PHOENIX – Gyms, bars, nightclubs and more will remain closed past next week as the state continues to fight a disease that is “highly contagious and in every part of the state,” Gov. Doug Ducey said Thursday.

But even as he urged people to stay home and practice safe hygiene, Ducey declined to require the use of masks statewide, instead unveiling an advertising campaign, “Tougher than COVID,” that urges people to wear masks voluntarily.

“I’d ask you to continue to be vigilant,” Ducey said. “Whether you’re in Phoenix or Tucson or a rural area, the virus is still present.”

The comments came in a wide-ranging news conference in which the governor tried to walk a tightrope between touting improvements in the state’s number of COVID-19 cases and warning residents that the virus still presents a threat and people need to brace for what Ducey called a new normal.

They also came the same day that the state crossed the 3,000 threshold for deaths. The Arizona Department of Health Services reported 84 deaths Thursday to bring the total for the state to 3,063.

“There’s no victory lap today, there’s no celebration,” said Ducey, who extended condolences to the thousands of Arizona families who have lost a loved one to the disease.

PHOENIX – Arizona skywatchers have been over the moon about a comet that has graced the night sky since July 11.

Comet NEOWISE was discovered March 27 by Amy Mainzer, principal investigator on NASA’s Near-Earth Object Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer mission, and her team at the University of Arizona.

“We’re specifically interested in what we call ‘near-Earth objects,’” Mainzer said. “These are the asteroids and comets that come within about 1.3 times the distance from the Earth to the sun.”

The 3-mile wide ball of ice, dust and rock survived a close approach to the sun and is headed toward the outer edge of our solar system before starting another very long trip around the sun. Unlike a shooting star, viewers have a chance to view the comet for longer than a split second.

“This comet, even though it’s traveling at enormous speeds, you’d think, given this incredible speed, that it’d be gone in an instant,” Mainzer said. “But space is so big, that even at that incredible speed, it still takes an appreciable number of days to traverse the sky.”

PHOENIX – As activists nationwide vandalize, topple and demand the removal of Confederate statues and memorials, the United Daughters of the Confederacy on Wednesday removed two monuments from the Capitol complex and along U.S. 60 near Gold Canyon.

After advocacy groups and local leaders sent letters to Gov. Doug Ducey urging the removal of at least six monuments throughout the state, the United Daughters of the Confederacy on June 30 sent its own letter to Arizona Department of Administration Director Andy Tobin requesting the state “regift” the monuments for repairs.

Overnight, two memorials – the Memorial to the Arizona Confederate Troops in Wesley Bolin Plaza and the Jefferson Davis Memorial Highway marker near Gold Canyon – were removed from state property and “returned to the United Daughters of the Confederacy, the private organization that originally placed the monuments on state property,” according to a news release Thursday from the Arizona Department of Administration.

Activists recently defaced and vandalized these monuments, according to the letter from the United Daughters of the Confederacy, a hereditary society founded in 1894 to honor rebel war dead. It said the monuments are “now in need of repair, but due to the current political climate, we believe it unwise to repair them where they are located.”

PHOENIX – A lot goes into running a successful election in a normal year, but in the era of COVID-19 that also includes 3,200 gallons of hand sanitizer.

That’s one of several items on a shopping list that includes gloves, masks and face shields, as state elections officials work to make sure they have safeguards in place to protect the vote and voters in the Aug. 4 primary.

With that election less than two weeks away, Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs said she is optimistic.

“For both the primary and the general I just feel really confident about being ready to handle the situation,” Hobbs said this week. “I know that things are going to continue to come up that we’re not anticipating, but my office spent all of last year really laying the groundwork to be prepared.”

Hobbs delivered much the same message Tuesday during a virtual meeting of the National Association of Secretaries of State, where elections officials traded stories and tips on how they are “Preparing for Increased Voter Turnout in November 2020.”

For Arizona, that has included a renewed emphasis on mail-in voting, an increase in the use of curbside voting and the development of safety recommendations, released Monday in a pair of guides for voters and poll workers.

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Frustrated by the lack of response to their complaint of the “imminent danger” posed by COVID-19, three meatpacking workers at the Maid-Rite Specialty Foods plant outside of Scranton, Pennsylvania, took the unusual step Wednesday of filing a lawsuit against the Occupational Safety and Health Administration and Labor Secretary Eugene Scalia.

The lawsuit, filed in a Pennsylvania federal court, accuses the government of failing to protect essential workers from dangerous conditions that could expose them to the coronavirus. It relies on a rarely used provision of the Occupational Safety and Health Act that allows workers to sue the secretary of labor for “arbitrarily or capriciously” failing to counteract imminent dangers.

On May 19, the Maid-Rite workers had turned to a Pennsylvania organization called Justice at Work to help them file an anonymous complaint with OSHA that detailed the lack of protections at the plant and described how they were required to work elbow-to-elbow with their co-workers on the production line.

