional" felonies. They are currently in custody in Hennepin County Jail.

It comes as lawmakers approve a controversial bill criminalising insulting China's national anthem.

A U.S. Navy veteran held in Iran for the past two years has been freed.Michael White, 48, was detained in July 2018 after traveling to Iran to see a woman he had met online and fell in love with. White was sentenced to 10 years in prison in March 2019, in part for insulting Iran's supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.In March 2020 White was hospitalized with coronavirus symptoms and was furloughed along with other prisoners after the pathogen swept through Iranian jails. White's release to the U.S. is part of a prisoner swap the details of which will be released on Thursday, U.S. officials told the Associated Press."I am blessed to announce that the nightmare is over, and my son is safely in American custody and on his way home," White's mother Joanne said in a statement. "I am incredibly grateful to the Administration, especially the team at the State Department for their work on Michael’s case."The Navy veteran was on a Swiss government plane to Zurich as of Thursday morning, and from there he will be flown to the U.S. with the Trump administration's special envoy to Iran Brian Hook. Switzerland maintains an embassy in Tehran and often acts as a go-between for negotiations between Iran and the U.S.There are currently at least three other American citizens held in Iran.

Jordan said on Thursday it would reopen hotels and cafes, allow sporting events without spectators and shorten a night curfew as of Saturday, further easing its coronavirus lockdown that has hit the aid-dependent economy. Jordan has withstood the COVID-19 pandemic better than most regional neighbours after taking early steps in mid-March to restrict the mobility of its 10 million people, sealing its borders, imposing a state of emergency and a night curfew. The economy was already struggling with sluggish growth before the crisis.

We are bringing you the top headlines on COVID-19 from the US and around the world.

Drivers naturally become concerned about reliability as a car ages, since the risk of inconvenience and unexpected expenses rises while the miles rack up. Most modern cars can make it to 200,000 ...

Sean Monterrosa, 22, was outside a Walgreens that police say was being looted when he ran, then stopped in a half-kneeling position, police said.

Tens of thousands of people across Hong Kong lit candles and chanted democracy slogans on Thursday to commemorate China's deadly Tiananmen crackdown, defying a ban against gathering as tensions seethed over a planned new security law. The biggest crowds descended on Victoria Park that has hosted huge Tiananmen anniversary vigils for the past three decades, with smaller rallies erupting in multiple shopping districts and local neighbourhoods. The displays of resistance came hours after Hong Kong's legislature passed a bill criminalising insults to China's national anthem, which the pro-democracy movement sees as yet another example of eroding freedoms.

Nearly 30,000 COVID-19 tests which Britain sent to a U.S. lab for processing came back void, Prime Minister Boris Johnson's spokesman said on Thursday, adding to a mounting pile of questions over the UK's testing regime. Johnson's spokesman said that "operational issues in our lab network" had meant that 67,000 tests were sent to the United States for processing.

While other older weapons were also designed without such joint capabilities, technology and warfare have advanced and so, too, has the need to develop solutions to provide commanders the flexibility and overmatch they may require and this has given rise to integration as the central principle of weapon system development.

North Korea on Wednesday excoriated the U.S. in the midst of George Floyd demonstrations, comparing the country to a setting sun with China rising."Demonstrators enraged by the extreme racists throng even to the White House," read a statement in North Korean state newspaper Rodong Sinmun, translated in the New York Times. "This is the reality in the U.S. today. American liberalism and democracy put the cap of leftist on the demonstrators and threaten to unleash even dogs for suppression."The statement slammed U.S. secretary of state Mike Pompeo, who on Sunday told Fox News's Sunday Morning Futures that the Chinese Communist Party is "intent upon the destruction of Western ideas, Western democracies, Western values.""Pompeo, who has been deeply engrossed in espionage and plot-breeding against other countries, has become too ignorant to discern where the sun rises and where it sets," the statement read.The U.S. has kept sanctions against North Korea in place as negotiations over ending the country's nuclear program have stalled. Last week, the U.S. Justice Department charged 28 North Koreans and five Chinese citizens with laundering $2.5 billion through North Korea's state-owned bank, funds which were ultimately put toward the nuclear program.North Korea on Thursday also criticized defectors to the South who have been sending anti-regime propaganda across the border by balloon. North Korean leader Kim Jong-un's sister, Kim Yo-Jong, threatened to end a ceasefire agreement between the two nations that provides for a joint liaison office at the border."What matters is that those human scum hardly worth their value as human beings had the temerity of faulting our supreme leadership," Kim Yo-Jong said."We are no longer slaves of North Korea, we are citizens of a free South Korea with an obligation to speak the truth," Park Sang-hak, a defector who leads activist group Fighters for Free North Korea, told the Times.

