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Timeless words of wisdom from Friedrich Engels:This legacy belongs to all of us:
“Let us not, however, flatter ourselves overmuch on account of our human victories over nature. For each such victory nature takes its revenge on us. Each victory, it is true, the first place brings about the results we expected, but in the second and third places it has quite different, unforeseen effects which only too often cancel the first. The people who, in Mesopotamia, Greece, Asia Minor and elsewhere, destroyed the forest to obtain cultivable land, never dreamed that by removing along with the forests the collecting centres and reservoirs of moisture they were laying the basis for the present forlorn state of those countries. . . Thus at every step we are reminded that we by no means rule over nature like a conqueror over a foreign people, like someone standing outside nature–but that we, with flesh, blood and brain, belong to nature, and exist in its midst, and that all our mastery of it consists in the fact that we have the advantage over all other creatures of being able to learn its laws and apply them correctly.” The Part played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man 1876. —Friedrich Engels
Oust Duterte: Stop The Killings in the
Philippines
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Transit Workers Need COVID Protection; Help Keep Them Safe and Build Union Power!
By August 1st
ATU members and supporters at Transit Equity Day, 2020
Transit Workers Need COVID Protection; Help Keep Them Safe and Build Union Power!
Sign this letter to our regional Metropolitan Transportation Commission: https://bit.ly/ridesafecalif
One click--you don’t need to compose anything original. Do it now!
By Aug 1stSign this state-wide Ride Safe petition to be delivered by ATU to transit authorities throughout the state: https://actionnetwork.org/petitions/california-ride-safe-campaign/
Transit operators are getting sick and essential workers who depend on transit are at grave risk.
The Amalgamated Transit Union has reached out for our help; sign both the petition and the letter above!
We know a Green New Deal calls for Free, Accessible, Expanded and Emissions-free Public Transit. But right now, public transit operators need us join their fight for COVID health and safety protection.
This ATU demand for protection of majority Black workers and majority Black and Brown riders sits right at the intersection of Labor, Racial, and Environmental Justice—where working class power is building right now.
Sign both of the petition and the letter right now!
The Amalgamated Transit Union has reached out for our help; sign both the petition and the letter above!
We know a Green New Deal calls for Free, Accessible, Expanded and Emissions-free Public Transit. But right now, public transit operators need us join their fight for COVID health and safety protection.
This ATU demand for protection of majority Black workers and majority Black and Brown riders sits right at the intersection of Labor, Racial, and Environmental Justice—where working class power is building right now.
Sign both of the petition and the letter right now!
• Letter to our regional Metropolitan Transportation Commission: https://bit.ly/ridesafecalif
• State-wide Ride Safe petition: https://actionnetwork.org/petitions/california-ride-safe-campaign/
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For Immediate Release
Press Contact: Herb Mintz
(415) 759-9679
Photos and Interviews: Steve Zeltzer
(415) 867-0628
LaborFest is committed to providing unique and relevant labor theme events while practicing proper social distancing to prevent the spread of the virus. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, there will be no printed program booklet and all LaborFest 2020 program events will be available online only at https://laborfest.net/. Events will be available through YouTube or Facebook using a web address provided in the program schedule. Events are subject to change or cancellation due to COVID-19 related issues. Check our website at https://laborfest.net/ prior to each event.
LaborFest is the premier labor cultural arts and film festival in the United States. LaborFest recognizes the role of working people in the building of America and making it work even in this time of COVID-19. The festival is self-funded with contributions from unions and other organizations that support and celebrate the contributions of working people.
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Reality Winner Tests Positive for COVID, Still Imprisoned
With great anguish, I’m writing to share the news that NSA whistleblower Reality Winner, still in federal prison, has tested positive for COVID-19. Winner, despite her vulnerable health conditions, was denied home release in April – the judge’s reasoning being that the Federal Medical Center, Carswell is “presumably better equipped than most to deal with the onset of COVID-19 in its inmates”.Since that ruling, COVID infections at Carswell have exploded, ranking it now as second highest in the nation for the number of cases, and substantially increasing the likelihood that its medical capacity will be overwhelmed.This news comes one week after Trump’s commutation of convicted felon Roger Stone, and two months after the home release of Trump’s convicted campaign manager, Paul Manafort:Roger Stone’s Freedom Is All the More Outrageous While Reality Winner Languishes in Prison
Donald Trump’s commutation of Roger Stone’s prison sentence is galling on numerous levels. It’s a brazen act of corruption and an egregious obstruction of an ongoing investigation of the President and his enablers. There are few figures less worthy of clemency than a Nixonian dirty trickster like Stone. But the final twist of the knife is that Reality Winner, the honest, earnest, anti-Stone of the Russian meddling saga, remains in federal prison.
Continue Reading
Please share this with your networks, and stand with us in support of Reality Winner and her family during this critical time.
Thank you,Jesselyn Radack
Director
Whistleblower & Source Protection Program (WHISPeR)
ExposeFactsTwitter: @JesselynRadack
You are receiving this list because you have opted in on our website.
Want to change how you receive these emails?
You can update your preferences or unsubscribe from this list
WHISPeR Project at ExposeFacts 1627 Eye Street, NW Suite 600 Washington, DC 20006
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"While you're worried about 'bad apples', We're wary of the roots. because NO healthy tree, naturally bears Strange
Fruit."
—Unknown source
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Subject: Shut Down Fort Hood! Justice for Vanessa Guillén. Sign the petition!
SHUT DOWN FORT HOOD NOW!
In late April, Pfc. Vanessa Guillén went missing from her base in Ft. Hood, Texas. It took her family and friends working night and day to appeal to the commanding officers to get any attention whatsoever about her whereabouts. Vanessa had told her family she had been sexually harassed by her supervisor.For more than three months, Vanessa’s higher-ups paid little attention to her family’s urgent pleas to investigate her disappearance. She was treated as being disposable.In late June, her body was found 25 miles from the base. Vanessa had been tragically murdered by her abuser who later killed himself upon capture.The unspeakable crimes against Vanessa Guillén have opened a floodgate of testimonies about sexual assault in the military. Many women and LGBTQ2S+ people are telling their heartbreaking stories with the hashtag #iamvanessaGuillén.Vanessa’s death is a result of sexual harassment in the military, which is deplorable. Fort Hood is the worst. According to the Pentagon’s own reports, it has the most sexual assaults of any Army post in the country. That is why it must be shut down now!In addition, Fort Hood, the single biggest military post in the U.S. armed forces, is named after a Confederate general. Its name glorifies racism and slavery.When Vanessa Guillén enlisted in the Army, she thought she’d be doing good and it would be helpful to her. Instead, it destroyed her. But how could it not when the military exists not to help people, but to defend Wall Street? It invaded and still occupies Iraq and Afghanistan, killing millions, just for oil profits.The case for Justice for Vanessa is very much linked to the movement for Black Lives. Young people of color must have other options than police violence or going to war for their future.WE DEMAND:•Investigate Fort Hood Commanding General Robert White and others for conspiracy to cover up Pfc. Vanessa Guillén’s murder. Why did it take a mass movement to find what happened?
•Shut down Ft. Hood! There is no other way to end the deplorable conditions soldiers face.
•Job training, education, COVID-19 relief, not war! If we shut down the Pentagon, the annual U.S. defense budget of $1 trillion could be used for people’s needs, not war.
•End misogyny and homophobia in the military. Justice for Vanessa and all survivors.
147 W 24th St.
2nd Floor
New York City, NY 10011
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Marvin Gaye - What's Going On (Official Video 2019)
Because once is not enough. Because sometimes music is my only solace. Because sometimes it hurts too much too care but to be human is to hurt. Because I feel lucky to have grown up with great music. Because that music was harmonic and melodious. Because that music had soul. Because I grew up with Blues and Motown and Jazz. Because I grew up with Black friends and we played ball everyday and we had fun and we were winners. Because they taught me about music and soul and acceptance. Because they didn't hate me for being white. Because I was brought up with Irish Catholics who taught me that fighting and arguing for justice kept depression in its place. Because they taught me that if you never quit fighting you haven't lost so never quit fighting for justice. Because I was in a union and learned that solidarity is the original religion. Because without solidarity you are alone. And alone is hell and because I have never been in hell. Because I am part of the human race. Because the human race is the only race on earth. Because I am grateful for Marvin Gaye, and John Coltrane, and Sam Cooke and because you know what I am talking about. Because we are going to win and we are going to have fun. Because that's the truth. Because no lie can defeat truth. Because you are there to hear me. Because I know I am not alone. —Gregg Shotwell
https://www.greggshotwell.com
(Gregg Shotwell is a retired autoworker, writer and poet.)
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"When I liberate myself, I liberate others. If you don't speak out, ain't nobody going to speak out for you."
Fannie Lou Hamer
Dear Community,
Do you know what wakes me up every day? Believing that we will win. We always knew that we were on the right side of history—but this summer between unveiling the racist outcomes of COVID-19, the global uprisings and the nationwide 650+ Juneneenth actions, we have momentum like we’ve never had before, and the majority of the country is with us. We know that the next step in our pathway to liberation is to make a strong political move at the ballot box—and we need you to lead the effort to entice, excite, educate, and ignite our people, from the babies to the grannies. Black August belongs to the Electoral Justice Project; it is our turn to set the national Black Political Agenda, and we want you to join us!
In a crisis, we have found resilience and the opportunity to make history. This is the genius of our Blackness—even amid a devastating pandemic that exposed racism and anti-Blackness as the real pre-existing conditions harming our communities, we are rising up and taking action to build power and demand that our rights and dignity be upheld and respected.
This summer, we will continue the legacy of Black Political Power-building and the righteous anger and momentum in the streets to shape a movement that will extend to the November elections and beyond.
We invite you to join the Movement for Black Lives on Friday, August 28, at for the Black National Convention—a primetime event in celebration of Black Culture, Black Political Power-building, and a public policy agenda that will set forth an affirmative vision for Black Lives.
We are drawing from a legacy of struggle for Black Liberation. In 1964, Black communities across Mississippi and the South united in the face of systemic racism and voter suppression. That summer, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the landmark Civil Rights Act, which after decades of violence and segregation, was won through sheer will. Then, on March 10, 1972, 4,000 Black people from every political affiliation attended the National Black Political Convention in Gary, Indiana, to yield power for Black people. While the historic event generated a new Black Political Agenda and quadrupled the number of Black elected officials by the end of the 1970s, it was not without its divisions and tensions—ranging from questions about the efficacy of Reverend Jesse Jackson’s assertion of a “Liberation Party” to the isolation of then–Presidential Candidate Shirley Chishom.
Despite the varied outcomes, the National Black Political Convention was an influential moment in Black History. Forty-eight years later, we are meeting yet another opportunity for radical change. This Black August, join us as we unveil one of the boldest political platforms our country has ever seen, partnering to ignite millions across the country. www.blacknovember.org
You feel that? We’re going to win.
With Black Love,
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BlackRock loves to make a killing on killing: Over a thousand Americans have been killed by Tasers — 32 percent of them are Black Americans. Tasers are made by the colossal law enforcement supplier Axon Enterprise, based in Arizona.
One of their top shareholders happens to be Blackrock. Recently Blackrock has been trying to be sympathetic to the atrocities of murders waged on Black Americans and communities of color. If we ramp up massive pressure and blow the whistle on their deadly stocks, we can highlight that divesting from Tasers and the war in our streets will be a step in the right direction in building a fair and just society.
This issue is important to having peace in our streets. But this will only work if people participate. Send an email to Blackrock to divest from the Taser manufacturer Axon Enterprise which is responsible for the killing of thousands of Americans, and CODEPINK will pull out all the stops to make sure Blackrock execs hear our call:
Tell Blackrock: stop investing in Tasers!
Blackrock could do this. They recently announced that they were divesting from fossil fuels — signaling a shift in their policies. If CEO Larry Fink cares about “diversity, fairness, and justice” and building a “stronger, more equal, and safer society” — he should divest from Tasers.
Plus, compared to Blackrock’s other holdings, Taser stocks aren’t even that significant!
But if Blackrock does this, it could be the first domino we need to get other investment companies on board too. Send an email to BlackRock and share this widely! Tell Blackrock: stop investing in Tasers!
If there’s one thing our community stands for, it’s peace and social justice. And one way we can help achieve that is by cutting off the flow of cash into the manufacturing of Tasers. So, let’s come together to make that happen, and help prevent more innocent Americans from being killed with these senseless tools.
With hope, Nancy, Carley, Jodie, Paki, Cody, Kelsey, and Yousef | |
This email was sent to giobon@comcast.net. To unsubscribe, click here.
To update your email subscription, contact info@codepink.org.
© 2020 CODEPINK.ORG | Created with NationBuilder
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Rayshard Brooks, 27 years old, was shot to death while running away from police in Atlanta Friday, June 12, 2020.
SAY HIS NAME!
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/14/us/videos-rayshard-brooks-shooting-atlanta-police.html?action=click&module=Top%20Stories&pgtype=Homepage
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Kimberly Jones
If you haven't seen this, you're missing something spectacular:
On Saturday May 30th filmmaker and photographer David Jones of David Jones Media felt compelled to go out and serve the community in some way. He decided to use his art to try and explain the events that were currently impacting our lives. On day two, Sunday the 31st, he activated his dear friend author Kimberly Jones to tag along and conduct interviews. During a moment of downtime he captured these powerful words from her and felt the world couldn’t wait for the full length documentary, they needed to hear them now.
Kimberly Jones on YouTube
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So what has protesting accomplished?
👉🏾Within 10 days of sustained protests:
Minneapolis bans use of choke holds.
👉🏾Charges are upgraded against Officer Chauvin, and his accomplices are arrested and charged.
👉🏾Dallas adopts a "duty to intervene" rule that requires officers to stop other cops who are engaging in inappropriate use of force.
👉🏾New Jersey’s attorney general said the state will update its use-of-force guidelines for the first time in two decades.
👉🏾In Maryland, a bipartisan work group of state lawmakers announced a police reform work group.
👉🏾Los Angeles City Council introduces motion to reduce LAPD’s $1.8 billion operating budget.
👉🏾MBTA in Boston agrees to stop using public buses to transport police officers to protests.
👉🏾Police brutality captured on cameras leads to near-immediate suspensions and firings of officers in several cities (i.e., Buffalo, Ft. Lauderdale).
👉🏾Monuments celebrating confederates are removed in cities in Virginia, Alabama, and other states.
👉🏾Street in front of the White House is renamed "Black Lives Matter Plaza.”
Military forces begin to withdraw from D.C.
Then, there's all the other stuff that's hard to measure:
💓The really difficult public and private conversations that are happening about race and privilege.
💓The realizations some white people are coming to about racism and the role of policing in this country.
💓The self-reflection.
💓The internal battles exploding within organizations over issues that have been simmering or ignored for a long time. Some organizations will end as a result, others will be forever changed or replaced with something stronger and fairer.
Globally:
🌎 Protests against racial inequality sparked by the police killing of George Floyd are taking place all over the world.
🌎 Rallies and memorials have been held in cities across Europe, as well as in Mexico, Canada, Brazil, Australia, and New Zealand.
