The American Museum of Natural History will remove a prominent statue of Theodore Roosevelt from its entrance after years of objections that it symbolizes colonial expansion and racial discrimination, Mayor Bill de Blasio said Sunday.The bronze statue that has stood at the museum’s Central Park West entrance since 1940 depicts Roosevelt on horseback with a Native American man and an African man standing next to the horse.”The American Museum of Natural History has asked to remove the Theodore Roosevelt statue because it explicitly depicts Black and Indigenous people as subjugated and racially inferior,” de Blasio said in a written statement. “The City supports the Museum’s request. It is the right decision and the right time to remove this problematic statue.”Taking to Twitter, President Donald Trump objected to the statue’s removal.”Ridiculous, don’t do it!” he tweeted.The museum’s president, Ellen Futter, told the New York Times that the museum’s “community has been profoundly moved by the ever-widening movement for racial justice that has emerged after the killing of George Floyd.””We have watched as the attention of the world and the country has increasingly turned to statues as powerful and hurtful symbols of systemic racism,” Futter told the Times.Officials said it hasn’t been determined when the Roosevelt statue will be removed and where it will go.”The composition of the Equestrian Statue does not reflect Theodore Roosevelt’s legacy,” Theodore Roosevelt IV, a great-grandson of the president, said in a statement to the Times. “It is time to move the statue and move forward.”Futter said the museum objects to the statue but not to Roosevelt, a pioneering conservationist whose father was a founding member of the institution and who served as New York’s governor before becoming the 26th president. She said the museum is naming its Hall of Biodiversity for Roosevelt “in recognition of his conservation legacy.”In 2017, protesters splashed red liquid on the statue’s base to represent blood and published a statement calling for its removal as an emblem of “patriarchy, white supremacy and settler-colonialism.” 
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Ratcheting up fresh pressure, Greece has blasted the British Museum for exhibiting the Parthenon marbles, calling the collection “stolen” treasures and demanding the masterpieces be returned to Athens. The call comes as Greece celebrates the 11th anniversary of the New Acropolis Museum, a four-story, state of the art edifice built to house the ancient treasures and weaken Britain’s claim that it is best able to look after the 2,500-year-old masterpieces. 
 
“Since September 2003 when construction work for the Acropolis Museum began, Greece has systematically demanded the return of the sculptures on display in the British Museum because they are the product of theft,” the country’s culture minister Lina Mendoni said. “The current Greek government – like any Greek government – is not going to stop claiming the stolen sculptures which the British Museum, contrary to any moral principle, continues to hold illegally,” she told the Athens daily Ta Nea. 
 
Depicting figures of ancient Greek mythology, the 75-meter frieze and its 17 statues were sawed off the Parthenon temple and shipped to London by Lord Elgin in the early 19th century, during his tenure as Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire. 
 
Bankrupted by the venture, the British aristocrat sold them to the British Museum in 1816, where they became a major attraction and began one of the world’s longest running cultural disputes. 
 
Mendoni said “It is sad that one of the world’s largest and most important museums is still governed by outdated, colonialist views.” While successive governments in Britain have opposed calls for the return of the sculptures to Greece, pressure has mounted in recent years with a bandwagon of celebrities and politicians joining the repatriation campaign. 
 
Greece’s center-right government is also stepping up efforts to win back the treasures as the country gears up for its bicentennial independence anniversary next year.A municipal worker wearing a protective suit sprays disinfectant outside Acropolis museum as the Parthenon temple is seen in the background in Athens on March 24, 2020.While 50 meters of the 115-block Parthenon frieze is displayed in Athens, eight other museums scattered across Europe house fragments of it, including the Louvre and the British Museum. 
 
Last year, Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis secured a key agreement from French President Macron to allow the Louvre to lend a small fragment of the Parthenon in light of those celebrations. 
 
Macron has become the first Western leader to initiate a comprehensive review of colonial looting, repatriating significant collections to Africa – a move traditionally resisted by leading museums in the West, including the British Museum. 
 
