And Now Your Week Is Ended

COVID-19 Snapshot

• Across the U.S., ICU bed capacity was recorded at ~64% on Wednesday. For context, average U.S. ICU bed capacity was estimated at 68% from 2005 to 2007 (the most recent data we could find).
• On Wednesday, Texas reported 9,610 people hospitalized with COVID-19 across the state (with 1,017 ICU beds available), compared to 2,008 hospitalizations on June 11 (with 1,419 ICU beds available). Check out your state.
• Major virus news from yesterday: The WHO acknowledged that airborne COVID-19 transmission is a possibility, especially in closed indoor spaces.

U.S. Sanctions Chinese Officials Over Uighur Abuses

The U.S. announced sanctions against three senior officials of the Chinese Communist Party on Thursday. Among the three is Chen Quanguo, the party leader of the Xinjiang province (home to ~11 million Uighur Muslims), who is the highest-ranking Chinese official to be hit by U.S. sanctions so far. Among other things, the restrictions forbid the individuals and their families from entering the country due to associated human rights abuses.

South Korean Mayor Found Dead

The mayor of Seoul, South Korea - Park Won-soon - was found dead early Friday morning following an hours-long search involving 700 police officers. Won-soon’s daughter first reported him missing Thursday afternoon, saying he had left her a message “like a will” and turned off his phone.

More: South Korean broadcaster SBS reported that one of Won-soon’s secretaries filed a criminal complaint alleging sexual harassment against him on Wednesday evening.

Worth noting: The Supreme Court on Thursday declared nearly half of Oklahoma to be a Native American reservation for certain legal purposes. Go deeper.

The Coronavirus Effect

• Starbucks customers at all company-owned locations will be required to wear facial coverings beginning July 15.
• New data shows that mobile app usage set a record high in Q2. Records were also set in total app downloads (nearly 35 billion) and consumer spending in apps ($27 billion).
• Another 1.3 million Americans filed for unemployment last week, down ~100k from the week before.

TikTok On The Clock

TikTok published its latest transparency report on Thursday, self-reporting 49 million videos removed for content violations from July 2019 to Dec. 2019. The company also disclosed more than 500 government requests during that time, stating none of them originated from Hong Kong or China.

More: Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on Tuesday said the U.S. is considering a ban of TikTok. The Indian government banned the app late last month. (The data the app collects and why U.S. authorities are concerned).

Clear And Present Danger

In the UK and Australia, privacy regulators launched a joint probe into U.S. facial recognition firm Clearview AI regarding their “data scraping” practices on Thursday. Clearview AI has reportedly scraped more than 3 billion images from social media sites (including Twitter and Facebook) to build its database of individuals, which law enforcement agencies use to identify and apprehend criminals.

More: Clearview AI has stopped offering its services in Canada after government data protection agencies opened two separate probes into the company in February (which will remain ongoing).

Even More: Last month, Clearview AI reportedly agreed to delete some of its facial images through an opt-out system, except for Canadian residents.

Love Conquers All

Chris Buckley of Walker County, GA, first developed racist ideologies as a result of his troubled childhood in Cleveland, OH, and was later appointed national security leader of the Ku Klux Klan.

After befriending Arno Michaels, a former Klan member, and reformed racist, Chris left the KKK in 2016. Recognizing how his tumultuous upbringing impacted his own hostile beliefs, Chris now works with the nonprofit Parents for Peace to help young people process trauma and reject hateful views.

Chairing Is Caring

Cambry Nelson is paralyzed from the waist down and has spent most of her adult life in a standard wheelchair. However, this does not deter her from pursuing adventure. Cambry is known to take on tough trails and exhausting wilderness excursions, often tugging on her chair's tires until her arms are extremely sore.

Wanting to help Cambry experience the Earth with ease, her husband, Zack, created an all-terrain wheelchair out of the pieces of two electric bikes. The couple has now turned the contraption – which can travel up to 35 miles on a single charge – into a small business, offering the accessible apparatus for a fraction of the cost of a traditional automated wheelchair.

The Bear Necessities

When someone encounters a bear in the wild, the safest plan of action (if it hasn’t noticed you) is to back away slowly without making too much noise. However, Tricia, Brian, and Brady Hurt decided to part with that traditional wisdom when the family encountered a bear cub swimming in Wisconsin's Marsh-Miller Lake with a discarded plastic container stuck around its head.

Matching the boat's pace to the gait of the submerged cub, the Hurt family cooed to the distressed animal and eventually removed the container from its entrapped head. Tricia managed to capture the harrowing encounter in a video posted to Facebook by Tricia, documenting the triumphant – and adorable – rescue.

The net worth of the average U.S. Black family trails behind every other ethnic group, sometimes by as much as 7 times less.

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