🌎 As the US contends with its second week of protests, issues of racism, police brutality, and oppression have been brought to light across the globe.
🌎 People all over the world understand that their own fights for human rights, for equality and fairness, will become so much more difficult to win if we are going to lose America as the place where 'I have a dream' is a real and universal political program," Wolfgang Ischinger, a former German ambassador to the US, told the New Yorker.
🌎 In France, protesters marched holding signs that said "I can't breathe" to signify both the words of Floyd, and the last words of Adama Traoré, a 24-year-old black man who was subdued by police officers and gasped the sentence before he died outside Paris in 2016.
🌎 Cities across Europe have come together after the death of George Floyd:
✊🏽 In Amsterdam, an estimated 10,000 people filled the Dam square on Monday, holding signs and shouting popular chants like "Black lives matter," and "No justice, no peace."
✊🏽 In Germany, people gathered in multiple locations throughout Berlin to demand justice for Floyd and fight against police brutality.
✊🏾 A mural dedicated to Floyd was also spray-painted on a stretch of wall in Berlin that once divided the German capital during the Cold War.
✊🏿 In Ireland, protesters held a peaceful demonstration outside of Belfast City Hall, and others gathered outside of the US embassy in Dublin.
✊🏿In Italy, protesters gathered and marched with signs that said "Stop killing black people," "Say his name," and "We will not be silent."
✊🏾 In Spain, people gathered to march and hold up signs throughout Barcelona and Madrid.
✊🏾 In Athens, Greece, protesters took to the streets to collectively hold up a sign that read "I can't breathe."
✊🏾 In Brussels, protesters were seen sitting in a peaceful demonstration in front of an opera house in the center of the city.
✊🏾In Denmark, protesters were heard chanting "No justice, no peace!" throughout the streets of Copenhagen, while others gathered outside the US embassy.
✊🏾 In Canada, protesters were also grieving for Regis Korchinski-Paquet, a 29-year-old black woman who died on Wednesday after falling from her balcony during a police investigation at her building.
✊🏾 And in New Zealand, roughly 2,000 people marched to the US embassy in Auckland, chanting and carrying signs demanding justice.
💐 Memorials have been built for Floyd around the world, too. In Mexico City, portraits of him were hung outside the US embassy with roses, candles, and signs.
💐 In Poland, candles and flowers were laid out next to photos of Floyd outside the US consulate.
💐 And in Syria, two artists created a mural depicting Floyd in the northwestern town of Binnish, "on a wall destroyed by military planes."
Before the assassination of George Floyd some of you were able to say whatever the hell you wanted and the world didn't say anything to you...
THERE HAS BEEN A SHIFT, AN AWAKENING...MANY OF YOU ARE BEING EXPOSED FOR WHO YOU REALLY ARE. #readthatagain
Don't wake up tomorrow on the wrong side of this issue. Its not to late to SAY,
"Maybe I need to look at this from a different perspective."
"Maybe I don't know what its like to be black in America..."
"Maybe, just maybe, I have been taught wrong."
There is still so much work to be done. It's been a really dark, raw week. This could still end badly. But all we can do is keep doing the work.
Keep protesting.
WE ARE NOT TRYING TO START A RACE WAR; WE ARE PROTESTING TO END IT,
PEACEFULLY.
How beautiful is that?
ALL LIVES CANNOT MATTER UNTIL YOU INCLUDE BLACK LIVES.
YOU CANNOT SAY 'ALL LIVES MATTER' WHEN YOU DO NOTHING TO STOP SYSTEMIC RACISM & POLICE BRUTALITY.
YOU CANNOT SAY 'ALL LIVES MATTER' WHEN BLACK PEOPLE ARE DYING AND ALL YOU COMPLAIN ABOUT IS THE LOOTING.
YOU CANNOT SAY 'ALL LIVES MATTER' WHEN YOU ALLOW CHILDREN TO BE CAGED, VETERANS TO GO HOMELESS, AND POOR FAMILIES TO GO HUNGRY & LOSE THEIR HEALTH INSURANCE.
DO ALL LIVES MATTER? YES. BUT RIGHT NOW, ONLY BLACK LIVES ARE BEING TARGETED, JAILED, AND KILLED EN MASSE- SO THAT'S WHO WE'RE FOCUSING ON.
🖤🖤🖤BLACK LIVES MATTER🖤🖤🖤
IF YOU CAN'T SEE THIS, YOU ARE THE PROBLEM.
*I do not know the original author*
Copy & paste widely!
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BLACK LIVES MATTER
Ultimately, the majority of human suffering is caused by a system that places the value of material wealth over the value of
human life. To end the suffering, we must end the profit motive—the very foundation of capitalism itself.
—BAUAW
(Bay Area United Against War Newsletter)
Ultimately, the majority of human suffering is caused by a system that places the value of material wealth over the value of
human life. To end the suffering, we must end the profit motive—the very foundation of capitalism itself.
(Bay Area United Against War Newsletter)
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George Floyd's Last Words
"It's my face man
I didn't do nothing serious man
please
please
please I can't breathe
please man
please somebody
please man
I can't breathe
I can't breathe
please
(inaudible)
man can't breathe, my face
just get up
I can't breathe
please (inaudible)
I can't breathe sh*t
I will
I can't move
mama
mama
I can't
my knee
my nuts
I'm through
I'm through
I'm claustrophobic
my stomach hurt
my neck hurts
everything hurts
some water or something
please
please
I can't breathe officer
don't kill me
they gon' kill me man
come on man
I cannot breathe
I cannot breathe
they gon' kill me
they gon' kill me
I can't breathe
I can't breathe
please sir
please
please
please I can't breathe"
I didn't do nothing serious man
please
please
please I can't breathe
please man
please somebody
please man
I can't breathe
I can't breathe
please
(inaudible)
man can't breathe, my face
just get up
I can't breathe
please (inaudible)
I can't breathe sh*t
I will
I can't move
mama
mama
I can't
my knee
my nuts
I'm through
I'm through
I'm claustrophobic
my stomach hurt
my neck hurts
everything hurts
some water or something
please
please
I can't breathe officer
don't kill me
they gon' kill me man
come on man
I cannot breathe
I cannot breathe
they gon' kill me
they gon' kill me
I can't breathe
I can't breathe
please sir
please
please
please I can't breathe"
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By ShakaboonaTrump Comic Satire—A Proposal
Write to Shakaboona:
Smart Communications/PA DOC
Kerry Shakaboona Marshall #BE7826
SCI Rockview
P.O. Box 33028
St. Petersburg, FL 33733
Write to Shakaboona:
Smart Communications/PA DOC
Kerry Shakaboona Marshall #BE7826
SCI Rockview
P.O. Box 33028
St. Petersburg, FL 33733
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Still photo from Stanley Kubrick's "Dr. Strangelove"released January 29, 1964
Enough is Enough: Global Nuclear Weapons
Spending 2020
In its report "Enough is Enough: Global Nuclear Weapons Spending 2020" the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons has produced the first estimate in nearly a decade of global nuclear weapon spending, taking into account costs to maintain and build new nuclear weapons. ICAN estimates that the nine nuclear-armed countries spent $72.9 billion on their 13,000-plus nuclear weapons in 2019, equaling $138,699 every minute of 2019 on nuclear weapons, and a $7.1 billion increase from 2018.
These estimates (rounded to one decimal point) include nuclear warhead and nuclear-capable delivery systems operating costs and development where these expenditures are publicly available and are based on a reasonable percentage of total military spending on nuclear weapons when more detailed budget data is not available. ICAN urges all nuclear-armed states to be transparent about nuclear weapons expenditures to allow for more accurate reporting on global nuclear expenditures and better government accountability.
ICAN, May 2020
https://www.icanw.org/global_nuclear_weapons_spending_2020
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Shooting, looting, scalping, lynching,
Raping, torturing their way across
the continent—400 years ago—
Colonial settler thugs launched this
endless crimson tide rolling down on
Today…
Raping, torturing their way across
the continent—400 years ago—
Colonial settler thugs launched this
endless crimson tide rolling down on
Today…
Colonial settler thugs launched this
endless crimson tide leaving in-
visible yellow crime
scene tape crisscrossing Tallahassee
to Seattle; San Diego to Bangor…
endless crimson tide leaving in-
visible yellow crime
scene tape crisscrossing Tallahassee
to Seattle; San Diego to Bangor…
Shooting Seneca, Seminole, Creek,
Choctaw, Mohawk, Cayuga, Blackfeet,
Shooting Sioux, Shawnee, Chickasaw,
Chippewa before
Looting Lakota land; Looting Ohlone
Land—
Looting Ashanti, Fulani, Huasa, Wolof,
Yoruba, Ibo, Kongo, Mongo, Hutu, Zulu…
Labor.
Choctaw, Mohawk, Cayuga, Blackfeet,
Shooting Sioux, Shawnee, Chickasaw,
Chippewa before
Looting Lakota land; Looting Ohlone
Land—
Looting Ashanti, Fulani, Huasa, Wolof,
Yoruba, Ibo, Kongo, Mongo, Hutu, Zulu…
Labor.
Colonial settler thugs launched this
endless crimson tide—hot lead storms—
Shooting, looting Mexico for half of New
Mexico; a quarter of Colorado; some of
Wyoming and most of Arizona; Looting
Mexico for Utah, Nevada and California
endless crimson tide—hot lead storms—
Shooting, looting Mexico for half of New
Mexico; a quarter of Colorado; some of
Wyoming and most of Arizona; Looting
Mexico for Utah, Nevada and California
So, next time Orange Mobutu, Boss Tweet,
is dirty like Duterte—howling for shooting;
Next time demented minions raise rifles to
shoot; Remind them that
Real looters wear Brooks Brothers suits;
Or gold braid and junk medals ‘cross their
chests. Real looters—with Capitalist Hill
Accomplices—
Steal trillions
Not FOX-boxes, silly sneakers, cheap clothes…
is dirty like Duterte—howling for shooting;
Next time demented minions raise rifles to
shoot; Remind them that
Real looters wear Brooks Brothers suits;
Or gold braid and junk medals ‘cross their
chests. Real looters—with Capitalist Hill
Accomplices—
Steal trillions
Not FOX-boxes, silly sneakers, cheap clothes…
© 2020. Raymond Nat Turner, The Town Crier. All Rights Reserved.
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Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin
https://www.change.org/p/fulton-county-district-attorney-paul-howard-new-trial-for-imam-jamil-al-amin-fka-h-rap-brown/u/26712236?cs_tk=Agfqa4Sr0n9NAEiczV4AAXicyyvNyQEABF8BvL2nnqaMAc2Bt2LUieefEjI%3D&utm_campaign=db01b165ea374b29a7db3cf3d605952a&utm_content=initial_v0_4_0&utm_medium=email&utm_source=petition_update&utm_term=cs
Application for retrial has been submitted to the
conviction integrity unit—confession and all
Petition update - Please sign at the link above!
May 23, 2020 —
We have submitted our application to the @FultonCountyDA #ConvictionIntegrityUnit demanding a retrial for Imam Jamil Al-Amin FKA H. Rap Brown.
We must now show the establishment that we care more about justice than they do about corruption and injustice.
The proof of misdeeds is clear, the proof of innocence is clear, a retrial or release are the only acceptable options.
Questions and comments may be sent to info@freedomarchives.orgWe make the news so let our voices once again be heard loudly and in unison…we demand a retrial…we demand justice! #FreeImamJamil
To unsubscribe contact: http://freedomarchives.org/mailman/options/ppnews_freedomarchives.org
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Veterans Join Call for a Global Ceasefire, The Lasting Effects of War Book Discussion, Sir, No Sir Viewing, VFP's Online Convention, Workshop Proposals, Convention FAQ, No More COVID-19 Money For the Pentagon, Repeal the AUMF, Community Conversation on Hybrid Warfare, St Louis VFP Delivers VA Lunch, In the News and Calendar
Veterans Join Call for a Global Ceasefire
Veterans For Peace, as a United Nations Department of Global Communication affiliated NGO, is most gratified to see UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres make his plea for a worldwide ceasefire during this global pandemic.
The first line of the Preamble of the UN's Charter says that they originated to save “succeeding generations from the scourge of war”. But sadly, because the UN was created by the victors of WW2 who remain the powers of the world, and because the UN depends for funding on those same militarily and economically dominant nation-states, primarily the U.S., much more often than not the UN is very quiet on war.
Please join Veterans For Peace in appealing to U.S. Ambassador to the UN Kelly Craft to support the Secretary General's call for a GLOBAL CEASEFIRE!
For more information about events go to:
https://www.veteransforpeace.org/?eType=EmailBlastContent&eId=fa5082af-9325-47a7-901c-710e85091ee1
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COURAGE TO RESIST ~ SUPPORT THE TROOPS WHO REFUSE TO FIGHT!
www.couragetoresist.org ~ 510.488.3559 ~ facebook.com/couragetoresist
www.couragetoresist.org ~ 510.488.3559 ~ facebook.com/couragetoresist
484 Lake Park Ave # 41
Oakland, CA 94610-2730
United States
Oakland, CA 94610-2730
United States
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From Business Insider 2018
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"The biggest block from having society in harmony with the universe is the belief in a lie that says it’s not realistic or humanly possible."
"If Obama taught me anything it’s that it don’t matter who you vote for in this system. There’s nothing a politician can do that the next one can’t undo. You can’t vote away the ills of society people have to put our differences aside ban together and fight for the greater good, not vote for the lesser evil."
—Johnny Gould (Follow @tandino415 on Instagram)
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COVID-19 PRISON UPDATEBy: Shakaboona, Wednesday, April 29, 2020
I just heard on the prison grapevine that PA prisons SCI-Huntingdon and SCI-Houtzdale has coronavirus infections. SCI-Huntingdon is suppose to have 12 incarcerated persons infected and SCI-Houtzdale suppose to have 3 incarcerated persons infected. This information has not been confirmed by reliable & legitimate sources, but I'm placing this info on the wire for folks to look into and confirm themselves. Ask questions people. Don't depend on government officials to tell u the truth; they hardly ever do, and when they do manage to tell what may appear to be some truth it is always mixed with a lie, which is still falsehood. They r media "Spin Artists", and poor ones at that. Investigate things for yourselves.More on Secret Mass Prison Transfers @ SCI-Rockview - Beginning on Sunday (4-26-2020) incarcerated persons had there personal property packed up in preparation for transfer from SCI-Rockview to other far away prisons across the state. From Monday to Friday, SCI-Rockview has shipped out for transfer about 60 incarcerated persons per day. Rumors by Prison Officials are saying they must transfer 250 prisoners from SCI-Rockview to thin down this prison's population in case the coronavirus hits here. Secretary Wetzel and PADOC Central Office Officials has absolutely no concern, consideration, or respect for the Families of incarcerated people, b/c they didn't tell families about it to give them any input on the matter whatsoever. Families of prisoners get No R-E-S-P-E-C-T! Don't the Families of incarcerated people want that for themselves? The only way for Families to get respect, is to get power (People Power!), and the only way to get both is to form into a UNION of Family members. Well, that is but one reason why we founded the HUMAN RIGHTS COALITION (HRC). So come join the HRC that we may become such a force, that in unity (as a Families of Prisoners UNION), we can fight back. Take care & be safe.