A similar loan request was made to the British Prime Minister Boris Johnson but it was quickly knocked down by the British Museum, saying any swap would require Athens to relinquish ownership claims to the prized treasures — a request Greece has emphatically refused. 
 
“Without the supreme symbol of culture, the Parthenon, Western Civilization cannot exist, and this symbol deserves to be reunited with its expatriate sculptures,” Mendoni told a local broadcaster in May. 
 
Government officials have refused to clarify whether Athens has followed up with any alternative proposal to the British Museum. Nor have they said whether Greece would resort to legal action against Britain in a bid to win back the marbles. 
 
“In law, a thief is not allowed to keep his or her ill-gotten gains, no matter how long ago they were taken, or how much he or she may have improved them,” said Geoffrey Robertson, a leading human rights attorney whom the government in Athens recruited in 2014 to consider legal action. 
 
“In the past, a lot of cultural property was wrongfully extracted from places that are now independent states. They want the loot sent back to where it was created and to the people for whom it has most meaning.” 
 
In its pamphlets, the British Museum argues that its free-of-charge entrance attracts millions of visitors every year from around the work, making the ancient Greek masterpieces available to the public within the context of a wide swath of human civilization — a claim Greece insists is now defunct with its $200 million mammoth museum. 
 
An austere building wedged within the chaotic sprawl of a crowded old neighborhood, the new Acropolis museum was initially scheduled to open in time for the 2004 Athens Summer Olympics. 
 
