A federal appeals court on Friday upheld a Kentucky law that requires abortion clinics to have written agreements with a hospital and ambulance service in case of medical emergencies.

The 2-1 ruling from the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals reverses a 2018 district court ruling that found the law, first passed in 1998, violated constitutionally protected due process rights.

Amid rising COVID-19 cases nationwide and a crackdown on a wedding in Brooklyn that reportedly planned to have 10,000 attendees, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo on Saturday announced a new strategy for combating COVID-19 into the fall and winter months by targeting micro-clusters.

Cuomo said that targeting coronavirus would no longer be at the statewide or regional level, but "block-by-block."

"For fall we are going to deploy a micro-cluster strategy. We have been targeting all our actions either ... statewide ... or we reopened on a regional level. We are now going to analyze it block-by-block," he said. "We have data so specific that we can't show it because it could violate privacy conditions. We know exactly where the new cases are coming from."

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On June 30, as the coronavirus was cresting toward its summer peak, Dr. Paul Alexander, a new science adviser at the Department of Health and Human Services, composed a scathing two-page critique of an interview given by a revered scientist at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Dr. Anne Schuchat, a 32-year veteran of the C.D.C. and its principal deputy director, had appealed to Americans to wear masks and warned, “We have way too much virus across the country.” But Dr. Alexander, a part-time assistant professor of health research methods, appeared sure he understood the coronavirus better.

“Her aim is to embarrass the president,” he wrote, commenting on Dr. Schuchat’s appeal for face masks in an interview with the Journal of the American Medical Association.

Tens of thousands of loans worth billions of dollars may have been subject to fraud, waste and abuse in the $659 billion taxpayer-funded Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) aimed at helping small U.S. businesses survive the coronavirus pandemic, a congressional panel said on Tuesday.

Over $1 billion went to companies that received multiple loans, in violation of the program’s rules, the House of Representatives Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis said.

U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin is due to testify before the panel at 1:00 pm (1700 GMT) on Tuesday.

Democrats in Congress and the Trump administration have been at loggerheads since July over further steps to bolster the economy after Congress approved trillions of dollars in March to respond to the coronavirus pandemic.

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Sen. Tim Scott, who delivered the closing speech at the Republican National Convention Monday night, said he is not concerned about potential fraud due to expanded mail-in-voting, contradicting President Donald Trump who accused Democrats of "trying to steal the election."

"I have a lot of confidence in our electoral process," the South Carolina Republican said when asked about Trump's fraud concerns on NBC's "Today" show Tuesday morning. "I'm very confident that we will have fair elections throughout this country."

Several states – including some with Republican governors or secretaries of state – have eased requirements for absentee ballots, or moved to send ballots to all registered voters, to give those concerned about coronavirus infection the option of avoiding potentially crowded polling stations. Trump has repeatedly railed against those efforts as opening the door to potential fraud, though experts say there is little evidence to support those concerns.

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