Write to Shakaboona:
Smart Communications/PA DOC
Kerry Shakaboona Marshall #BE7826
SCI Rockview
P.O. Box 33028
St. Petersburg, FL 33733
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Mumia Abu-Jamal Update
Mumia Abu-Jamal
Mobilization4Mumia
215-724-1618
mobilization4mumia@gmail.com
PRESS ALERT
Contact: Sophia Williams 917-806-0521, Pam Africa 267-760-7344 or Joe Piette 610-931-2615
PA DOC cruel hoax
that Abu-Jamal was ill with COVID19
Breaking News: At 5:04pm on Wednesday, April 15th, a prison official inside the SCI Mahanoy Superintendents’ Office told a concerned advocate for Mumia on an official DOC phone that Mumia was being transported by ambulance for evaluation of COVID 19 symptoms and had trouble breathing. After hours of supporters repeatedly calling prison officials to demand an opportunity to speak with Mumia, they allowed him a call at almost 9PM. Mumia confirmed that the official report was false. “I am fine,” he said, “What I need is freedom.”
This is of grave concern because the COVID-19 pandemic imposes a death sentence on the incarcerated, including 66 year-old Mumia, who already suffers from cirrhosis of the liver. More striking is this whole incident points to how the Pennsylvania DOC response to the COVID 19 pandemic is doomed to failure. As of April 15th there have been a total of 53 tests out of 45,000 inmates with a 17% positivity rate and already we have seen one death. There simply are not enough tests to understand the full transmission of the virus. The prison reduction mitigation efforts are not at all commensurate with the epidemic. In the last month there has only been a reduction of 474 out of 45,000 prisoners.
It is time to release thousands of prisoners, especially the elderly and immunocompromised, like respected journalist and internationally recognized political prisoner, Mumia Abu Jamal, that have homes, and caring families and are no risk to the community.
--
Freedom Archives 522 Valencia Street San Francisco, CA 94110 415 863.9977 https://freedomarchives.org/
Questions and comments may be sent to info@freedomarchives.org
To unsubscribe contact: http://freedomarchives.org/mailman/options/ppnews_freedomarchives.org
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Mumia Abu-Jamal: New Chance for Freedom
Police and State Frame-Up Must Be Fully Exposed!
Mumia Abu-Jamal is innocent. Courts have ignored and suppressed evidence of his innocence for decades.... But now, one court has thrown out all the decisions of the PA Supreme Court that denied Mumia's appeals against his unjust conviction during the years of 1998 to 2012!
This ruling, by Judge Leon Tucker, was made because one judge on the PA Supreme Court during those years, Ronald Castille, was lacking the "appearance of impartiality." In plain English, he was clearly biased against Mumia. Before sitting on the PA Supreme Court, Castille had been District Attorney (or assistant DA) during the time of Mumia's frame-up and conviction, and had used his office to express a special interest in pursuing the death penalty for "cop-killers." Mumia was in the cross-hairs. Soon he was wrongly convicted and sent to death row for killing a police officer.....
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Mumia Abu-Jamal is an award-winning and intrepid journalist, a former Black Panther, MOVE supporter, and a critic of police brutality and murder. Mumia was framed by police, prosecutors, and leading elements of both Democratic and Republican parties, for the shooting of a police officer.. The US Justice Department targeted him as well... A racist judge helped convict him, and corrupt courts have kept him locked up despite much evidence that should have freed him. He continues his commentary and journalism from behind bars. As of 2019, he has been imprisoned for 37 years for a crime he did not commit.
Time is up! FREE MUMIA NOW!
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DA's Hidden Files Show Frame-Up of Mumia
In the midst of Mumia's fight for his right to challenge the state Supreme Court's negative rulings, a new twist was revealed: six boxes of files on Mumia's case--with many more still hidden--were surreptitiously concealed for decades in a back room at the District Attorney's office in Philadelphia. The very fact that these files on Mumia's case were hidden away for decades is damning in the extreme, and their revelations confirm what we have known for decades: Mumia was framed for a crime he did not commit!
So far, the newly revealed evidence confirms that, at the time of Mumia's 1982 trial, chief prosecutor Joe McGill illegally removed black jurors from the jury, violating the Batson decision. Also revealed: The prosecution bribed witnesses into testifying that they saw Mumia shoot the slain police officer when they hadn't seen any such thing.... Taxi driver Robert Chobert, who was on probation for fire-bombing a school yard at the time, had sent a letter demanding his money for lying on the stand....... Very important, but the newly revealed evidence is just the tip of the iceberg!
All Evidence of Mumia's Innocence Must Be Brought Forward Now!
Mumia Abu-Jamal's trial for the murder of police officer Daniel Faulkner was rigged against him from beginning to end........ All of the evidence of Mumia's innocence--which was earlier suppressed or rejected--must now be heard:
• Mumia was framed - The judge at Mumia's trial, Albert Sabo, was overheard to say, "I'm gonna help 'em fry the n____r." And he proceeded to do just that.... Mumia was thrown out of his own trial for defending himself! Prosecution "witnesses" were coerced or bribed at trial to lie against Mumia.. In addition to Chobert, this included key witness Cynthia White, a prostitute who testified that she saw Mumia shoot Faulkner... White's statements had to be rewritten under intense pressure from the cops, because she was around the corner and out of sight of the shooting at the time! Police bribed her with promises of being allowed to work her corner, and not sent to state prison for her many prostitution charges.
• Mumia only arrived on the scene after Officer Faulkner was shot - William Singletary, a tow-truck business owner who had no reason to lie against the police, said he had been on the scene the whole time, that Mumia was not the shooter, and that Mumia had arrived only after the shooting of Faulkner. Singletary's statements were torn up, his business was wrecked, and he was threatened by police to be out of town for the trial (which, unfortunately, he was)...
• There is no evidence that Mumia fired a gun - Mumia was shot on the scene by an arriving police officer and arrested. But the cops did not test his hands for gun-powder residue--a standard procedure in shootings! They also did not test Faulkner's hands. The prosecution nevertheless claimed Mumia was the shooter, and that he was shot by Faulkner as the officer fell to the ground. Ballistics evidence was corrupted to falsely show that Mumia's gun was the murder weapon, when his gun was reportedly still in his taxi cab, which was in police custody days after the shooting!
• The real shooter fled the scene and was never charged - Veronica Jones was a witness who said that after hearing the shots from a block away, she had seen two people fleeing the scene of the shooting.... This could not have included Mumia, who had been shot and almost killed at the scene. Jones was threatened by the police with arrest and loss of custody of her children. She then lied on the stand at trial to say she had seen no one running away.
• Abu-Jamal never made a confession - Mumia has always maintained his innocence. But police twice concocted confessions that Mumia never made. Inspector Alfonso Giordano, the senior officer at the crime scene, made up a confession for Mumia. But Giordano was not allowed to testify at trial, because he was top on the FBI's list of corrupt cops in the Philadelphia police force... At the DA's request, another cop handily provided a second "confession," allegedly heard by a security guard in the hospital......... But at neither time was Mumia--almost fatally shot--able to speak.. And an earlier police report by cops in the hospital said that, referring to Mumia: "the negro male made no comment"!
• The crime scene was tampered with by police - Police officers at the scene rearranged some evidence, and handled what was alleged to be Mumia's gun with their bare hands... A journalist's photos revealed this misconduct. The cops then left the scene unattended for hours.. All of this indicates a frame-up in progress....
• The real shooter confessed, and revealed the reason for the crime - Arnold Beverly came forward in the 1990s. He said in a sworn statement, under penalty of perjury, that he, not Mumia, had been the actual shooter. He said that he, along with "another guy," had been hired to do the hit, because Faulkner was "a problem for the mob and corrupt policemen because he interfered with the graft and payoffs made to allow illegal activity including prostitution, gambling, drugs without prosecution in the center city area"! (affidavit of Arnold Beverly).
• The corruption of Philadelphia police is documented and well known - This includes that of Giordano, who was the first cop to manufacture a "confession" by Mumia... Meanwhile, Faulkner's cooperation with the federal anti-corruption investigations of Philadelphia police is strongly suggested by his lengthy and heavily redacted FBI file......
• Do cops kill other cops? There are other cases in Philadelphia that look that way. Frank Serpico, an NYC cop who investigated and reported on police corruption, was abandoned by fellow cops after being shot in a drug bust. Mumia was clearly made a scape-goat for the crimes of corrupt Philadelphia cops who were protecting their ill-gotten gains.
• Politicians and US DOJ helped the frame-up - Ed Rendell, former DA, PA governor, and head of the Democratic National Committee--and now a senior advisor to crime-bill author Joe Biden--is complicit in the frame-up of Mumia. The US Justice Department targeted Mumia for his anti-racist activities when he was a teenager, and later secretly warned then-prosecutor Rendell not to use Giordano as a witness against Mumia because he was an FBI target for corruption..
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All this should lead to an immediate freeing of Mumia! But we are still a ways away from that, and we have no confidence in the capitalist courts to finish the job. We must act! This victory in local court allowing new appeals must now lead to a full-court press on all the rejected and suppressed evidence of Mumia's innocence!
Mass Movement Needed To Free Mumia!
Mumia's persecution by local, state and federal authorities of both political parties has been on-going, and has generated a world-wide movement in his defense... This movement has seen that Mumia, as a radio journalist who exposed the brutal attacks on the black community by the police in Philadelphia, has spoken out as a defender of working people of all colors and all nationalities in his ongoing commentaries (now on KPFA/Pacifica radio), despite being on death row, and now while serving life without the possibility of parole (LWOP)...
In 1999, Oakland Teachers for Mumia held unauthorized teach-ins in Oakland schools on Mumia and the death penalty, despite the rabid hysteria in the bourgeois media. Teachers in Rio de Janeiro held similar actions. Letters of support came in from maritime workers and trade unions around the world.. Later in 1999, longshore workers shut down all the ports on the West Coast to free Mumia, and led a mass march of 25,000 Mumia supporters in San Francisco................
A year later, a federal court lifted Mumia's death sentence, based on improper instructions to the jury by trial judge Albert Sabo.. The federal court ordered the local court to hold a new sentencing hearing... Fearing their frame-up of Mumia could be revealed in any new hearing, even if only on sentencing, state officials passed. Much to the chagrin of the Fraternal Order of Police (FOP)--which still seeks Mumia's death--this left Mumia with LWOP, death by life in prison..
Mumia supporters waged a struggle to get him the cure for the deadly Hepatitis-C virus, which he had likely contracted through a blood transfusion in hospital after he was shot by a cop at the 1981 crime scene. The Labor Action Committee conducted demonstrations against Gilead Sciences, the Foster City CA corporation that owns the cure, and charged $1,000 per pill! The Metalworkers Union of South Africa wrote a letter excoriating Governor Wolf for allowing untreated sick freedom fighters to die in prison as the apartheid government had done. Finally, Mumia did get the cure.. Now, more than ever, struggle is needed to free Mumia!
Now is the Time: Mobilize Again for Mumia's Freedom!
Labor Action Committee To Free Mumia Abu-Jamal
www.laboractionmumia...........org
Labor Action Committee to Free Mumia Abu-Jamal | Mumia Abu-Jamal is an I.....
November 2019
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Message to the People
A voice from inside Pennsylvania’s gulag
I trust everyone is well, healthy, and safe. I just got news that the federal judge denied my appeal to modify my federal sentence. I don’t classify the news of denial as either good or bad; it simply is what it is, a denial. It neither sets me back or pushes me forward. I am at the same spot that I’ve been at before that federal appeal, and that is, very close to being released from prison. Remember, we were simply trying to “expedite” release from prison. And that hasn’t change not one bit. The judge’s denial of my appeal is just a reminder of how most of the status quo view us—as less than—less than human, less than citizens, less than themselves, less than...you can fill in the rest.
People may be wondering how I’m feeling, so let me tell you all how I pretty much always feel and view situations like this one. I always have momentary mixed feelings of disappointment, anger, and sadness, but as quick as it comes it goes. Because my view in life is 1) they can’t keep a good person down for long, 2) be thankful for what you have, 3) always look at the positive in things that appear bad and take that positive position, and 4) have faith in the universal laws at play in the world. So, the way I see this situation is that I’m a good brother; I’m thankful for being near release from prison and for even getting the opportunity to have my federal appeal heard before a court because that rarely happens. I see the positives as being heard, meeting new friends, bringing family closer to me, and new paths revealing themselves to me; and I have unwavering faith in the law of cause and effect—that what we put into the world is what we get out of the world. Well I put in good works.
So, keep your eyes on the prize and fight like hell to get it! I know I will. And know of a surety, that in the end, we will win freedom, justice, equality, peace, happiness, family, good homes, health, and heaven on earth while we live. Stay safe.
Write to Shakaboona:
Smart Communications/PA DOC
Kerry Shakaboona Marshall #BE7826
SCI Rockview
P.O. Box 33028
St. Petersburg, FL 33733
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You can watch the film here:
iTunes - https://itunes.apple.com/gb/movie/we-are-many/id1118498978
Amazon - https://www.amazon.co.uk/We-Are-Many-Damon-Albarn/dp/B01IFW0WX4
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LETTERS NEEDED FOR
LEONARD PELTIER
Dear Friends, Supporters, and Family,
In light of the provisions of the CARES Act meant to decrease the risk to prisoner heath, in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the U.S. Attorney General has delegated to the Director of the Bureau of Prisons the authority to release certain vulnerable prisoners to home confinement. Currently, the process for identifying appropriate candidates for home confinement have not been solidified but we believe it may help to write to the BOP Director and Southeast Regional Director and ask that Leonard be immediately considered and transitioned to his home on the Turtle Mountain Reservation.Your letters should be addressed to:
Michael CarvajalDirector320 First Street NWWashington, DC 20534
J.A. KellerSoutheast Regional DirectorFederal Bureau of3800 Camp Crk Prk SW, Building 2000Atlanta, GA 30331
We have not drafted a form letter or correspondence. Your pleas should come from your heart as an individual who has supported Leonard for so many years. Say what you would like but we have put together some talking points that will assist you in your letter writing. Below are some helpful guidelines so your letter touches on the requirements of the Attorney General’s criteria for releasing inmates like Leonard to home confinement
OPENING:• Point out that Leonard is an elder and is at risk for example.” Mr. Peltier is 75 years old and in very poor health; his only desire is to go home to the Turtle Mountain Indian Reservation and live out the remainder of his years surrounded by his family.”
MEDICAL:The AG and CDC guidelines for releasing inmates requires the health concerns cause greater risk of getting the virus. Leonard has the following conditions you can list in your letter• Diabetes• Spots on lung• Heart Condition (has had triple by-pass surgery)• Leonard Peltier suffers from a kidney disease that cannot be treated at the Coleman1facility and impacts as an underlying condition if contracting the virus.