COVID-19 deaths in Brazil reached record highs on Tuesday and Wednesday. Its president has so far refused to take the illness seriously.

The North Korean leadership has called the balloon-senders "human scum" and "mongrel dogs".

Driving vehicles into protesters demanding justice for George Floyd earned the backing of the mayor, but of few others * George Floyd killing – latest US updates * See all our George Floyd coverageIt doesn’t take long to blow up a reputation. In the case of the New York police department, an institution with an already troubled history, the clip lasted all of 27 seconds.It showed an NYPD vehicle in Brooklyn lined up against a metal barricade behind which protesters were chanting during Saturday’s demonstrations over the police killing of George Floyd. Projectiles were thrown on to the roof of the car, then suddenly a second police SUV drew up alongside and instead of stopping continued to plough straight into the crowd.Seconds later the first vehicle lurched forward, knocking the barrier over and with it propelling several protesters to the ground amid a harrowing chorus of shrieking.A 27-second video, now viewed more than 30m times, had quickly shredded years of effort to repair the deeply tarnished image of the NYPD. New York’s “finest” were firmly cast in a role normally reserved for the security corps of petty dictators.The shocking video was compounded hours later when the mayor of New York, Bill de Blasio, spoke about the incident. A politician who won election in 2013 largely on a promise to reform the NYPD and scrap its racially discriminatory stop-and-frisk policy, astounded even his closest supporters when he defended the police.De Blasio said: “I do believe the NYPD has acted appropriately.”Social media lit up. Was it appropriate to drive those two SUVs into the crowd? Was it appropriate for an NYPD officer forcibly to remove the coronavirus mask of a black protester whose arms were raised in the air, then pepper-spray his face?Was it appropriate for another officer to tell a protester to get off the street, then physically shove her several feet towards the curb where she landed on her head? Or that the police officers involved in the pepper spray incident had covered their badge numbers, presumably to avoid having to answer for their actions. Or to beat a nurse walking home from a shift at a hospital?The clashes between New York’s police and its protesters have reverberated around the city. The largest police force in the US, with its $5.6bn annual budget and 36,000 uniformed officers under the leadership of one of the most progressive mayors in the country, has responded to demonstrations about police brutality with more police brutality.The Black, Latino and Asian Caucus of the city council, which makes up more than half of the legislative body, was swift and devastating in its criticism. In a statement, it said that the NYPD had acted “with aggression towards New Yorkers who vigorously and vociferously but nonetheless peacefully advocated for justice”.Adrienne Adams, co-chair of the caucus, told the Guardian the NYPD had tried to suppress legitimate anger felt by African American and other minority communities following years of police abuse. “We cannot allow people who have kept people of color down for decades to say now that we don’t have the right to display our outrage,” she said.Though that sentiment applies nationwide, Adams believes New York stands out as having a “horrible history of police brutality”. It was the NYPD that set the tone, she said, when Daniel Pantaleo, the officer implicated in the 2014 death by chokehold of Eric Garner in Staten Island, avoided prosecution.“When nothing happened to the police officers who were responsible for the death of Eric Garner, New York set the blueprint for what happened to George Floyd,” she said. “There’s no penalty, no consequence, so it’s OK.”Adams’s framing of the Garner killing could equally be applied to a long string of notorious episodes of police misconduct that preceded it. In 1997, Haitian immigrant Abner Louima was handcuffed by an NYPD officer and sexually assaulted with a broken broomstick.Two years later, Amadou Diallo was shot near his home in a hail of 41 bullets after officers mistook his wallet for a gun. In an echo of that event, an unarmed Sean Bell was shot 50 times in Queens on the morning of his wedding in 2006 – it took six years for the NYPD detective who opened the fusillade to be chucked off the force while nobody has ever been convicted of any crime.In the policing of