But legal fights over the expropriation of some 25 buildings, as well as archaeological findings unearthed at the site, derailed the project by more than 5 years. 
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Delegations from the United States and Russia meet in Vienna, Austria Monday and Tuesday to discuss their nuclear arsenals after more than a year’s pause. President Donald Trump has abandoned several U.S. treaties with Russia, including ones on overflights and on intermediate-range nuclear forces. Special Presidential Envoy for Arms Control Ambassador Marshall Billingslea is leading the U.S. delegation that will meet with their Russian counterparts led by Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov in Vienna. They are to discuss mutually agreed topics related to the future of arms control, the State Department said in a statement last week. Trump has said China should be involved in the talks on New START, arguing that up until now Beijing has done as it liked in developing its weapon systems. “The United States has extended an open invitation to the People’s Republic of China to join these discussions, and has made clear the need for all three countries to pursue arms control negotiations in good faith,” the State Department statement said.  The Chinese government has refused the invitation with its Foreign Ministry saying earlier this month that “the time is not yet ripe for China to participate in nuclear disarmament negotiations.” Billingslea replied in a tweet: “China … should reconsider. Achieving Great Power status requires behaving with Great Power responsibility. No more Great Wall of Secrecy on its nuclear buildup. Seat waiting for China in Vienna.” The U.S.-Russia New START treaty agreed upon in 2010 limits each side to 1,550 deployed nuclear warheads. It expires in February 2021. Arms experts say the time is too tight to renew a complex deal between the United States and Russia, let alone to negotiate and craft a new treaty involving China, with the U.S. presidential election is quickly approaching.  
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The World Health Organization has released sobering numbers showing that the coronavirus pandemic is still in its powerful first wave even as some experts are warning of a second wave. On Sunday, the WHO reported the largest one-day increase in the number of new coronavirus cases worldwide — 183,000 in 24 hours.  It said Brazil led the way with nearly 55,000 new cases followed by the United States with more than 36,000 and India with about 15,000 new cases.   Overall, the WHO says there are more than 8,708,000 cases worldwide and close to 462,000 deaths. The large number of new cases cannot be explained away by wider testing, Dr. Tom Inglesby, director of the Center for Health Security at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, said on “Fox News Sunday.” President Donald Trump has said he believes testing is the reason.   “When you do testing to that extent, you’re going to find more cases. So, I said to my people, ‘Slow the testing down.’ They test and they test,” Trump told the crowd at his campaign rally Saturday night in Tulsa, Oklahoma.  The White House later said the president was just joking.  But the director of the Harvard Global Health Institute, Dr. Ashish Jha, says there’s nothing funny about COVID-19.A medical worker in a protective suit conducts a nucleic acid test for a resident, following a new outbreak of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) in Beijing, China, June 20, 2020.“This is incredibly frustrating for the millions of Americans who have gotten sick and have not been able to get tests. … This is unfortunately not a joke,” Jha told CNN Sunday. Meanwhile, some heath experts are warning of a second wave of COVID-19, to the frustration of other scientists.  “When you have 20,000-plus infections per day, how can you talk about a second wave?” Dr. Anthony Fauci of the National Institutes of Health told the Associated Press. “We’re in the first wave. Let’s get out of the first wave before you have a second wave.” Some of the experts, including Caitlin Rivers, a disease researcher at Johns Hopkins University’s Center for Health Security, say they don’t even want to use the words “second wave” because they say that gives people a false sense of believing the worst is over. Many viruses, such as the flu, get worse in the winter when more people stay indoors and the weather cools. But because COVID-19 is a new coronavirus, scientists say they are still not sure what they are dealing with and how the change of seasons will affect it. WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said last week that the pandemic is accelerating.  “We are in a new and dangerous phase,” Tedros said, adding that lockdown measures are still needed to halt the spread of the virus even as such measures are being eased around the world. Brazil’s coronavirus death toll officially surpassed 50,000 Sunday, and the South American country now has a total of more than 1 million cases, second only to the United States with 2.2 million confirmed cases of coronavirus. Brazil’s right-wing President Jair Bolsonaro has dismissed COVID-19 as just a flu and has called those worried about the disease neurotic – much to the consternation of health experts who say the actual number of cases may be higher than the government reports.An artist wearing a protective mask reading “Out Bolsonaro” attends a protest to honour people who died from the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) during its outbreak in Brasilia, Brazil June 15, 2020.He has also brushed off such measures as lockdowns and social distancing as damaging an already disease-crippled economy. In Germany, authorities say the coronavirus reproduction rate is rising to a level higher than what experts say is needed for long-term containment of the virus.  The authorities reported a 2.88 reproduction rate Sunday – meaning for every 100 people who get COVID-19, an additional 288 people will become infected. The reproduction rate was 1.79 Saturday, and experts say a number of 1 or less is necessary to consider the outbreak contained. Germany has started easing coronavirus-related lockdowns and other restrictions after what it had regarded as success in fighting COVID-19. Authorities blame the surge in German cases on outbreaks inside such places as nursing homes, hospitals and facilities housing refugees and asylum-seekers. On Sunday, the thousands of worshippers who usually flock to Stonehenge to watch the sun rise on the first day of summer made their pilgrimage a virtual one this year. The body that oversees Stonehenge, English Heritage, said more than 3.6 million people tuned in as the sun broke Sunday morning. Britain has a ban on large gatherings to curb the spread of the coronavirus that causes COVID-19, but a small group of druids, those who say they are descended from the ancient religion, gathered in a nearby field to watch in person. Also Sunday, Bulgarian tennis star Grigor Dimitrov announced he is ill with the coronavirus, the highest-profile tennis player to come down with the disease so far.  “I want to reach out and let my fans and friends know that I tested positive back in Monaco for COVID-19,” Dimitrov wrote on Instagram. “I want to make sure anyone who has been in contact with me during these past days gets tested and takes the necessary precautions.” He says he is home and recovering and apologized for any harm he might have caused.  Dimitrov pulled out of the Adria Tour match in Zadar, Croatia, Saturday, saying he felt sick. The finals of the Zadar leg of the tour have also been canceled. 
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One of the coldest places on Earth on Saturday became one of the hottest places on Earth. A Russian heat wave sent the thermometer in the Siberian town of Verkhoyansk soaring to 38 degrees Celsius (104 Fahrenheit). Meteorologists say that would be the highest temperature ever recorded north of the Arctic Circle.  Verkhoyansk is about 10 kilometers north of the Arctic Circle. Temperatures in the town average 40 degrees below zero Celsius (-40 Fahrenheit) in winter, and it rarely gets warmer than 20 degrees (68 Fahrenheit) in summer.  Experts blame the unusual heat wave on a massive high-pressure system that has been stalled over Siberia for almost two weeks, preventing cooler air from flowing south. All of Russia has experienced an uncharacteristically warm winter and spring this year with average temperatures breaking records in the first five months of the year set in 2016.  
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Serbia’s ruling conservative party led by President Aleksandar Vucic is set for a landslide win in Sunday’s parliamentary election, results projected by Ipsos and CeSID pollsters showed.The projection shows the Serbian Progressive Party (SNS) on track to win 62.5% of the votes, while the Socialist party, a junior coalition partner in the outgoing government, is seen coming in second with 10.7% of the votes.The center-right Serbian Patriotic Alliance led by former water polo player Aleksandar Sapic is seen in third place with 4% of the votes.A brass band orchestra at the SNS headquarters was playing traditional Serbian music before Vucic proclaimed victory.Dozens of smiling people crammed into a small room, hugged each other and few had their faces covered with masks, despite doctors warning to be cautious to avoid spreading the coronavirus.”Tonight people showed enormous trust in our team,” Vucic told journalists. “Serbian people have decided what kind of future they want.”Another Serbian pollster CRTA saw turnout at 48% compared to 56.7% in 2016. The State Election Commission is to announce preliminary results including turnout later in the evening.Turnout was hit by a boycott by some opposition parties, who say the vote will not be free or fair owing to Vucic’s grip on the media.Florian Bieber, a Balkan expert at Austria’s University of Graz, tweeted after seeing results: “It is a pyrrhic victory, without opposition in parliament the election is discredited and its rule less legitimate than ever before.”Voters largely back efforts by Vucic’s ruling coalition to push for Serbian membership of the European Union while maintaining strong ties with Russia and China.But the future government will face increasing EU and U.S. pressure to recognize the independence of Serbia’s former province of Kosovo, a move seen as key for regional stability.Serbia, which has a population of 7.2 million, has reported 12,894 confirmed cases of COVID-19 and 261 deaths. It was among the first European countries to start opening its borders on May 22 and all lockdown curbs have since been lifted.Analysts and pollsters said that health concerns kept some voters at home, especially among higher-risk groups. About 1.2 million people on the electoral list have lived abroad for years and are unlikely to vote.”If we take into account number of votes (the SNS got) … we are heading to a North Korean or Chinese system,” said Slobodan Zecevic, a lecturer of international law with the Belgrade-based European University.   
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While some health experts warn of what they call a second wave of COVID-19 this fall, others say the United States — and some other parts of the world — are not over the first wave.
 