RISK TO COMMUNITY:To qualify for release to home confinement we must show that Leonard poses no risk to the community.
COMMUNITY SUPPORT/RENTRY PLAN:To qualify for release to home confinement we must show that Leonard has a reentry plan. Leonard has support from the Turtle Mountain Chippewa Band and has family land on the reservation where he can live.
RISK OF COVID 19:To qualify for the release to home confinement must show that Leonard is at reduced risk to exposure of COVID 19 by release than he is at Coleman 1. Currently Rolette County, ND has no cases of COVID 19, Sumter County has at least 33 cases.
Questions and comments may be sent to info@freedomarchives.org
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Support Major Tillery, Friend of Mumia, Innocent, Framed, Now Ill
Major Tillery (with hat) and family
Dear Friends of the Labor Action Committee to Free Mumia,
Major Tillery, a prisoner at SCI Chester and a friend of Mumia, may have caught the coronavirus. Major is currently under lockdown at SCI Chester, where a coronavirus outbreak is currently taking place. Along with the other prisoners at SCI Chester, he urgently needs your help.
Major Tillery, a prisoner at SCI Chester and a friend of Mumia, may have caught the coronavirus. Major is currently under lockdown at SCI Chester, where a coronavirus outbreak is currently taking place. Along with the other prisoners at SCI Chester, he urgently needs your help.
Major was framed by the Pennsylvania District Attorney and police for a murder which took place in 1976. He has maintained his innocence throughout the 37 years he has been incarcerated, of which approximately 20 were spent in solitary confinement. The U.N. Special Rapporteur on torture has said that 15 days of solitary confinement constitutes torture.
When Mumia had Hepatitis C and was left to die by the prison administration at SCI Mahanoy, Major Tillery was the prisoner who confronted the prison superintendent and demanded that they treat Mumia. (see https://www.justiceformajortillery.org/messing-with-major.html). Although Mumia received medical treatment, the prison retaliated against Major for standing up to the prison administration. He was transferred to another facility, his cell was searched and turned inside out repeatedly, and he lost his job in the prison as a Peer Facilitator.
SCI Chester, where Major is currently incarcerated, has been closed to visitors since mid-March. Fourteen guards and one prisoner are currently reported to be infected with the coronavirus. Because the prison has not tested all the inmates, there is no way to know how many more inmates have coronavirus. Major has had a fever, chills and a sore throat for several nights. Although Major has demanded testing for himself and all prisoners, the prison administration has not complied.
For the past ten days, there has been no cleaning of the cell block. It has been weeks since prisoners have been allowed into the yard to exercise. The food trays are simply being left on the floor. There have been no walk-throughs by prison administrators. The prisoners are not allowed to have showers; they are not allowed to have phone calls; and they are not permitted any computer access.
This coronavirus outbreak at SCI Chester is the same situation which is playing out in California prisons right now, about which the Labor Action Committee to Free Mumia, along with other groups, organized a car caravan protest at San Quentin last week. Prisons are enclosed indoor spaces and are already an epicenter of the coronavirus, like meatpacking plants and cruise ships. If large numbers of prisoners are not released, the coronavirus will infect the prisons, as well as surrounding communities, and many prisoners will die. Failing to release large numbers of prisoners at this point is the same as executing them. We call for "No Execution by COVID-19"!
Major is close to 70 years old, and has a compromised liver and immune system, as well as heart problems. He desperately needs your help.
Please write and call Acting Superintendent Kenneth Eason at:
Kenneth Eason, Acting Superintendent
SCI Chester
500 E. 4th St.
Chester, PA 19013
Telephone: (610) 490-5412
Email: keason@pa.gov (Prison Superintendent). maquinn@pa.gov (Superintendent's Assistant)Please also call the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections at:Department of Corrections
1920 Technology Parkway
Mechanicsburg, PA 17050
Telephone: (717) 737-4531
This telephone number is for SCI Camp Hill, which is the current number for DOC.
Reference Major's inmate number: AM 9786
Email: ra-contactdoc@pa.govDemand that the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections immediately:
SCI Chester
500 E. 4th St.
Chester, PA 19013
Telephone: (610) 490-5412
Email: keason@pa.gov (Prison Superintendent). maquinn@pa.gov (Superintendent's Assistant)Please also call the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections at:Department of Corrections
1920 Technology Parkway
Mechanicsburg, PA 17050
Telephone: (717) 737-4531
This telephone number is for SCI Camp Hill, which is the current number for DOC.
Reference Major's inmate number: AM 9786
Email: ra-contactdoc@pa.govDemand that the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections immediately:
1) Provide testing for all inmates and staff at SCI Chester;
2) Disinfect all cells and common areas at SCI Chester, including sinks, toilets, eating areas and showers;
3) Provide PPE (personal protective equipment) for all inmates at SCI Chester;
4) Provide access to showers for all prisoners at SCI Chester, as a basic hygiene measure;
5) Provide yard access to all prisoners at SCI Chester;
6) Provide phone and internet access to all prisoners at SCI Chester;
7) Immediately release prisoners from SCI Chester, including Major Tillery, who already suffers from a compromised immune system, in order to save their lives from execution by COVID-19.
It has been reported that prisoners are now receiving shower access. However, please insist that prisoners be given shower access and that all common areas are disinfected.
In solidarity,
The Labor Action Committee to Free Mumia Abu-Jamal
2) Disinfect all cells and common areas at SCI Chester, including sinks, toilets, eating areas and showers;
3) Provide PPE (personal protective equipment) for all inmates at SCI Chester;
4) Provide access to showers for all prisoners at SCI Chester, as a basic hygiene measure;
5) Provide yard access to all prisoners at SCI Chester;
6) Provide phone and internet access to all prisoners at SCI Chester;
7) Immediately release prisoners from SCI Chester, including Major Tillery, who already suffers from a compromised immune system, in order to save their lives from execution by COVID-19.
It has been reported that prisoners are now receiving shower access. However, please insist that prisoners be given shower access and that all common areas are disinfected.
In solidarity,
The Labor Action Committee to Free Mumia Abu-Jamal
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1) Large DNA Study Traces Violent History of American Slavery
Scientists from the consumer genetics company 23andMe have published the largest DNA study to date of people with African ancestry in the Americas.
By Christine Kenneally, July 23, 2020
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/23/science/23andme-african-ancestry.html?action=click&module=Well&pgtype=Homepage§ion=Science
An 1823 cross-section diagram of a ship used to carry enslaved people. Credit...incamerastock/Alamy
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More than one and a half centuries after the trans-Atlantic slave trade ended, a new study shows how the brutal treatment of enslaved people has shaped the DNA of their descendants.
The report, which included more than 50,000 people, 30,000 of them with African ancestry, agrees with the historical record about where people were taken from in Africa, and where they were enslaved in the Americas. But it also found some surprises.
For example, the DNA of participants from the United States showed a significant amount of Nigerian ancestry — an unexpected finding, as the historical record does not show evidence of enslaved people taken directly to the United States from Nigeria.
At first, historians working with the researchers “couldn’t believe the amount of Nigerian ancestry in the U.S.,” said Steven Micheletti, a population geneticist at 23andMe who led the study.
After consulting another historian, the researchers learned that enslaved people were sent from Nigeria to the British Caribbean, and then were further traded into the United States, which could explain the genetic findings, he said.
The study illuminates one of the darkest chapters of world history, in which 12.5 million people were forcibly taken from their homelands in tens of thousands of European ships. It also shows that the historical and genetic records together tell a more layered and intimate story than either could alone.
The study, which was published on Thursday in the American Journal of Human Genetics, represents “real progress in how we think that genetics contributes to telling a story about the past,” said Alondra Nelson, a professor of social science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., who was not involved in the study.
Although the work is commendable for making use of both historical and genetic data, Dr. Nelson said, it was also “a missed opportunity to take the full step and really collaborate with historians.” The history of the different ethnic groups in Africa, for example, and how they related to modern and historical geographic boundaries, could have been explored in greater depth, she said.
The study began as a dream project of Joanna Mountain, senior director of research at 23andMe, even before the company had any customers. Over 10 years she and her team built a genetic database. Primarily the participants were 23andMe customers whose grandparents were born in one of the geographic regions of trans-Atlantic slavery. All participants consented to have their DNA used in the research.
In the new study, Dr. Micheletti’s team compared this genetic database with a historical one, Slave Voyages, which contains an enormous amount of information about slavery, such as ports of embarkation and disembarkation, and numbers of enslaved men, women and children.
The researchers also consulted with some historians to identify gaps in their data, Dr. Mountain said. Historians told them, for example, that they needed representation from critical regions, like Angola and the Democratic Republic of Congo. The team worked with academics connected to West African institutions to find that data.
The size of the project’s dataset is “extraordinary,” said David Reich, a professor of genetics at Harvard who was not part of the project.
Because it drew participants from a direct-to-consumer database of millions of people, the study was able to “ask and answer questions about the past and about how people are related to each other” that could not be asked by academics like himself, he said. At best, academic projects are able to study hundreds or a few thousand people, and generally that data does not also include the genealogical information that the 23andMe research participants provided.
The findings show remarkable alignment with the historical record. Historians have estimated, for example, that 5.7 million people were taken from West Central Africa to the Americas. And the genetic record shows a very strong connection between people in West Central Africa and all people with African ancestry in the Americas.
Historians have also noted that the people who were taken to Latin America from Africa disembarked from West Central Africa, but many were taken originally from other regions like Senegambia and the Bight of Benin. And the new genetic evidence supports this, showing that the descendants of enslaved people in Latin America generally carry genetic connections with two or three of these regions in Africa.
Historical evidence shows that enslaved people in the United States and the British Caribbean, by contrast, were taken from a larger number of regions of Africa. Their descendants today show a genetic connection to people in six regions in Africa, the study found.
The historical record shows that of the 10.7 million enslaved people who disembarked in the Americas (after nearly 2 million others died on the journey), 60 percent were men. But the genetic record shows that it was mostly enslaved women who contributed to the present-day gene pool.
The asymmetry in the experience of enslaved men and women — and indeed, many groups of men and women in centuries past — is well understood. Enslaved men often died before they had a chance to have children. Enslaved women were often raped and forced to have children.
The 23andMe project found this general pattern, but also uncovered a startling difference in the experience of men and women between regions in the Americas.
The scientists calculated that enslaved women in the United States contributed 1.5 times more to the modern-day gene pool of people of African descent than enslaved men. In the Latin Caribbean, they contributed 13 times more. In Northern South America, they contributed 17 times more.
What’s more, in the United States, European men contributed three times more to the modern-day gene pool of people of African descent than European women did. In the British Caribbean, they contributed 25 times more.
This genetic evidence, the scientists say, may be explained by local practices. In the United States, segregation between enslaved people and the European population may have made it more likely that the child of an enslaved mother would have an enslaved father. But in other regions where enslaved men were less likely to reproduce, dangerous practices like rice farming — in which harsh conditions and muddy fields made it easier to drown, and malaria was common — may have killed many of them before they could have children.
In some regions in Latin America, the government enacted programs that brought men from Europe to father children with enslaved women in order to intentionally diminish the African gene pool.
The study illustrates how much physical and sexual violence were part of slavery — and how they are still built into our society, Dr. Nelson said. It confirms the “mistreatment, discrimination, sexual abuse, and violence that has persisted for generations,” she said, and that many people are protesting today.
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2) There Is a ‘Great Silent Majority.’ But It Stands Against Trump.
And the minority he represents.
By Jamelle Bouie, July 24, 2020
Opinion Columnist
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/24/opinion/trump-silent-majority.html?action=click&module=Opinion&pgtype=Homepage
The Kenton neighborhood in North Portland. Credit...Leah Nash for The New York Times
President Trump believes he represents the “silent majority” of the country against a dangerous, radical minority. He says as much on Twitter, frequently yelling “SILENT MAJORITY” at his followers. Accordingly, his campaign for re-election has tried to appeal to this “majority” with displays tailored to its perceived interests.
Because Trump believes that this silent majority is protective of Confederate statues and other monuments, he marked Independence Day with a speech on July 3 denouncing “angry mobs” for “defacing our most sacred memorials” and “unleashing a wave of violent crime in our cities.” Because he also believes that this silent majority fears integration and diversity, he has issued constant warnings to the “suburban housewives of America” that Joe Biden, the former vice president who is his opponent in the election, will destroy their neighborhoods with affordable housing. “People have worked all their lives to get into a community, and now they’re going to watch it go to hell,” he said last week. And because he believes that this silent majority is hostile to protests against police brutality, he has deployed federal law enforcement officers to Portland and other cities to suppress “anarchists” and generate “law-and-order” images for his campaign.
Unfortunately for Trump, there’s quite a bit of distance between his perception and our reality. Most Americans support efforts to remove Confederate statues and monuments; most Americans welcome racial and ethnic diversity and few believe their communities should be less diverse; and most Americans are supportive of the Black Lives Matter movement and protests against police brutality — 67 percent, according to the Pew Research Center.
There is a silent majority in this country, and it is arrayed against a radical, extremist minority. But it stands against Trump, not the other away around. He and his allies are and always have been in the minority, acting in ways that frighten and disturb the broad middle of the electorate. And as long as Trump cannot see this — as long as he holds to his belief in a secret, silent pro-Trump majority — he and his campaign will continue to act in ways that diminish his chance of any legitimate victory in the 2020 presidential election.
It’s worth unpacking the phrase “silent majority.” It dates back to a speech given in late 1969 by Richard Nixon defending the Vietnam War at a moment when antiwar sentiment was on the rise. “As president of the United States,” Nixon said, “I would be untrue to my oath of office if I allowed the policy of this nation to be dictated by the minority who holds that point of view and who try to impose it on the nation by mounting demonstrations on the street.” He continued: “And so tonight, to you, the great silent majority, my fellow Americans, I ask for your support.”
Nixon’s basic view of American politics was that the country was divided between a disruptive, countercultural left (enabled by feckless, liberal elites) and a broad middle of Americans who craved order and stability. Less than a month before that speech, he convened a secret group he called the “Middle America Committee,” tasked with reaching a “large and politically powerful white middle class” that is “deeply troubled, primarily over the erosion of what they consider to be their values.” These Americans, in the view of the committee, felt that they had “lost control of a complicated and impersonal society which oppresses them with high taxes, spiraling inflation and enforced integration.”
Nixon identified with that middle — he spoke directly to its fears and anxieties about race, crime and rapid cultural change, as well as its resentments toward those groups (like the Black Power or women’s liberation movement) that might try to overturn the existing social order.
And he could do this, in part, because the “the great silent majority” within Middle America shared a similar position in the social and economic landscape of the country. They were nearly all white (of varying ethnic origins); some were college-educated but the vast majority were not; they had left the cities for the suburbs, part of the “white flight” that transformed the built environment of the country.