protest, the NYPD also has a contentious track record. In 2004 it rounded up more than 1,800 peaceful protesters rallying outside the Republican National Convention during the re-election bid of George W Bush and herded them into overcrowded pens on Pier 57 in Manhattan. In 2011 it was similarly criticized for heavy-handed tactics during the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations.Cutting across all this, the force has consistently targeted its efforts on neighborhoods of the city with majority black or Latino populations, straying at times into overt racial profiling. Though stop and frisk has been reined back in recent years, the NYPD continues to heavily and disproportionately police those communities despite a historically low homicide rate.Despite this long legacy of overreach, the force continues to be systemically resistant to public oversight. Under Section 50-A of New York state law, the disciplinary files of police officers are largely held in secret, making the task of holding them accountable almost impossible.Jennvine Wong, a staff attorney at the Cop Accountability Project (CAP) within the Legal Aid Society, told the Guardian that there were currently more than 200 police officers still being employed by the NYPD on full pay who should have been considered for termination following reports of misconduct.Data collected by CAP shows that where cases of misconduct arise they often involve escalation of low-level encounters into aggressive confrontations – something officers are supposed to be trained not to do. The project is currently litigating the case of Tomas Medina who was put in a chokehold and Tasered in 2018 after police were called to a complaint about loud music being played.Eric Garner’s fatal arrest was triggered by him allegedly selling single cigarettes.Although the use of chokeholds has been banned in New York, the project has found that between 2015 and 2018 the city settled 30 lawsuits involving NYPD use of the potentially lethal maneuver.Wong believes such endemic deployment of excessive force has spilled over into the NYPD’s handling of the George Floyd protests. She was present at a peaceful protest in Brooklyn that suddenly turned volatile not because of the behavior of protesters but by a sudden change of tack on the part of the police.“In a split second, the NYPD snapped and engaged in over-aggressive enforcement. They escalated it from 0 to 10 out of nowhere, arresting people and wielding their batons.”If there has been unrestrained use of batons in the city, it would be with the full approval of Ed Mullins, the provocative president of one of the main police unions, the Sergeants Benevolent Association (SBA). He wrote to members urging “each and every one of you to report for duty with your helmet and baton and do not hesitate to utilize that equipment in securing your personal safety”.The sister Police Benevolent Association of New York City has also spoken to its members in inflammatory terms about them being “under attack by violent, organized terrorists while New York City council and other politicians sit at home demanding we ‘de-escalate’”.There is no denying that the NYPD faces difficult challenges in the policing of mass protests, especially late at night when violent outbreaks have erupted as they did on Monday in Manhattan and the Bronx. Fires were started in the street and stores looted.For Eugene O’Donnell, a former NYPD officer and prosecutor in Brooklyn and Queens who is now a professor of police studies at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, Monday night’s spectacle of looting along Fifth Avenue amounted to a collapse of policing in the city.“This weekend, the job of police officer in New York became officially impossible when the police abolitionists won. They have created a model of zero tolerance towards force being used and any injuries being inflicted, and that’s absurd.”O’Donnell said the same pattern is repeating itself across America. “In city after city, the police were abolished this weekend. They stood back and watched as damage was inflicted that was irreversible.”

Thailand will draw up a stimulus plan for domestic tourism to be rolled out for four months starting in July, a senior official said on Thursday, as the country seeks to revive a sector hit badly by the global impacts of the coronavirus. The Tourism Authority of Thailand (TAT) will submit a plan to the Ministry of Finance for a package that will boost domestic tourism by next week, TAT governor Yuthasak Supasorn said in a statement.