…from the New York Times…
President Trump, who has been under criticism for his handling of the response to the coronavirus and has seen his poll numbers drop, on Tuesday blamed the World Health Organization for what he called its failures in the crisis and said he planned to halt American funding of the organization.
The announcement came as Mr. Trump continued to be angered by criticism of his response to the pandemic, which has been assailed as too slow and ineffective, failing to quickly embrace public health measures that could have contained the virus.
“Everybody knows what is going on there,” he said, blaming the organization for what he described as a “disastrous decision to oppose travel restrictions from China and other nations.
The president did not say whether the United States would permanently stop funding the W.H.O., saying only that it would halt payments while the administration reviewed its role in handling the virus. Last year, the United States contributed about $553 million of the W.H.O.’s $6 billion budget, a significant sum to lose in the middle of a pandemic….
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A day after President Trump claimed that he had “total” authority to reopen the American economy himself — a position that was widely challenged by legal scholars, governors and other elected officials from both parties — the president said on Tuesday that he would work with the states.
“I will be speaking to all 50 governors very shortly, and I will then be authorizing each individual governor of each individual state to implement a reopening,” Mr. Trump said, granting the governors an authority most contended they already possessed. Mr. Trump added that the reopenings would be “at a time and in a manner as most appropriate” for each state.
“The day will be very close,” he said, holding out the possibility that some states without large outbreaks could reopen before May 1.
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Officials like Mr. Cuomo, encouraged by data suggesting a flattening curve, have begun to edge toward setting a strategy for reopening New York, partnering with other states in the Northeast, including New Jersey, to create a coordinated strategy. But Mr. Cuomo has emphasized that the reopening was dependent on New Yorkers continuing to observe the restrictions that were imposed weeks ago….
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On Tuesday, Gov. Gavin Newsom said the state would be moving from its broad shelter-in-place order to a more individual approach to suppressing the virus, without immediately giving a time frame for the shift.
Numbers of infections and deaths have stabilized, but he said that any decisions about reopening society would be based on “public health, not politics,” and would be gradual and depend in part on building and tracking immunity within the population.
“We are not out of the woods yet, and we are not spiking the ball,” he said.
The state, which has the nation’s largest economy, has been ahead of the rest of the country in confronting the pandemic, locking down early and so far avoiding worst-case scenarios for infections and deaths. How it calibrates reopening will provide examples of what works and what doesn’t, especially given limits on testing capacity.
Mr. Newsom warned Californians that even in the next phase, restrictions might be loosened and tightened “as we toggle from stricter to looser” interventions “as data comes in.”…