The silent majority of 1969 was a singular grouping of Americans. The silent majority of 2020 is not. It is diverse, made up of many millions of Black, Hispanic and Asian-Americans as well as whites. It is still largely working and middle-class, and it still lives in the suburbs, but those suburbs are also more diverse and heterogeneous. This “silent majority” isn’t as worried about crime and disorder — violent crime is still near a 30-year-low — but it is concerned with economic security and the rising cost of housing, health care and education. Faced with protests against police brutality, this “silent majority” wants reform and sees racism as a serious problem for the country. And in the midst of a deadly pandemic, it wants the federal government to take control and manage the crisis as best as it can, rather than try to wish it away.
What the silent majority doesn’t want are spectacles like the crackdown in Lafayette Square or the current operation in Portland. What it doesn’t want are endless displays of cruelty for its own sake. Although this silent majority has no uniform view of how to handle issues like immigration, it stands against the hostile rhetoric and draconian policies of the present administration.
To Trump and his allies, the country is filled with “shy” supporters just waiting for the right time to reveal themselves; they think they can rally this public to their side with a violent demonstration of “law and order.” They think they can run the Nixon playbook again, not realizing that to the broad middle of the country, they are the ones who represent the politics of division, disruption and disorder.
Or maybe they do realize it. Earlier this week, Trump issued a memorandum directing Wilbur Ross, the Commerce Secretary, who oversees the Census Bureau, to exclude unauthorized immigrants from the final report for the purposes of apportionment in the House of Representatives. Like last year’s blocked attempt to add a citizenship question to the census, this would reduce representation for states and localities with heavy immigrant populations — legal or otherwise — shifting power to more rural, more white, more Republican areas of the country.
This is not the move of a president who believes his party holds a majority of the country. It is the move of a president who knows he is in the minority, who knows his coalition cannot win a fair fight for future political power.
The silent majority of the country is against Trump, his allies and his would-be successors. He is trying to build a world where that doesn’t actually matter.
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3) Meet the New C.D.C. Director: Walmart
Why are big corporations requiring masks when many states still do not?
"“While such efforts by Walmart and other big payers help to restrain health care costs, the larger problem is that we’ve been abdicating health care policy to profit-seeking corporations.”
By Bill Saporito, July 24, 2020
Mr. Saporito is a contributor to the editorial board.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/24/opinion/walmart-coronavirus-masks.html?action=click&module=Opinion&pgtype=Homepage
Walmart is among the retailers that now require the wearing of masks in their stores. Credit...Eduardo Munoz/Reuters
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention opened branch offices in Bentonville, Ark., and Seattle this month. Not officially. But with the president trying to distance himself from responsibility for the coronavirus crisis, and Southern governors amplifying the damage with their flawed reopening strategies, the nation’s retailers have become the first line of defense against the pandemic.
From the headquarters of Walmart (which includes Sam’s Club) and Starbucks came the directive that all customers must wear masks. The conservative Southeasterner and liberal Northwesterner were followed by other national retailers, including Kohl’s, CVS, Walgreens, Publix and Target. Wearing a mask is a “simple step everyone can take for their safety and the safety of others in our facilities,” said Dacona Smith and Lance de la Rosa, the chief operating officers of Walmart U.S. and Sam’s Club, on the corporate website.
So simple that you’d think even a president or a governor could do it, yet Mr. Trump could only muster a halfhearted tweet on Monday conceding that “many people say that it is Patriotic to wear a face mask.” Many people not named Donald Trump. People with names like Robert Redfield, director of the C.D.C., who noted that mask wearing isn’t so much patriotic as prudent. “The data is clearly there, that masking works,” he said. Without the visible backing of the president, though, Dr. Redfield lacks the authority of, say, a guy who sells caramel brûlée lattes. Even after finally, grudgingly, coming around to the idea that masks work, Mr. Trump was spotted in public without one.
For Starbucks, that caffeinated brand of corporate progressivism founded by Howard Schultz, the face mask rule seems in keeping with the corporate culture. Mr. Schultz, moreso than Seattle’s other big retail boss, Jeff Bezos, has a social conscience. Starbucks offered health care to full-time and even part-time employees long before other big chains did. The company has also learned from its experience with the pandemic in China.
Walmart’s conscience is evolving. Last year its C.E.O., Doug McMillon, took a stand against the N.R.A. and gun violence in asking customers in open-carry states to stop openly bringing firearms into his stores, which have been the sites of several mass shootings. The Walmart founder Sam Walton was an avid bird hunter, and hunting and fishing are important departments in the stores. So you can still buy a shotgun at Walmart, but you have to wear a mask to do it.
The mask rule may create some tension in the deep-red burgs in Arkansas or Texas where Walmart can be the biggest game in town. But mandatory masks could turn out to be a competitive issue, too, as consumers seek safety. Winn-Dixie, a Southern supermarket chain, had resisted masks, but changed its mind this week. Putting customers at risk for political reasons is one thing; putting your business at risk is another.
Walmart, like other large corporations, is wading deeper into health care and health care policy. With more than a million employees, it probably buys more health care than many cities. For serious procedures such as heart surgery, for instance, the company has made deals with “Centers of Excellence” such as Cleveland Clinic where employees can get better outcomes at a lower cost over many local practitioners. Other companies have underwritten medical tourism to Mexico or Europe (pre-pandemic) for the same reason.
The company has also opened Walmart Health centers, which offer customers discount doctoring and dentistry, including $30 checkups and mental health counseling at $1 per minute. True to its operating philosophy, Walmart said it has cut the cost of basic health care delivery by some 40 percent compared with conventional practices.
Walmart is also moving directly into selling health insurance to the public. And why not? It sees a huge market opportunity in the fat profit margins and diffident service of the current players. And because we’ll all be dead before the Republican Party delivers the affordable health care insurance it has promised will replace Obamacare.
While such efforts by Walmart and other big payers help to restrain health care costs, the larger problem is that we’ve been abdicating health care policy to profit-seeking corporations. This isn’t a great idea, even if it’s well meaning in the beginning. There’s a long tradition of corporate medicine, from 19th- and 20th-century social welfare model companies such as H.J. Heinz and Hershey to Henry Ford’s later attempt to control every aspect his workers’ lives. In company towns, coal and steel companies supported clinics to repair the damage being done to employees in the mills and mines. It was only in the years after World War II that corporations formally assumed health care as part of collecting bargaining agreements, setting the pattern for the country.
Rather than use policy to help corporations get a better handle on Covid-19 safety, the Trump administration is instead focused on absolving them of liability if they don’t act to keep employees and customers safe. Perversely, when the airline industry begged the Federal Aviation Administration to impose a mandatory mask rule for passengers, it got shot down. The F.A.A.’s intransigence is now threatening thousands of airline jobs, if not the carriers themselves, because consumers don’t have enough confidence that flying is safe.
If there are no customers, indemnity from liability is not of much use. It is this vacuum of responsibility that is compelling the businesses that are expert at selling coffee, underwear and groceries to manage the pandemic across their swath of the economy. That they are doing a better job than the Trump administration is beyond pathetic.
Bill Saporito is a contributor to the editorial board.
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4) Gold vs. Salmon: An Alaska Mine Project Just Got a Boost
The Trump Administration, rejecting concerns over the risks to Alaska’s fishery, cleared the way on Friday for the Pebble Mine.
By Henry Fountain, Photographs by Acacia Johnson, July 24, 2020
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/24/climate/pebble-mine-alaska-environment.html?action=click&module=Top%20Stories&pgtype=Homepage
A work camp on the tundra near the site of the proposed Pebble Mine in Southwest Alaska.
A brown bear catching salmon in Katmai National Park and Preserve, 30 miles from Bristol Bay.
Diamond Point, where a port would be built to ship metals from the mine, 80 miles away.
A brown bear and her three spring cubs in the salt marsh of Chinitna Bay.
From the air it looks like just another tract of Alaska’s endless, roadless tundra, pockmarked with lakes and ponds, with a scattering of some of the state’s craggy mountains.
But this swath of land, home to foraging bears and spawning salmon about 200 miles southwest of Anchorage, has been a battleground for years.
The fight is over what lies just below the surface: one of the richest deposits of copper, gold and other valuable metals in the world. It sets two of the state’s most important industries, mining and fishing, against each other.
A mining company plans to dig a pit, more than a mile square and a third of a mile deep, over two decades to obtain the metals, estimated to be worth at least $300 billion.
Supporters say the project, known as the Pebble Mine, would be an economic boost for a remote region that has missed out on the North Slope oil boom and other resource-extraction development in the state over the past half century. It would employ nearly 1,000 people, and the Canada-based company, Northern Dynasty Minerals, would pay for infrastructure improvements in some Native Alaskan villages and provide cash dividends totaling at least $3 million to people in the area.
But opposition has long been widespread, both in the region and statewide, with concerns about environmental damage and the potential for harming another critical resource: salmon. The fish is the main traditional subsistence food for many of the Native Alaskans in the region and the basis of both a thriving sport-fishing industry and, in nearby Bristol Bay, one of the largest commercial wild salmon fisheries in the world.
The mine will be located in two watersheds that feed fish-spawning rivers. Opponents say tailings left from the mining operation pose risks if heavy metals or other contaminants from them leach into groundwater or if dams holding back the tailings fail in an earthquake.
Tom Collier, the chief executive of Pebble Partnership, the Northern Dynasty subsidiary developing the project, said the mine was designed to minimize those and other risks.
The deposit was discovered in the late 1980s, and planning for a mine began in earnest about 15 years ago. It drew opposition from leaders in both parties from the start, as battle lines between mining and fishing were established. But the project was aided by the pro-mining stance of the governor at the time, Sarah Palin.
Under President Barack Obama, the project was blocked in 2014 by the Environmental Protection Agency, largely over concerns about the risks to salmon.
But the Pebble Mine gained new momentum under President Trump’s more industry-friendly policies. While at first continuing its criticism of the project, the Environmental Protection Agency eventually reversed the Obama-era decision blocking it.
On Friday, the Army Corps of Engineers issued a final environmental impact statement, or E.I.S., for the project. Under normal operations, the Corps wrote, the project would not result in “long-term changes in the health of the commercial fisheries in Bristol Bay.”
In addition to the open-pit mine, the plan would include large dammed ponds for the tailings, some of them toxic, that result from mining and concentrating the metals, 80 miles of road and pipeline to carry the concentrate to a new port on Cook Inlet, and a 165-mile natural gas pipeline for a generating plant to power the operation.
In an interview this week, Mr. Collier described the release of the final impact statement as “the most significant day in the 15-odd-year history of the Pebble project.”
“It’s really for the first time that a federal agency has conducted a rigorous scientific review of the specific project Pebble wants to build,” he said. The conclusion that the mine was not going to damage the salmon fishery would be “unequivocal,” he added.
But in public comments on a draft of the environmental impact statement last year, opponents suggested that the review was not so rigorous. They pointed to numerous hazardous risks, including the potential for a tailings dam failure that could contaminate waterways used by spawning fish and harm the Bristol Bay fishery, which employs about 15,000 people.
Alaska is the most seismically active state in the nation, and critics said the Corps of Engineers had not taken sufficient account of the risk of earthquakes or volcanic activity, and that its analysis of the dam designs was inadequate. Some of the dams would be hundreds of feet high
Tailing dam failures can unleash a sudden flood of contaminated slurry with disastrous effects. A 2019 failure at an iron mine in Brazil, for example, killed more than 250 people. Given the Pebble Mine’s remote location, the risk to people might be low, but the heavy metals and other contaminants could make nearby rivers toxic to fish.
This year, after the Corps sent a preliminary version of the final impact statement to federal and state agencies and other groups, the critiques continued, according to documents obtained by opponents of the project. U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service scientists, for example, wrote that the version failed to acknowledge that habitat destruction from development of the mine “would erode the portfolio of habitat diversity and associated life history diversity that stabilize annual salmon returns to the Bristol Bay region.”
At a news briefing this week, David Hobbie, chief of the Corps’ Alaska district regulatory division, said, “We’ve done our best to address all the comments we’ve received.”
In a month or perhaps longer, the Corps will make a final decision on whether to allow the project to proceed. Approval is expected.
That will almost certainly not be the end of the story, however.
Even after the Corps’ latest review, “the E.I.S. is so lacking and thoroughly inadequate, I anticipate legal challenges,” said Brian Litmans, legal director of Trustees for Alaska, a nonprofit public interest law firm.
The project will require more permits, mostly from the state, which could take three years to obtain. And should President Trump lose re-election, a Democratic administration could move to block the project once again.
In Alaska, statewide public opinion polls have consistently shown more opposition than support, and locally the anti-mine feelings are even stronger. “Opposition is overwhelming throughout the bay,” Mr. Litmans said.
Opponents are focusing on an 11th-hour change to one aspect of the project. In May, the Corps announced it had changed its determination of what is called the “least environmentally damaging practicable alternative” for the transportation route between the mine and Cook Inlet.
The company and the Corps had both favored a route that included a ferry crossing of Iliamna Lake, one of the largest in the United States. But after hearing concerns about the potential impact on winter travel and seal hunting on the lake, the Corps now says a land-only route, along the northern edge of the lake, is the preferred one, although it could destroy several thousand acres of wetlands.
The Bristol Bay Native Corporation, one of 13 regional corporations established in the 1970s in the settlement of Native claims to Alaska’s lands, owns subsurface rights on land that the route would cross.
“We believe the subsurface will be impacted” by construction of a road and pipelines, said Daniel Cheyette, the corporation’s vice president for land and resources. “We’ve not given Pebble permission to utilize those or impact those.”
As to whether the corporation might negotiate on the issue, Mr. Cheyette said that while he could not speak for his board of directors, “I believe that is nonnegotiable.”
“We’ve been fighting this for a long time and will continue to fight it,” he said.
Other Native Alaskan groups, including the village corporation of Pedro Bay on Iliamna Lake, also plan to withhold access to their lands.
But not all Native Alaskan groups are opposed to the project.
A consortium of five village corporations in the area expects to become a transportation contractor for the mine. And the village corporation for Iliamna, about 20 miles from the mine site, has already negotiated with the developer to allow access to 68,000 acres of land it owns.
“We don’t see Pebble damaging the area like everybody claims,” said Lisa Reimers, a board member of the corporation, Iliamna Natives Ltd. “Pebble has to do it right because there are so many people watching them.”
Ms. Reimers was raised in Iliamna, in a house that had no running water or electricity until she was 12. Her parents, she said, “wanted the best for their family and for their grandkids today.”
“They didn’t see Iliamna surviving without a project like Pebble.”
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5) How One of America’s Whitest Cities Became the Center of B.L.M. Protests
In a state with a dark and brutal racist history, the Black Lives Matter protests in Portland, Ore., have been overwhelmingly attended by white demonstrators.
By Thomas Fuller, July 24, 2020
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/24/us/portland-oregon-protests-white-race.html?action=click&module=Top%20Stories&pgtype=HomepageProtesters gathered to listen to Black Lives Matter activists in Portland, Ore., on Thursday. Credit...Octavio Jones for The New York Times
PORTLAND, Ore. — Seyi Fasoranti, a chemist who moved to Oregon from the East Coast six months ago, has watched the Black Lives Matter protests in Portland with fascination. A sea of white faces in one of the whitest major American cities has cried out for racial justice every night for nearly two months.
