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Vice President Mike Pence on Wednesday seemed to bolster President Donald Trump’s threat to cut funding for schools that don’t reopen in the fall.

When asked during a press briefing if Trump was serious about his threat, Pence noted that “roughly percent” of states’ education funding comes from the federal government (however, that funding is ultimately determined by Congress, not the White House).

“As we work with Congress on the next round of state support, we’re going to be working for ways to give states a strong incentive and an encouragement to get kids back to school,” the vice president said.

Pence mentioned budgetary “incentives” again after he was asked why local governments shouldn’t be the ones to decide whether schools reopen instead of Trump pressuring them to do so.

“What you’re going to see is the President is going to continue to provide leadership,” the vice president told reporters. “I expect as the debate in Congress goes forward about additional resources, we’re going to look into building incentives for states to go forward.”

Earlier on Wednesday, Trump accused Democrats of believing reopening schools “would be bad for them politically” via Twitter.

“May cut off funding if not open!” he threatened.

As coronavirus cases surge, inundating hospitals and leading to testing shortages, a rapidly growing number of Houston area residents are dying at home, according to an NBC News and ProPublica review of Houston Fire Department data. An increasing number of these at-home deaths have been confirmed to be the result of COVID-19, Harris County medical examiner data shows.

The previously unreported jump in people dying at home is the latest indicator of a mounting crisis in a region beset by one of the nation’s worst and fastest-growing coronavirus outbreaks. On Tuesday, a record 3,851 people were hospitalized for the coronavirus in the Houston region, exceeding normal intensive care capacity and sending some hospitals scrambling to find additional staff and space.

The uptick in the number of people dying before they can even reach a hospital in Houston draws parallels to what happened in New York City in March and April, when there was a spike in the number of times firefighters responded to medical calls, only to discover that the person in need of help had already died. These increases also echo those reported during outbreaks in Detroit and Boston, when the number of people dying at home jumped as coronavirus cases surged.

While far more people died of COVID-19 in those cities than have died so far in Houston, researchers and paramedics say that the trend of sudden at-home deaths in Texas’ largest city is concerning because it shows that the virus’s toll may be deeper than what appears in official death tallies and daily hospitalization reports.

Many people who die at home are not tested for COVID-19, said Dr. Jeremy Faust, an emergency medicine physician at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. In New York City, for example, only 16 percent of the 11,475 at-home deaths between February and June have been attributed to COVID-19, according to data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

“There’s no reflexive testing,” Faust said, noting that medical examiners are selective about the cases they take. “There’s no pressure to call it a COVID death.”

In yet another dire election forecast for President Donald Trump, the Cook Political Report announced on Wednesday that the crucial swing states of Wisconsin and Pennsylvania are now leaning blue amid Trump’s blundering response to COVID-19 and his near-constant trafficking in racist dogwhistling in recent weeks.

Cook national editor Amy Walters cited Trump’s flatlining approval ratings, which have sunk to the low 40s, and equally disastrous poll numbers against Democratic candidate Joe Biden as the reasons for the shift.

Per FiveThirtyEight, Trump currently trails Biden in Wisconsin by nearly 8 points and in Pennsylvania by 7.4 points. Both states were key to Trump’s victory over Hillary Clinton after he won them by razor–thin margins of less than 1 percent in 2016.

Additionally, Walters reported that Biden is currently “slightly favored to win at least Arizona and Florida” among the “toss up” states, which also include North Carolina and now Georgia.

Overall, the upcoming November elections are “looking more like a Democratic tsunami than simply a Blue wave,” Walters wrote, adding that Trump could drag down congressional candidates along with him.

Roger Stone and his associates were behind dozens of fake Facebook accounts that coordinated their activity and boosted his work and political priorities, Facebook said Wednesday — all at the same time Stone was under federal scrutiny for his alleged attempts to work with Wikileaks and boost Donald Trump ahead of the 2016 election.

The accounts, including Stone’s personal profiles, have been removed from Facebook.

Facebook said the full scope of the Stone network was only visible after the release of search warrants earlier this year from former special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation of Russian election meddling.

The warrants, released in April after a petition from several media organizations, showed Stone using a huge network of fake accounts to boost stolen Democratic emails published on Wikileaks.

Stone’s assistant told a Mueller investigator that he bought “a couple hundred fake Facebook accounts,” and that bloggers working for Stone sought to set up authentic-looking profiles to push the emails published by Wikileaks. Stone said in April that the released warrants “prove no crime.”

Facebook said in a press release Wednesday that “some pages appeared to have acquired followers from Pakistan and Egypt to make themselves seem more popular than they were.”

The Stone network was faulted for breaking Facebook’s rule against “coordinated inauthentic behavior,” Facebook said. In all, the take-down affected 54 Facebook accounts, 50 Pages, and 4 Instagram accounts.

“The Page admins and account owners posted about local politics in Florida, Roger Stone and his Pages, websites, books, and media appearances, a Florida land and water resources bill, the hacked materials released by Wikileaks ahead of the US 2016 election, candidates in the 2016 primaries and general election, and the Roger Stone trial,” Facebook’s press release asserted.

The accounts were most active between 2015 and 2017 and since then the majority of them have been dormant.

Like beachgoers informed there is no danger just before a tsunami hits, Israelis are stunned by the magnitude of the dramatic turn in their fortune. In under six weeks, they’ve gone from model nation fighting the novel coronavirus to a small, isolated country whose citizens face a long, deadly summer locked down.

On May 17, Israel reported only 10 new cases of COVID-19 in the entire country. It looked like Israel had succeeded in subduing the coronavirus crisis with a lockdown enforced early and strictly, reemerging on the other side with only 271 dead.

Announcing the imminent reopening of restaurants and pubs, Netanyahu, who usually sticks to a formal manner, beamed and told Israelis to “go out and enjoy yourselves.”

The prime minister, who was indicted late last year and had failed to win enough votes to form a right-wing government in three successive electoral campaigns, was basking not only in his internationally applauded success against the virus, but in having remained head of government. After 18 months of political limbo, he’d been able to cobble together a team-of-rivals coalition with former opponent Benny Gantz, a centrist retired army chief of staff.

That government, Netanyahu promised, would focus only on the “corona emergency” for its first six months.

With Israelis under virtual house arrest and numbers of patients under control, Netanyahu spent much of April boasting about his mastery of virus management.

“Israel is the safest country on earth,” he crowed at one of his prime time live appearances, citing statistics published by an unknown website, the Deep Knowledge Group.

Jump to July, and cases of COVID-19 are spiking, putting Israel high on the list of countries who’ve lost control of the virus’ contagion, the economy is cratering, with unemployment at about 23 percent, and the new government is on the verge of collapse.

What happened?

If you ask Dr. Siegal Sadetzki, the head of the nation’s public health service, who served as an Israeli Dr. Anthony Fauci for the past six months and quit her job on Tuesday, the government “has lost its compass.”