Happy Thursday! Major League Baseball players and owners are inching closer to a deal that would bring back America’s best sport in mid-July. [Editor: Hockey?] Don’t turn back now, just get this thing done!

Quick Hits: Today’s Top Stories

• As of Wednesday night, 2,163,290 cases of COVID-19 have been reported in the United States (an increase of 25,574 from yesterday) and 117,717 deaths have been attributed to the virus (an increase of 755 from yesterday), according to the Johns Hopkins University COVID-19 Dashboard, leading to a mortality rate among confirmed cases of 5.4 percent (the true mortality rate is likely much lower, between 0.4 percent and 1.4 percent, but it’s impossible to determine precisely due to incomplete testing regimens). Of 24,937877 coronavirus tests conducted in the United States (488,570 conducted since yesterday), 8.7 percent have come back positive.

• Senate Republicans unveiled on Wednesday the JUSTICE Act, a police reform bill spearheaded by Sen. Tim Scott that aims to restrict law enforcement’s use of chokeholds and expand methods for data collection on policing practices throughout the country.

• Kim Reynolds, the Republican governor of Iowa, signed an executive order restoring voting rights for former felons. Iowa was the last remaining state in the country that denied ex-felons voting rights for life.