Arizona

Phoenix, Jul 4 (AP/PTI) Arizona has reached new peaks in hospitalisations and emergency room visits, indicating the state is only intensifying as a coronavirus hot spot.

State health officials say the capacity of hospital intensive care units is at an all-time high of 91 per cent.

The number of people hospitalised Thursday due to a suspected or confirmed case of COVID-19 was 3,013, according to the Arizona Department of Health Services. It's the first time reaching 3,000.

(AP) --- Arizona’s Republican governor shut down bars, movie theaters, gyms and water parks Monday and leaders in several states ordered residents to wear masks in public in a dramatic course reversal amid an alarming resurgence of coronavirus cases nationwide.

Among those implementing the face-covering orders is the city of Jacksonville, Florida, where mask-averse President Donald Trump plans to accept the Republican nomination in August. Trump has refused to wear a mask during visits to states and businesses that require them.

PHOENIX (AP) — It wasn’t quite one of his signature big-stadium rallies.

But President Donald Trump drew something closer to the jam-packed audience of political supporters he’s been craving as hundreds of young conservatives filled a Phoenix megachurch Tuesday to hear his call for them to get behind his reelection effort.

The crowded Dream City Church for the gathering of Students for Trump offered a starkly different feel compared to Trump’s weekend rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma, his first of the coronavirus era, which drew sparser attendance.

GUADALUPE, Ariz. (AP) — A Hispanic immigrant working at a fast-food restaurant in North Carolina is rushed to the hospital after she contracts COVID-19. A sickened Honduran woman in Baltimore with no health insurance or immigration status avoids the doctor for two weeks and finally takes a cab to the hospital and ends up on oxygen.

PHOENIX (AP) — The U.S. Supreme Court has upheld legal protections for young immigrants, but President Donald Trump could still take away the ability for hundreds of thousands of them to live and work legally in the United States. With no legislative answer in sight, that means the uncertainty of the last eight years isn’t over for many who know of nowhere else as home.

TUCSON, Ariz. (AP) — Hundreds of Arizona residents under an evacuation notice were allowed to return home Friday but were told to remain ready to leave at a moment’s notice as a wildfire burns in a national forest near Tucson.

Firefighters are trying to keep the blaze in canyons and ridges and prevent it from moving downhill.

PHOENIX (AP) — A North Dakota construction company favored by President Donald Trump has received the largest contract to date to build a section of Trump’s signature wall along the U.S.-Mexico border.

Republican U.S. Sen. Kevin Cramer of North Dakota confirmed the $1.3 billion contract for building the 42-mile section of wall through “really tough terrain in the mountains” in Arizona. That’s about $30 million per mile.

Cramer said Fisher Sand and Gravel Co. offered the lowest price for the project. He did not know how many companies bid.

PHOENIX (Reuters) - Without wearing a face-covering himself, President Donald Trump toured a new medical mask factory in Arizona on Tuesday, taking a rare trip out of Washington to visit a state he hopes to win in the November election even as Americans avoid travel to slow the spread of the coronavirus.

PHOENIX (AP) — The $2.2 trillion package that Congress approved to offer financial help during the coronavirus pandemic has one major exclusion: millions of immigrants who do not have legal status in the U.S. but work here and pay taxes.

That includes Carmen Contreras Lopez, a 48-year-old housekeeper who, though she earns low wages, files a tax return each year. Since the virus took hold, she has lost most of her clients and is getting by with help from her oldest son. But she won’t see a penny of the money promised to most Americans in response to the pandemic.

PHOENIX (AP) — The Arizona Court of Appeals on Tuesday upheld Jodi Arias’ first-degree murder conviction and life prison sentence in the 2008 killing of her former boyfriend.

Arias’ lawyers had argued that a prosecutor’s misconduct and a judge’s failure to control news coverage during the case deprived her of the right to a fair trial.

But the three-member appeals court, in a 29-page opinion, unanimously concluded that prosecutor Juan Martinez’s conduct in the case didn’t outweigh Arias’ guilt.