“It’s something I joke about with my friends,” Mr. Fasoranti, who is Black, said over the din of protest chants this week. “There are more Black Lives Matter signs in Portland than Black people.”
Loud advocacy has been a hallmark of Portland life for decades, but unlike past protests over environmental policies or foreign wars, racism is a more complicated topic in Oregon, one that is intertwined with demographics and the state’s legacy of some of the most brutal anti-Black laws in the nation.
During 56 straight nights of protests here, throngs of largely white protesters have raised their fists in the air and chanted, “This is not a riot, it’s a revolution.” They have thrown water bottles at the federal courthouse, tried to pry off the plywood that protects the entrance and engaged in running battles with police officers through clouds of tear gas. In recent nights, the number of protesters has swollen into the thousands.
Damany Igwé, 43, a bath products salesman who is Black and has taken part in dozens of the protests, says white crowds have shielded him from the police, all the while yelling “Black power!”
“I feel the most protected that I ever have in my city,” Mr. Igwé said during a Wednesday night protest that lasted well into Thursday morning. “White people can’t understand what we’ve been through completely, but they are trying to empathize. That’s a beginning.”
Oregon’s relative homogeneity — the state is three-quarters white compared with neighboring California, where white people make up 37 percent of the population — was not accidental. The state was founded on principles of white supremacy. A 19th-century lash law called for whipping any Black person found in the state. In the early part of the 20th century Oregon’s Legislature was dominated by members of the Ku Klux Klan.
Today the average income level for Black families in Portland is nearly half that of white residents and police shootings of Black residents are disproportionate to their 6 percent share of the population. Three years ago, two good Samaritans were fatally stabbed while trying to stop a man from shouting slurs at two African-American women on a commuter train, one of whom was wearing Muslim dress.
“Really there are two Portlands that exist,” said Walidah Imarisha, a scholar of Black history in Oregon. “There’s white Portland and Portland of color.”
The differences, she said, cover almost every aspect of life. “There’s massive racial disparities around wealth, health care, schools and criminal legal systems that white Portlanders just don’t understand.”
Yet on the streets this week in Portland there was optimism among Black protest leaders who generally spoke admiringly of the large white crowds, which were reinvigorated last week after clashes with federal riot police officers who are protecting a U.S. courthouse and other buildings.
Xavier Warner, a Black protest organizer, called the predominance of white protesters “a beautiful thing” that speaks to the progressive ethos in the city.
Teal Lindseth, another Black organizer, said she saw the irony in predominantly white Portland having among the longest continuous protests stemming from the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis on May 25. But she said she was thankful for the strength in numbers. “They hurt us less when there are more people,” she said.
The role of white protesters has some detractors in the Black community.
In an op-ed published Thursday in The Washington Post, the Rev. E.D. Mondainé, the president of the Portland branch of the N.A.A.C.P., called the protests a “spectacle” that distracted attention from the Black Lives Matter movement.
“Are they really furthering the cause of justice, or is this another example of white co-optation?” he wrote.
But in a measure of the divided opinion on this question, Mr. Mondainé’s predecessor at the N.A.A.C.P., Jo Ann Hardesty, a city commissioner, rejected his criticism.
“There’s a lot of new, aware folks who have joined into the battle for Black lives,” she said during a news conference on Thursday.
Ms. Hardesty, who took office in 2019 as the first African-American woman on the Portland City Council, said the protests were serving the dual purposes of fighting racial injustice and rejecting the presence of federal agents sent to the city by the Trump administration.
Both protest goals were important, she said. “And one is not any more important than the other.”
Joe Lowndes, an expert on right-wing politics and race at the University of Oregon, said the protests reflected an intertwining of interests in recent years between racial justice advocates and the largely white anti-fascist movement. Both are deeply distrustful of the police and want police powers and budgets curtailed. The presence of far-right groups in Oregon, emboldened during the Trump administration, has also brought anti-racists and anti-fascists into closer alignment, he said.
Speeches and chants at the protests have touched on the legacy of slavery and the stripping of lands from Native Americans. From a historical perspective, the sight of hundreds of white protesters chanting one of that movement’s most popular refrains — “Stolen lands and stolen people” — can be jarring.
As the destination of the Lewis and Clark expeditions, Oregon once symbolized the conquest of the American West and the subjugation of Native peoples.
Some white protesters said it was this white supremacist legacy that helped spur them into the streets.
“Bringing that history to light is definitely a motivating factor,” said Liza Lopetrone, a veterinary nurse who joined the Wall of Moms protest this week that consisted mostly of white women locking arms in the face of the federal troops. “Oregon has an extremely racist history. I’m not from here but I take responsibility for it now.”
Another woman at the protest, Julie Liggins, had a more immediate connection to prejudice and racism in Portland. She is white and her husband of three decades, Reginald, is Black.
During the years he drove his car to work, Mr. Liggins said, he was pulled over by Portland police multiple times without cause. He said he switched to riding the bus. But two years ago when Mr. Liggins, who is 60, ran to catch a bus, the police pulled it over after misidentifying him for a robbery suspect in his 20s.
Mr. Liggins said he was encouraged by the protests even if he wished the reckoning over race in America had occurred earlier. And he loves his life in Portland.
“You can literally go days without seeing people that look like you,” he said. “But I find Portland to be a very progressive city despite its racist past. I can honestly say that as an interracial couple we haven’t had any problems here.”
Mr. Fasoranti, the chemist, says he has been impressed with the awareness of racial issues in Portland and described the current round of protests as something that “feels genuine.”
He says he feels welcome in the city and was intrigued soon after he arrived when a white motorist pulled over to the sidewalk and asked if he needed a ride. He has been invited to conversations about gentrification and the displacement of Black residents.
“There are less of these conversations in New York or New Jersey, where I used to live,” he said.
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6) Feds Sending Tactical Team to Seattle, Expanding Presence Beyond Portland
After outrage over the presence of federal agents in Portland, Ore., the Trump administration is sending a team to Seattle. Officials say they will be on standby.
By Zolan Kanno-Youngs, Adam Goldman and Mike Baker, July 23, 2020
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/23/us/seattle-protests-feds.html?action=click&module=Well&pgtype=Homepage§ion=US%20News
Mayor Jenny Durkan of Seattle last week. She said on Thursday that she did not want federal agents deployed to the city. Credit...Ted S. Warren/Associated Press
The Trump administration, which has pledged to use the full force of the government to protect federal property, expanded that effort on Thursday by sending a team of tactical border officers to stand by for duty in Seattle.
The Special Response Team being deployed is similar to the tactical teams currently operating in Portland, Ore., where local officials have vehemently objected to their efforts to subdue street protests. Seattle officials have also said they do not want federal agents sent to target protesters.
Agents from the Special Response Team, operated under U.S. Customs and Border Protection, are typically deployed for intense law enforcement operations, similar to the agency’s BORTAC group that has operated in Portland.
“The C.B.P. team will be on standby in the area, should they be required,” the Federal Protective Service said in a statement about the Seattle effort.
A spokesman for the agency, who requested anonymity to speak about the operation, said the border officers were sent to back up the Federal Protective Service officers charged with protecting federal buildings, and would only be used if protests expected this weekend escalate out of control.
The deployment to Seattle came on the same day that the inspector general of the Justice Department announced an investigation into tactics used by the federal agents in Portland and in front of Lafayette Square in Washington, D.C., in early June.
The inspector general of the Department of Homeland Security, Joseph V. Cuffari, is also conducting an inquiry into the tactics of the agents in Portland. Mr. Cuffari said in a letter to Democrats that he expected to examine the authority used to deploy agents to the city after President Trump signed an executive order directing federal agencies to increase security at monuments, statues and federal property.
The order prompted the Homeland Security Department to form teams that were briefly deployed to multiple cities to guard federal property, including Seattle, for the July 4 weekend. The tactical teams in Portland have remained at a federal courthouse as tension with protesters there has heightened.
Representative Bennie G. Thompson, a Democrat from Mississippi who chairs the House Committee on Homeland Security, said on Thursday that he would hold a hearing next week to examine the D.H.S. response to the protests.
“The administration’s actions are not only violent and clearly politically motivated, they are anathema to the rights guaranteed by the Constitution and a threat to every value for which our Republic stands,” Mr. Thompson said.
Seattle’s mayor, Jenny Durkan, said in an interview that she spoke earlier Thursday with Chad F. Wolf, the acting secretary of homeland security. She said he had assured her that the administration had no plans to deploy a surge of agents to Seattle and would not do so without communicating with the city. She had not been alerted to plans to position the tactical team, but said that the department may be distinguishing between an active deployment and agents who are on standby.
Ms. Durkan said she made it clear that the city did not need the help of federal agents.
“Any deployment here would, in my view, undermine public safety,” Ms. Durkan said.
Protests in the Seattle area have quieted somewhat since police this month cleared the so-called Capitol Hill Organized Protest zone, where demonstrators had laid claim to several city blocks. But there have been signs that demonstrations may be ramping back up, including on Thursday, when the police said a group of protesters broke windows and lit fires in the Capitol Hill neighborhood.
Alexei Woltornist, a spokesman for the Department of Homeland Security, said in a statement that the expected presence in Seattle would be smaller than that in Portland.
“There is no large-scale deployment of personnel to Seattle at this time. As threats warrant, any large-scale use of law enforcement assets will involve close coordination with local law enforcement,” Mr. Woltornist said. “There are no other cities across the country that have the same threats and lack of local law enforcement support as we are experiencing in Portland.”
The Federal Protective Service said it routinely requested assistance from other law enforcement agencies when there are threats to federal properties.
Teams of federal agents from several agencies have been operating in Portland for much of July, drawing outrage from city officials, including Mayor Ted Wheeler. The mayor, who was hit with tear gas from the federal officers on Wednesday night, said the presence of the agents had only inflamed tensions in a city that was working to calm them.
The number of protesters in Portland has swollen in recent days into the thousands, drawing out people who had not joined the protests earlier but who were appalled that federal forces would be operating in the city with such aggressive tactics. Some in the demonstrations have targeted federal agents with lasers and frozen water bottles, and others set fire to a police union building.
The agents have repeatedly fired tear gas and various kinds of crowd-control munitions, leaving at least one protester bloodied. Videos have shown federal agents seizing protesters and guiding them into unmarked vans.
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7) Shot Twice in the Back: A Case Tests the ‘Fleeing Felon’ Defense
The family of a suicidal Colorado man killed by the police in 2019 has filed a federal wrongful death lawsuit, as many states review their standards for the use of lethal force.
By Maria Cramer, July 23, 2020
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/23/us/colorado-fleeing-felon-rule.html?action=click&module=Top%20Stories&pgtype=Homepage
A bystander’s video shows Allan George holding a gun to his chest, talking to police officers after putting the gun in his pocket and then on the ground after he was shot while running from the officers. Credit...Killmer, Lane & Newman, LLP
In August 2019, a man stood on a highway bridge over the Colorado River in Rifle, Colo., and pointed a gun to his chest as two police officers urged him not to kill himself.
“No! Go away,” said the man, Allan George, a 58-year-old construction worker who was wanted for possession of child pornography. He stuffed the gun in his pocket and scratched his head. Then he began to run slowly down the shoulder of the busy highway.
What happened next was captured, as with so many recent fatal encounters with the police, by a bystander’s cellphone.
One of the officers took aim at Mr. George as he ran and shot him twice in the back, killing him.
The local district attorney declined to charge the officer.
Now, a year later, Mr. George’s family has filed a federal lawsuit against the officer, the police chief and the city of Rifle, claiming they violated his Fourth Amendment rights by using excessive force.
The suit challenges the “fleeing felon” defense that has given the police near impunity to use deadly force against a person escaping their custody. It is also unfolding as legislators in Colorado and other states raise the standards for when an officer can intentionally kill someone running away from them.
The complaint cites a 1985 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that restricts the use of lethal force against someone who is fleeing the police to cases in which officers believe the person poses a significant threat to officers or the public.
However, a subsequent Supreme Court ruling and states’ own interpretations of the 1985 decision have largely protected the police when they are investigated by prosecutors or are sued. In many cases, the police have successfully argued that they felt they had no choice but to use deadly force to protect themselves or the public.
The video of Mr. George’s death could test that defense, legal observers said, especially at a time when states are under growing pressure from a public demanding change after the killing of George Floyd in police custody in Minneapolis.
In Utah this month, Sim Gill, the district attorney in Salt Lake County, sent state legislators recommendations for changing the laws governing the use of force by the police, including that state’s fleeing-felon statute. Mr. Gill, who said he had long examined how use-of-force statutes conflict with the public’s expectations, concluded that state laws were “more generous” to the police than to the public.
“George Floyd sparked our consciousness in a very visible way, in a way that we can’t simply talk around it, and that is because of the advent of technology and having the facts in your face,” Mr. Gill said.
His recommendations came days after he announced that two officers had acted within state law when they shot an armed man who was running away from them, which led to protests outside his office.
“If we want different outcomes, then we have to change the law,” he said in an interview.
Until last month, the law in Colorado allowed police officers to use deadly force if they “reasonably” believed it was necessary to prevent death or injury. Gov. Jared Polis, a Democrat, signed a law that restricts officers from using deadly force except in cases where someone “poses an immediate threat.”
Colorado and Utah are among other states and towns or cities that have recently announced plans to re-examine standards for the use of deadly force to stop someone who is fleeing from the police, said Raleigh Blasdell, a criminologist at North Central College in Illinois.
“What we are seeing at the local level is police departments are updating and amending their policies to provide citizens with greater protections,” Professor Blasdell said.
Most states, Professor Blasdell said, have tailored their fleeing-felon statutes around the 1985 Supreme Court ruling in Tennessee v. Garner, a case involving a 15-year-old boy who was killed as he fled from a police officer in Memphis even though the officer who shot him was “reasonably sure” he was unarmed.
In Graham v. Connor, in 1989, the court ruled that the use of force by the police must be judged from the perspective of “a reasonable officer on the scene.”
The case involving Mr. George in Colorado is not clear-cut, said Chuck Wexler, the executive director of the Police Executive Research Forum, an organization of law enforcement officials that provides recommendations for police departments.
The charges he faced were more serious than the accusation of using a counterfeit $20 bill that led to Mr. Floyd’s arrest in Minneapolis. But the circumstances — the shooting of a suicidal man who had not threatened anyone but himself — are a reminder that departments should not rely on the Graham decision to justify deadly force and instead train officers to consider other tactics, Mr. Wexler said.
“If this person had just committed a murder or it was an active-shooter situation, it would be very clear,” he said. “You want to make sure the bar is high in using deadly force.”
The case underscores the tension at the heart of excruciating decisions police officers feel forced to make quickly, said Bianca Harris, director of the criminal justice program at Meredith College in Raleigh, N.C., and a former warden at the North Carolina Correctional Institution for Women.
People want to be safe and protected, she said.
“But they want it to look fair, be fair and nonviolent,” Ms. Harris said. “Unfortunately, the reality is that safety and protection are not always achieved in nice pretty packages and often there must be a decision made that will serve the many and reinforce their safety while costing the few very heavy prices.”