Their complaint followed a similar report from another Maid-Rite employee in early April, which the workers weren’t aware of at the time.

PHOENIX – Gov. Doug Ducey has asked Arizona’s congressional delegation to focus on unemployment and other matters important to Arizonans in the next federal COVID-19 relief package.

Ducey’s July 21 letter seeks funds to guarantee the unemployed will be eligible to receive at least 100% of their weekly earnings, and to replenish the state’s $1 billion unemployment trust fund, which has paid out $640 million since the pandemic began.

“We know we will continue to have needs over the coming weeks and months and we are working to be good stewards of those dollars to the benefit of all Arizonans,” Ducey wrote.

The governor also asked for an extension beyond the Dec. 30 deadline for tribal leaders to spend money allocated by Congress “to ensure they can target their highest areas of need, including infrastructure that will allow them to continue providing needed services.”

A spokeswoman for Sen. Martha McSally, R-Arizona, told The Arizona Republic the senator is “deeply engaged” in crafting the next relief package, a followup to the CARES Act Congress passed in March.

“Employees who are unable to return to work should receive sustained financial relief with expanded unemployment benefits,” McSally said in a later statement. “Congress should provide more support to small businesses that continue to be impacted by restrictions so they can stay afloat.”

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This story is co-published with WNYC.

This year, President Donald Trump’s reelection campaign filed defamation lawsuits against three of the country’s most prominent news outlets: The New York Times, The Washington Post and CNN. Then it filed another suit against a somewhat lower-profile news organization: northern Wisconsin’s WJFW-TV, which serves the 134th-largest market in the country.

The Trump campaign sued the station over what it claims is a false and defamatory ad WJFW aired that showed Trump downplaying the threat of the coronavirus as a line tracking new COVID-19 infections ticks up and up on the screen.

Dozens of stations ran the ad. But the Trump campaign chose to sue just NBC-affiliate WJFW, which is owned by a relatively small company that only has two other local TV stations, both in Bangor, Maine. The campaign did not initially sue the political organization that produced the ad. That group later joined the case as a defendant.

The curious lawsuit is part of a larger, aggressive and exceedingly expensive legal operation by the Trump campaign that’s the focus of our latest “Trump, Inc.” podcast.

ICYMI, here are the stories we covered today:

• In today's coronavirus news: AZ has passed the 150K threshold in cases … hospitalizations are trending downward as Arizonans embrace masks … Gov. Doug Ducey is expected to give more guidance to schools tomorrow as State Superintendent of Public Instruction Kathy Hoffman calls for metrics rather than calendar dates to determine when it is safe to return to schools … Ducey calls on Congress to extend the unemployment benefit that provides an extra $600 a week to out-of-work Arizonans … and more.
• Conservationists expressed anger and frustration over the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent decision not to hear an appeal to stop construction of the southern border wall.
• Navajo leaders said the tribe could begin moving toward the phased reopening of the reservation as early as next week, but they continued to urge members to take precautions to keep the number of COVID-19 cases trending downward.
• President Donald Trump said Tuesday he will exclude undocumented immigrants in the 2020 Census when it comes to allocating seats in Congress, a move critics called unconstitutional and unenforceable.
• Opponents to the effort to legalize recreational marijuana in Arizona filed a legal challenge in Maricopa County Superior Court Tuesday in an attempt to stop the initiative from making the state's November ballot.
• A federal appeals court Tuesday rejected a long-simmering challenge to Proposition 123, the voter-approved 2016 measure that is set to redirect an estimated $3.5 billion to Arizona public schools over a decade.
• Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s announcement Tuesday that fans will not be allowed to attend college sporting events in the state of New York during the fall shed light on an interesting discrepancy between New York and Arizona.
• With Arizona's COVID-19 cases now topping 150,000, the University of Arizona and the State of Arizona have expanded their free COVID-19 antibody testing program to include 15 new categories of essential workers considered at high risk for exposure.

With Arizona's COVID-19 cases now topping 150,000, the University of Arizona and the State of Arizona have expanded their free COVID-19 antibody testing program to include 15 new categories of essential workers considered at high risk for exposure. The antibody test, developed by researchers at UA Health Sciences, determines who has been exposed to and developed an immune response against COVID-19.

PHOENIX – A federal appeals court Tuesday rejected a long-simmering challenge to Proposition 123, the voter-approved 2016 measure that is set to redirect an estimated $3.5 billion to Arizona public schools over a decade.

A three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals overturned a lower court ruling in the case, which has been pending since the day after Prop 123 was passed by a margin of just 1.5%.

Phoenix resident Michael Pierce had argued that the state could not transfer funds from the state’s land trust, as the proposition does, without congressional approval and a federal district court agreed. But the appeals court said Tuesday that Congress made the necessary approvals in 2018, leaving Pierce “without a case or controversy,” and it reversed the lower court.

The legal challenges did not hold up the school money, but Chris Thomas, general counsel for the Arizona School Boards Association, said it is still “good to get this chapter behind us.”