“When you have 20,000-plus infections per day, how can you talk about a second wave?” said Dr. Anthony Fauci, the country’s top infectious disease expert.
Much of the U.S. is easing restrictions implemented to halt the spread of the coronavirus, even as the number of cases has started rising in some states, especially in the South and West.
 
Some of the experts, including Caitlin Rivers, a disease researcher at Johns Hopkins University’s Center for Health Security, say they don’t even want to use the words “second wave” because they say that gives people a false sense of believing the worst is over.
 
U.S. President Donald Trump has said he believes the high number of reported coronavirus cases is because of testing.  
 
“When you do testing to that extent, you’re going to find more cases. So, I said to my people, ‘Slow the testing down.’ They test and they test,” Trump told the crowd at Saturday night’s rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma.  
 
The White House later said the president was just joking.  
 
But the director of the Harvard Global Health Institute, Dr. Ashish Jha, says there’s nothing funny about COVID-19.
 
“This is incredibly frustrating for the millions of Americans who have gotten sick and have not been able to get tests. … This is unfortunately not a joke,” Jha told CNN Sunday.  FILE – A medical assistant, right, provides paperwork to people in line at a walk-up COVID-19 testing site in Dallas, Texas, June 11, 2020.Many viruses, such as the flu, get worse in the winter when more people stay indoors and the weather is not as warm. But since COVID-19 is a new coronavirus, scientists say they are still not sure what they are dealing with and how the change of seasons will affect it.
 