Jefferson J. Cheney, the district attorney for Colorado’s Ninth Judicial District, cited the 1985 ruling when he concluded that the officer who shot Mr. George, Cpl. Dewey Ryan, had acted lawfully.
Mr. George, who pleaded guilty in 2009 to possession of child pornography, knew he was being investigated again for the same offense and had told his wife he did not want to go back to jail. She called the police to tell them that she was worried he might kill himself, and that he had told her he was not “going back to jail without a fight,” according to Mr. Cheney’s report.
Mr. George was driving home from work when Corporal Ryan and another officer pulled him over on a section of State Highway 13 that crosses the Colorado River.
The officers drew their weapons and ordered Mr. George out of the car. He showed them his gun and walked toward the bridge, yelling, “It’s all over,” and threatening to jump.
Corporal Ryan told Mr. George to think of his children and repeatedly told him to drop the gun, Mr. Cheney said in his report, adding that the officers would have been justified in shooting Mr. George the moment he showed them his firearm.
Mr. Cheney wrote that the officers commanded him to drop the gun about 46 times and “submit to a lawful arrest.”
Corporal Ryan had “reason to believe” that Mr. George might be running toward downtown Rifle to take cover and shoot officers or others, the report says.
Mr. George bought the gun legally in July 2019, according to the investigation.
David Lane, the lawyer for Mr. George’s family, called the investigation a “whitewash” of an unlawful killing.
Mr. Cheney said he disagreed with Mr. Lane, but declined to comment further, citing the federal case. Lawyers for Corporal Ryan and Chief Tommy Klein of the Rifle Police Department, who is also named as a defendant in the lawsuit, declined to comment.
There were other ways the officers could have stopped Mr. George, Mr. Lane said, including by using a stun gun.
“The police don’t get carte blanche to kill people who are suicidal,” he said.
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8) Christopher Columbus Statues Removed From 2 Chicago Parks
Crews removed statues of the explorer from Grant Park and Arrigo Park early on Friday.
By Christine Hauser, July 24, 2020
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/24/us/christopher-columbus-chicago.html?action=click&module=Top%20Stories&pgtype=Homepage
Protesters gathered around the statue in Chicago’s Grant Park last week. Credit...Madeleine Dupre, via Reuters
Statues of Christopher Columbus were taken down in two Chicago parks early on Friday, making the city the latest to remove a monument to the Italian explorer blamed for the genocide and exploitation of Indigenous people.
In Grant Park, a crew using a large crane lifted the statue from its pedestal, removing a symbol that had been the scene of violent clashes between protesters and the police last week. A crowd cheered and passing cars honked as the statue came down at about 3 a.m., The Associated Press reported, and the removal was shown live on local television.
A Columbus statue was also removed in Arrigo Park in Little Italy, the mayor’s office said in a statement.
“This statue coming down is because of the effort of Black and Indigenous activists who know the true history of Columbus and what he represents,” one resident, Stefan Cuevas-Caizaguano, told The Chicago Sun-Times while watching the removal in Grant Park.
Mayor Lori Lightfoot said in a statement that the statues were removed, temporarily, “in response to demonstrations that became unsafe for both protesters and police, as well as efforts by individuals to independently pull the Grant Park statue down in an extremely dangerous manner.”
“In addition, our public safety resources must be concentrated where they are most needed throughout the city, and particularly in our South and West Side communities,” the statement said.
In the coming days, it said, the mayor and city officials would announce a process to assess other monuments, memorials and murals across Chicago and “develop a framework for creating a public dialogue to determine how we elevate our city’s history and diversity. “
The mayor’s decision was criticized by some in the city. The Fraternal Order of Police said that the mayor was “bowing down to the lawlessness of these anarchists.” Its president, John Catanzara, Jr., wrote a letter last week asking President Donald Trump for federal help to deal with the city’s crime.
Last Friday, a group of protesters clashed with police officers at the Christopher Columbus statue in Grant Park, and some tried to tear down the statue. Some officers were hurt during the clashes and treated at the scene or transported to the hospital, CBS reported.
Four protesters were also hurt in the confrontation, and the police said 14 people were arrested, it reported.
Statues of Columbus have also been taken down in other American cities, including Boston, Richmond, Va., and St. Paul, Minn., where a group of protesters tied ropes around the statue’s neck and yanked it from its pedestal outside of the State Capitol last month, about 10 miles from where a Minneapolis police officer pinned his knee on George Floyd’s neck. Mr. Floyd’s death in May set off weeks of worldwide protests about racial injustice and violent policing, as well as a reckoning over statues and symbols.
Native Americans and others have long called for statues of Columbus to be removed, and also to replace Columbus Day, which is marked on the second Monday in October, with Indigenous Peoples’ Day. Protesters have said that Columbus’s arrival in the New World led to the genocide and exploitation of Indigenous populations in the Americas.
In dozens of cities, statues or monuments portraying Confederates and other historic figures have been marked with graffiti and challenged with petitions and protests. In some cities, officials have made plans to remove contested statues. In others, protesters have toppled them. In Roanoke, Va., this week The A.P. reported that a monument to Robert E. Lee that the city had planned to remove was found toppled and broken on the ground.
At Virginia’s Capitol in Richmond, The Washington Post reported, around the same time the Columbus statues were being removed in Chicago, workers overnight carted away a statue of Lee and busts of seven other Confederates.
With camouflage-clad federal agents already sweeping through the streets of Portland, President Trump has said he plans to deploy federal law enforcement to Chicago and other major cities — all controlled by Democrats. Mayor Lightfoot’s office said on Wednesday, after a “brief and straightforward” conversation with the president, that those forces will be “investigatory” and coordinated through the United States Attorney’s office.
“The mayor has made clear that if there is any deviation from what has been announced, we will pursue all available legal options to protect Chicagoans,” the statement said.
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9) With Covid-19, a Seismic Quiet Like No Other
Coronavirus shutdowns led to “the longest and most coherent global seismic noise reduction in recorded history,” scientists report.
By William J. Broad, July 23, 2020
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/23/science/coronavirus-seismic-activity.html?surface=home-discovery-vi-prg&fellback=false&req_id=963726281&algo=identity&imp_id=882408752&action=click&module=Science%20%20Technology&pgtype=HomepageScientists measured a drop in the global seismic din tied to human activity during pandemic lockdown. In New York’s Central Park, vibrations on Sunday nights during the peak lockdown period were 10 percent lower than previously measured. Credit...Jeenah Moon for The New York Times
The shock waves of civilization travel through rocky ground and, at times, ricochet around the globe, as geologists know from decades of listening for earthquakes with sensitive seismometers. The human pulses come from heavy traffic, football games, rock concerts, fireworks, subways, mine explosions, rock drilling, factories, jackhammers, industrial blasts and other activities. In 2001, vibrations from the collapse of the World Trade Center registered in five states. Seismometers even picked up the impacts of the two airplanes.
Now, a team of 76 scientists from more than two dozen countries reports that lockdowns from the Covid-19 pandemic led to a drop of up to 50 percent in the global din tied to humans. The main quieting, from March through May, was compared with levels in previous months and years.
“The length and quiescence of this period represents the longest and most coherent global seismic noise reduction in recorded history,” the scientists reported on Thursday in the journal Science. The quieting, they added, resulted from social distancing, industrial shutdowns and drops in travel and tourism. The overall decline far exceeded the kind typically observed on weekends and holidays.
Devices for measuring earthquakes go back at least to the early part of the 18th century, when pendulums were used to display ground motions. In 1895 an Irish engineer, John Milne, established on the Isle of Wight a modern seismometer center that quickly grew into the world’s first global network, with 30 overseas branches. By 1957, an international group of seismologists listed 600 stations. The devices can pick up vibrations not only from earthquakes and human activities but from hurricanes and the crashing of ocean waves on shorelines, as well as the impacts of rocky intruders from outer space.
The new research was led by the Royal Observatory of Belgium and other institutions, including Imperial College London and the University of Auckland in New Zealand. Participants from the United States included the seismological laboratory in Albuquerque of the U.S. Geological Survey, as well as Princeton University, Stanford University, the University of Alaska, the University of Maine and the University of California.
The team assembled data from 337 seismometers run by citizen scientists and 268 stations run by government, university and corporate geologists. It reported that the global quieting began in China in late January and spread to Europe and the rest of the world in March and April. The team said that by the end of the monitoring period, in May, the vibration levels in Beijing remained below those of previous years, suggesting that the pandemic was still restricting activity there.
In New York’s Central Park, the team reported, the vibrations on Sunday nights during the peak lockdown period registered as 10 percent lower than previously measured.
Overall, big cities and other densely populated areas produced the greatest reductions. The team said the quietude let scientists pick up previously hidden earthquake signals, and that continued analysis of the data may help geologists learn how to better differentiate between human and natural vibrations.
The findings of the team were so surprising and clear that they generated news accounts in early April, almost two months before closure of the monitoring window.
In its Science paper, the team reported that the quieting was also quite evident at tourist destinations. At the lush tropical isle of Barbados in the Caribbean, the lockdown began March 28 and, compared with previous years, produced a decline in ground vibrations of up to 50 percent. The team found similar reductions at ski resorts in Europe and the United States.
Globally, median levels of shaking dropped up to 50 percent between March and May, “highlighting how human activities impact the solid Earth,” the authors wrote.
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10) Corporate Insiders Pocket $1 Billion in Rush for Coronavirus Vaccine
Well-timed stock bets have generated big profits for senior executives and board members at companies developing vaccines and treatments.
“Executives at a long list of companies have reaped seven- or eight-figure profits thanks to their work on coronavirus vaccines and treatments.”
By David Gelles and Jesse Drucker, July 25, 2020
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/25/business/coronavirus-vaccine-profits-vaxart.htmlA trial of a potential coronavirus vaccine announced by Moderna in January. Since then, Moderna insiders have sold shares totaling about $248 million. Credit...Ted S. Warren/Associated Press
On June 26, a small South San Francisco company called Vaxart made a surprise announcement: A coronavirus vaccine it was working on had been selected by the U.S. government to be part of Operation Warp Speed, the flagship federal initiative to quickly develop drugs to combat Covid-19.
Vaxart’s shares soared. Company insiders, who weeks earlier had received stock options worth a few million dollars, saw the value of those awards increase sixfold. And a hedge fund that partly controlled the company walked away with more than $200 million in instant profits.
The race is on to develop a coronavirus vaccine, and some companies and investors are betting that the winners stand to earn vast profits from selling hundreds of millions — or even billions — of doses to a desperate public.
Across the pharmaceutical and medical industries, senior executives and board members are capitalizing on that dynamic.
They are making millions of dollars after announcing positive developments, including support from the government, in their efforts to fight Covid-19. After such announcements, insiders from at least 11 companies — most of them smaller firms whose fortunes often hinge on the success or failure of a single drug — have sold shares worth well over $1 billion since March, according to figures compiled for The New York Times by Equilar, a data provider.
In some cases, company insiders are profiting from regularly scheduled compensation or automatic stock trades. But in other situations, senior officials appear to be pouncing on opportunities to cash out while their stock prices are sky high. And some companies have awarded stock options to executives shortly before market-moving announcements about their vaccine progress.
The sudden windfalls highlight the powerful financial incentives for company officials to generate positive headlines in the race for coronavirus vaccines and treatments, even if the drugs might never pan out.
Some companies are attracting government scrutiny for potentially using their associations with Operation Warp Speed as marketing ploys.
For example, the headline on Vaxart’s news release declared: “Vaxart’s Covid-19 Vaccine Selected for the U.S. Government’s Operation Warp Speed.” But the reality is more complex.
Vaxart’s vaccine candidate was included in a trial on primates that a federal agency was organizing in conjunction with Operation Warp Speed. But Vaxart is not among the companies selected to receive significant financial support from Warp Speed to produce hundreds of millions of vaccine doses.
“The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has entered into funding agreements with certain vaccine manufacturers, and we are negotiating with others. Neither is the case with Vaxart,” said Michael R. Caputo, the department’s assistant secretary for public affairs. “Vaxart’s vaccine candidate was selected to participate in preliminary U.S. government studies to determine potential areas for possible Operation Warp Speed partnership and support. At this time, those studies are ongoing, and no determinations have been made.”
Some officials at the Department of Health and Human Services have grown concerned about whether companies including Vaxart are trying to inflate their stock prices by exaggerating their roles in Warp Speed, a senior Trump administration official said. The department has relayed those concerns to the Securities and Exchange Commission, said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
It isn’t clear if the commission is looking into the matter. An S.E.C. spokeswoman declined to comment.
“Vaxart abides by good corporate governance guidelines and policies and makes decisions in accordance with the best interests of the company and its shareholders,” Vaxart’s chief executive, Andrei Floroiu, said in a statement on Friday. Referring to Operation Warp Speed, he added, “We believe that Vaxart’s Covid-19 vaccine is the most exciting one in O.W.S. because it is the only oral vaccine (a pill) in O.W.S.”
Well-timed stock transactions are generally legal. But investors and corporate governance experts say they can create the appearance that executives are profiting from inside information, and could erode public confidence in the pharmaceutical industry when the world is looking to these companies to cure Covid-19.
“It is inappropriate for drug company executives to cash in on a crisis,” said Ben Wakana, executive director of Patients for Affordable Drugs, a nonprofit advocacy group. “Every day, Americans wake up and make sacrifices during this pandemic. Drug companies see this as a payday.”
Executives at a long list of companies have reaped seven- or eight-figure profits thanks to their work on coronavirus vaccines and treatments.
Shares of Regeneron, a biotech company in Tarrytown, N.Y., have climbed nearly 80 percent since early February, when it announced a collaboration with the Department of Health and Human Services to develop a Covid-19 treatment. Since then, the company’s top executives and board members have sold nearly $700 million in stock. The chief executive, Leonard Schleifer, sold $178 million of shares on a single day in May.
Alexandra Bowie, a spokeswoman for Regeneron, said most of those sales had been scheduled in advance through programs that automatically sell executives’ shares if the stock hits a certain price.
Moderna, a 10-year-old vaccine developer based in Cambridge, Mass., that has never brought a product to market, announced in late January that it was working on a coronavirus vaccine. It has issued a stream of news releases hailing its vaccine progress, and its stock has more than tripled, giving the company a market value of almost $30 billion.
Moderna insiders have sold about $248 million of shares since that January announcement, most of it after the company was selected in April to receive federal funding to support its vaccine efforts.
While some of those sales were scheduled in advance, others were more spur of the moment. Flagship Ventures, an investment fund run by the company’s founder and chairman, Noubar Afeyan, sold more than $68 million worth of Moderna shares on May 21. Those transactions were not scheduled in advance, according to securities filings.
Executives and board members at Luminex, Quidel and Emergent BioSolutions have sold shares worth a combined $85 million after announcing they were working on vaccines, treatments or testing solutions.
At other companies, executives and board members received large grants of stock options shortly before the companies announced good news that lifted the value of those options.
Novavax, a drugmaker in Gaithersburg, Md., began working on a vaccine early this year. This spring, the company reported promising preliminary test results and a $1.6 billion deal with the Trump administration.