World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said last week that the pandemic is accelerating.  
 
“We are in a new and dangerous phase,” Tedros said, adding that lockdown measures are still needed to halt the spread of the virus even while such measures are being eased around the world.
 
In Germany, authorities say the coronavirus reproduction rate is rising to a level higher than what experts say is needed for long-term containment of the virus.  
 
The authorities reported a 2.88 reproduction rate Sunday – meaning for every 100 people who get COVID-19, an additional 288 people will become infected.
 
The reproduction rate was 1.79 Saturday, and experts say a number of 1 or less is necessary to consider the outbreak contained.
 
Germany has started easing coronavirus-related lockdowns and other restrictions after what it had regarded as success in fighting COVID-19.
 
Authorities blame the surge in German cases on outbreaks inside such places as nursing homes, hospitals and facilities housing refugees and asylum-seekers.Red Cross staffers wearing face masks and protective clothing distribute bread to residents of a house that has been quarantined, in Verl, Germany, June 21, 2020.On Sunday, the thousands of worshippers who usually flock to Stonehenge to watch the sun rise on the first day of summer made their pilgrimage a virtual one this year.
 
The body that oversees Stonehenge, English Heritage, said more than 3.6 million people tuned in as the sun broke Sunday morning.
 
Britain has a ban on large gatherings to curb the spread of the coronavirus that causes COVID-19, but a small group of druids, those who say they are descended from the ancient religion, gathered in a nearby field to watch in person.
 
Also Sunday, Bulgarian tennis star Grigor Dimitrov announced he is ill with the coronavirus, the highest-profile tennis player to come down with the disease so far.  
 
“I want to reach out and let my fans and friends know that I tested positive back in Monaco for COVID-19,” Dimitrov wrote on Instagram. “I want to make sure anyone who has been in contact with me during these past days gets tested and takes the necessary precautions.”
He says he is home and recovering and apologized for any harm he might have caused.
 
Dimitrov pulled out of the Adria Tour match in Zadar, Croatia, Saturday, saying he felt sick. The finals of the Zadar leg of the tour have also been canceled.   
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Comedian DL Hughley COVID-19 Positive after Fainting Onstage Comedian D.L. Hughley announced he tested positive for COVID-19 after collapsing onstage during a performance in Nashville, Tennessee. The stand-up comedian, 57, lost consciousness while performing at the Zanies comedy nightclub on Friday night and was hospitalized, news outlets reported. On Saturday, Hughley posted a video on Twitter in which he said he was treated for exhaustion and dehydration afterward. “I also tested positive for COVID-19, which blew me away,” he says in the video. “I was what they call asymptomatic. I didn’t have any symptoms, the classic symptoms.” Hughley plans to quarantine in his Nashville hotel room for 14 days. The remaining two nights of his four-night engagement at Zanies were canceled, according to the club’s online calendar. “Our friend D.L. Hughley had a medical emergency while performing on Friday and was hospitalized overnight. According to his publicist, he was suffering from exhaustion after working & traveling this week,” the club posted on Facebook. “Love ya, D.L. and we’ll look forward to seeing this King of Comedy back in Nashville soon!” Hughley said he still hasn’t exhibited any of the typical symptoms associated with the coronavirus, including shortness of breath and fever. “So, in addition to all the other stuff you have to look out for,” Hughley advises in the video, if you “pass out in the middle of a show, onstage, you probably need to get tested.” In addition to stand-up comedy, Hughley is also an actor, author and radio and television host. He starred in Spike Lee’s 2000 concert film, “The Original Kings of Comedy,” alongside Steve Harvey, Bernie Mac and Cedric the Entertainer. Hughley also produced and starred in “The Hughleys,” which aired on ABC and UPN from 1998 to 2002 and hosted a CNN talk show. He currently hosts the radio show “The D.L. Hughley Show,” which is syndicated in dozens of markets. “Thank you for your prayers and your well wishes — and a few more of them wouldn’t hurt,” Hughley says in the video. 
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The U.S. can curb police killings on American streets with better law enforcement training and more accountability, the lead Senate Republican advocate for policing reforms said Sunday. Sen. Tim Scott, center, accompanied by Sen. James Lankford, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Ky., Sen. John Cornyn, Sen. Shelley Moore Capito, R-W.Va., and Sen. Lindsey Graham, speaks at a news conference on Capitol Hill, June 17, 2020.Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina, the lone black Republican in the U.S. Senate, told ABC’s “This Week” show, “I think we can prevent more of these deaths” and enhance “character-driven law enforcement” by approving legislation that cuts off or limits federal aid to city and state police agencies if they do not adopt better training and policies for their officers. Republican and Democratic lawmakers in Washington are in the midst of a legislative debate over U.S. policing practices in the wake of controversial deaths of African American men while in police custody. Scott said the two political parties agree on 70% of what is needed. “We all want to ban chokeholds; that we already know is unnecessary,” Scott said of a policing practice ended by many U.S. police agencies in which police restrain criminal suspects around the neck to subdue them as they are arrested. Both parties are calling for a national registry of police who have engaged in misconduct so they cannot easily move from one police agency to another. But differences remain as the Republican-controlled Senate and the Democratic-controlled House of Representatives head to key votes this week and next. Democrats want to make it easier for people who believe their civil rights have been infringed on by police actions against them to sue police, removing their virtually unlimited protection against liability for their actions. But President Donald Trump says he is opposed to changing the legal protection for police and Republican lawmakers have expressed reservations. U.S. President Donald Trump listens to applause after signing an executive order on police reform during a ceremony in the Rose Garden at the White House in Washington, June 16, 2020.“Americans want law and order,” Trump has said on several occasions. Scott said police must be more accountable for their actions and required to report on them to the U.S. Justice Department in order to get federal funding. He said only about 40% of local police actions are now reported to the federal government. Scott said any legislation approved by Congress should be targeted “so we get the outcome we want,” compelling police agencies to adopt training and policies on police encounters with the public “we feel are best for the nation.”  He said there is “plenty of blame” among both Republican and Democratic lawmakers about racial sensitivities in the U.S.  “We need to be more sensitive in our racial comments,” Scott said. “We should be working toward a more harmonious union.” The move toward adoption of national policing reforms comes in the wake of the May 25 death of George Floyd, an African American man, in Minneapolis, Minnesota. He was held down on a city street by a white police officer for nearly nine minutes as he pressed his knee on Floyd’s neck even as Floyd said he could not breathe. The officer was charged with second-degree murder. FILE – Demonstrators march on pavement, Sunday, May 31, 2020, in Minneapolis. Protests continued following the death of George Floyd, who died after being restrained by Minneapolis police officers on May 25.Floyd’s death spawned weeks of coast-to-coast protests about police abuse of minorities, some of which turned into violent clashes between police and demonstrators although most were peaceful.  
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The Chinese capital is capable of screening almost 1 million people a day for the coronavirus, an official said on Sunday, as testing continued across the city to try to contain the spread of a fresh outbreak.Beijing has been expanding testing in the city of 20 million since a cluster of infections linked to a food wholesale market erupted over a week ago.The outbreak, the first in Beijing in months, has now surpassed previous peak numbers in the city in early February.Testing was initially focused on people who worked or shopped at the Xinfadi market or lived nearby but it has been expanded to include residents in many other parts of the city as well as food and parcel delivery workers.Since the new outbreak, capacity has more than doubled to more than 230,000 tests daily at 124 institutions, Gao Xiaojun, spokesman for the Beijing Health Commission, told a press briefing.The tests are done on samples collected from multiple people in one test tube, meaning the city can get results from almost 1 million people daily, he added. The same pooling of samples was also carried out in Wuhan last month to quickly ramp up daily testing capacity after a cluster of new cases there raised worries about a second wave of infections.Gao also said that provinces including Hubei and Liaoning had sent about 200 people to Beijing to boost staff in laboratories, further helping to increase testing capacity. 
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