In April, with its shares below $24, Novavax issued a batch of new stock awards to all its employees “in acknowledgment of the extraordinary work of our employees to implement a new vaccine program.” Four senior executives, including the chief executive, Stanley Erck, received stock options that were worth less than $20 million at the time.
Since then, Novavax’s stock has rocketed to more than $130 a share. At least on paper, the four executives’ stock options are worth more than $100 million.
So long as the company hits a milestone with its vaccine testing, which it is expected to achieve soon, the executives will be able to use the options to buy discounted Novavax shares as early as next year, regardless of whether the company develops a successful vaccine.
Silvia Taylor, a Novavax spokeswoman, said the stock awards were designed “to incentivize and retain our employees during this critical time.” She added that “there is no guarantee they will retain their value.”
Two other drugmakers, Translate Bio and Inovio, awarded large batches of stock options to executives and board members shortly before they announced progress on their coronavirus vaccines, sending shares higher. Representatives of the companies said the options were regularly scheduled annual grants.
Vaxart, though, is where the most money was made the fastest.
At the start of the year, its shares were around 35 cents. Then in late January, Vaxart began working on an orally administered coronavirus vaccine, and its shares started rising.
Vaxart’s largest shareholder was a New York hedge fund, Armistice Capital, which last year acquired nearly two-thirds of the company’s shares. Two Armistice executives, including the hedge fund’s founder, Steven Boyd, joined Vaxart’s board of directors. The hedge fund also purchased rights, known as warrants, to buy 21 million more Vaxart shares at some point in the future for as little as 30 cents each.
Vaxart has never brought a vaccine to market. It has just 15 employees. But throughout the spring, Vaxart announced positive preliminary data for its vaccine, along with a partnership with a company that could manufacture it. By late April, with investors sensing the potential for big profits, the company’s shares had reached $3.66 — a tenfold increase from January.
On June 8, Vaxart changed the terms of its warrants agreement with Armistice, making it easier for the hedge fund to rapidly acquire the 21 million shares, rather than having to buy and sell in smaller batches.
One week later, Vaxart announced that its chief executive was stepping down, though he would remain chairman. The new C.E.O., Mr. Floroiu, had previously worked with Mr. Boyd, Armistice’s founder, at the hedge fund and the consulting firm McKinsey.
On June 25, Vaxart announced that it had signed a letter of intent with another company that might help it mass-produce a coronavirus vaccine. Vaxart’s shares nearly doubled that day.
The next day, Vaxart issued its news release saying it had been selected for Operation Warp Speed. Its shares instantly doubled again, at one pointing hitting $14, their highest level in years.
“We are very pleased to be one of the few companies selected by Operation Warp Speed, and that ours is the only oral vaccine being evaluated,” Mr. Floroiu said.
Armistice took advantage of the stock’s exponential increase — at that point up more than 3,600 percent since January. On June 26, a Friday, and the next Monday, the hedge fund exercised its warrants to buy nearly 21 million Vaxart shares for either 30 cents or $1.10 a share — purchases it would not have been able to make as quickly had its agreement with Vaxart not been modified weeks earlier.
Armistice then immediately sold the shares at prices from $6.58 to $12.89 a share, according to securities filings. The hedge fund’s profits were immense: more than $197 million.
“It looks like the warrants may have been reconfigured at a time when they knew good news was coming,” said Robert Daines, a professor at Stanford Law School who is an expert on corporate governance. “That’s a valuable change, made right as the company’s stock price was about to rise.”
At the same time, the hedge fund also unloaded some of the Vaxart shares it had previously bought, notching tens of millions of dollars in additional profits.
By the end of that Monday, June 29, Armistice had sold almost all of its Vaxart shares.
Mr. Boyd and Armistice declined to comment.
Mr. Floroiu said the change to the Armistice agreement “was in the best interests of Vaxart and its stockholders” and helped it raise money to work on the Covid-19 vaccine.
He and other Vaxart board members also were positioned for big personal profits. When he became chief executive in mid-June, Mr. Floroiu received stock options that were worth about $4.3 million. A month later, those options were worth more than $28 million.
Normally when companies issue stock options to executives, the options can’t be exercised for months or years. Because of the unusual terms and the run-up in Vaxart’s stock price, most of Mr. Floroiu’s can be cashed in now.
Vaxart’s board members also received large grants of stock options, giving them the right to buy shares in the company at prices well below where the stock is now trading. The higher the shares fly, the bigger the profits.
“Vaxart is disrupting the vaccine world,” Mr. Floroiu boasted during a virtual investor conference on Thursday. He added that his impression was that “it’s OK to make a profit from Covid vaccines, as long as you’re not profiteering.”
Noah Weiland contributed reporting.
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11) Federal Agents Push Into Portland Streets, Stretching Limits of Their Authority
Federal agents are venturing blocks from the buildings they were sent to protect. Oregon officials say they are illegally taking on the role of riot police.
By Mike Baker, Thomas Fuller and Sergio Olmos, July 25, 2020
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/25/us/portland-federal-legal-jurisdiction-courts.html?action=click&module=Top%20Stories&pgtype=Homepage
PORTLAND, Ore. — After flooding the streets around the federal courthouse in Portland with tear gas during Friday’s early morning hours, dozens of federal officers in camouflage and tactical gear stood in formation around the front of the building.
Then, as one protester blared a soundtrack of “The Imperial March,” the officers started advancing. Through the acrid haze, they continued to fire flash grenades and welt-inducing marble-size balls filled with caustic chemicals. They moved down Main Street and continued up the hill, where one of the agents announced over a loudspeaker: “This is an unlawful assembly.”
By the time the security forces halted their advance, the federal courthouse they had been sent to protect was out of sight — two blocks behind them.
The aggressive incursion of federal officers into Portland has been stretching the legal limits of federal law enforcement, as agents with batons and riot gear range deep into the streets of a city whose leadership has made it clear they are not welcome.
“I think it’s absolutely improper,” Oregon’s attorney general, Ellen Rosenblum, said in an interview on Friday. “It’s absolutely beyond their authority.”
The state lost its bid on Friday for a restraining order against four federal agencies on the grounds that the state attorney general lacked standing, but several other challenges are still making their way through the courts.
Federal officers who arrived this month to help control protests over racial injustice and police violence have made dozens of arrests for federal crimes, including assaults on federal officers and failing to comply with law enforcement commands. More than 60 protesters have been arrested, and 46 now face federal criminal charges, said Craig Gabriel, an assistant U.S. attorney for the District of Oregon, in a Saturday news conference.
One protester standing on a city street outside the federal courthouse was shot in the head with a crowd-control munition, leaving a bloody scene and a serious facial injury that required surgery. In another incident, an officer was seen repeatedly using a baton to whack a Navy veteran who said he had come to speak to the agents. Videos taken by members of the public captured camouflaged personnel pulling protesters into unmarked vans.
The inspectors general of the Department of Justice and the Department of Homeland Security have opened investigations into the tactics.
During 57 consecutive nights of protests, demonstrators have squared off first with the Portland police and then with federal agents in what at times have been pitched battles, with protesters throwing water bottles or fireworks and agents responding with frequent volleys of tear gas. The arrival of the federal agents caused the protests to swell and focused the ire of protesters onto the Mark O. Hatfield U.S. Courthouse, across from a park shaded by mature trees.
What began as a movement for racial justice became a broader campaign to dislodge the federal forces from the city.
The federal agents from four agencies arrived after President Trump signed an executive order on June 26 ordering the protection of federal monuments and buildings.
Their presence quickly became a political rallying point.
Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon, a Democrat, compared the agents to an “occupying army.” Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Democrat of California, called them “storm troopers.”
Mr. Trump criticized the police protests around the country in cities “all run by liberal Democrats” and defended the move to send in federal agents, warning that with the continuing turbulence in the streets, “They were going to lose Portland.”
Chad F. Wolf, the acting secretary of homeland security, described the protesters squaring off with federal agents outside the federal courthouse in Portland as “anarchists and criminals.”
“We will continue to take the appropriate action to protect our facilities and our law enforcement officers,” Mr. Wolf said at a news briefing this past week. “If we left tomorrow they would burn that building down.”
There is broad agreement among legal scholars that the federal government has the right to protect its buildings. But how far that authority extends into a city — and which tactics may be employed — is less clear.
Robert Tsai, a professor at the Washington College of Law at American University, said the nation’s founders explicitly left local policing within the jurisdiction of local authorities.
He questioned whether the federal agents had the right to extend their operations blocks away from the buildings they are protecting.
“If the federal troops are starting to wander the streets, they appear to be crossing the line into general policing, which is outside their powers,” Professor Tsai said.
Homeland Security officials say they are operating under a federal statute that permits federal agents to venture outside the boundaries of the courthouse to “conduct investigations” into crimes against federal property or officers.
But patrolling the streets and detaining or tear-gassing protesters go beyond that legal authority, said David Lapan, the former spokesman for the agency when it was led by John Kelly, Mr. Trump’s first secretary of homeland security.
“That’s not an investigation,” Mr. Lapan said. “That’s just a show of force.”
John Malcolm, vice president for the Institute for Constitutional Government at the conservative Heritage Foundation, and a former deputy assistant attorney general during the George W. Bush administration, said federal agents have clear legal authority to pursue protesters who have damaged federal property.
“Once they have committed a crime the federal authorities have probable cause to go arrest them,” Mr. Malcolm said. “I don’t care how many blocks away they are from that property.”
While federal authorities are not intended to be riot police, he said, the federal government has the authority to send in troops in extreme situations in which there is a breakdown of authority and local officials are unable to effectively enforce local laws.
“But we are not there yet, and I pray that we don’t get there,” he said.
Outraged by the federal presence, government leaders in Portland have been looking for ways to push back against the deployment. The Portland Police Bureau ousted federal representatives from the city’s command post. Mayor Ted Wheeler, who himself was hit with tear gas fired by federal agents on Wednesday night, called the federal deployment an abuse of authority.
“My colleagues and I are looking at every possible legal option we have to get the feds out of here,” Mr. Wheeler said in an interview.
In the state’s legal challenge, Ms. Rosenblum argued that the operations of federal authorities, using unmarked vehicles to detain protesters, resembled abductions. The lawsuit called on the court to order the agents to stop arresting individuals without probable cause and to clearly identify themselves and their agency before detaining or arresting “any person off the streets in Oregon.”
But in his ruling on Friday, Judge Michael W. Mosman of the U.S. District Court in Portland said the state attorney general’s office did not have standing to bring the case because it had not shown that the issue was “an interest that is specific to the state itself.”
In an interview, Ms. Rosenblum said that having federal agents battling protesters in Portland was un-American because the country does not have a tradition of a national police force.
“The police should be ideally as local as possible,” she said. “It’s about trust, relationships and community building.”
She warned that all Americans need to be concerned about what is happening in Portland.
“It could be happening in your city next,” she said.
The inspector general of the Department of Homeland Security, Joseph V. Cuffari, told lawmakers in a letter that he planned to examine the authority the agency used to deploy agents to Portland.
Some of the protesters who originally focused their anger on the case of George Floyd, whose death in police custody in Minneapolis in May sparked demonstrations around the country, now have turned much of their attention to the presence of federal officers on Portland’s streets.
On Friday night, a crowd gathered outside a fence erected around the federal courthouse; some in the crowd lit fires, lobbed fireworks over the fence and attempted to pull it down with power tools. Federal agents entered the street to disperse the crowd at 2:30 a.m.
Mr. Gabriel, the assistant U.S. attorney, said that the federal officers were forced into the streets to protect the fence. “The officers would love nothing more than to stay in the courthouse all night long,” he said. “If the protesters don’t seek to damage or destroy the fence, then the officers have no need to go outside the fence or leave federal property.”
Most of the demonstrations during the evening, though, were peaceful. A group of military veterans lined up along the fence, joining a “Wall of Moms,” hundreds of mothers who have linked arms to challenge the presence of the federal agents, who had been there on previous nights. There was also a “Wall of Dads" carrying leaf blowers to combat the tear gas.
Jennifer Kristiansen, a family-law attorney, was one of many women who came out to the protests in recent days to join the “Wall of Moms.” In the early morning hours on Tuesday, she said, as agents were clearing protesters from in front of the courthouse, one of them reported to another that Ms. Kristiansen had struck him.
Ms. Kristiansen said that she had done no such thing and that one of the officers ended up assaulting her, groping her chest and backside during the arrest.
“This is not creeping authoritarianism,” Ms. Kristiansen said. “The authoritarianism is here.”
Kate Conger contributed reporting from Portland, and Zolan Kanno-Youngs from Washington.
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12) Fires and Pepper Spray in Seattle as Police Protests Widen Across U.S.
From Los Angeles to New York, protesters marched in a show of solidarity with demonstrations in Portland, Ore. In Seattle, they smashed windows and set fires. A shooting at a protest in Austin, Texas, left one man dead.
By Mike Baker and Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs, July 25, 2020
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/25/us/protests-seattle-portland.html?action=click&module=Top%20Stories&pgtype=HomepageProtesters in Seattle faced a line of police officers after marching in support of demonstrators in Portland, Ore., on Saturday. Credit...Grant Hindsley for The New York Times
SEATTLE — Weeks of violent clashes between federal agents and protesters in Portland, Ore., galvanized thousands of people to march through the streets of American cities on Saturday, injecting new life into protests that had largely waned in recent weeks.
One of the most intense protests was in Seattle, where a day of demonstrations focused on police violence left a trail of broken windows and people flushing pepper spray from their eyes. At least 45 protesters had been arrested as of early evening, and both protesters and police officers suffered injuries.
Carrying signs such as “Feds Go Home” and shouting chants of “No justice, no peace,” some among the crowd of about 5,000 protesters stopped at a youth detention center and lit several construction trailers there on fire. Some smashed windows of nearby businesses, ignited a fire in a coffee shop and blew an eight-inch hole through the wall of the Seattle Police Department’s East Precinct building, the police said.
“At this point, we declared the event to be a riot, and several orders to disperse were given,” the Seattle police chief, Carmen Best, said at a news conference.
The police responded by firing flash grenades, showering protesters with pepper spray and abruptly rushing into crowds, knocking people to the ground. After a flash grenade left one woman with bloody injuries, police officers shoved people who had stopped to help her.
In Austin, Texas, the police said one man was shot and killed just before 10 p.m. during a protest in the city’s downtown. In a live video from the scene, protesters are seen marching through an intersection when a car blares its horn. Seconds later, five shots ring out, followed shortly after by several more loud bangs.
The man who was killed may have approached a vehicle with a rifle before he was shot and killed, Officer Katrina Ratcliff said. Ms. Ratcliff said the person who shot and killed the man had fired from inside the vehicle. That person was detained and is cooperating with officers, she said. No one else was injured.
“All I know is that someone dying while protesting is horrible,” Mayor Steve Adler of Austin said in a statement. “Our city is shaken and, like so many in our community, I’m heartbroken and stunned.”
In Los Angeles, protesters clashed with officers in front of the federal courthouse downtown. Videos showed people smashing windows and lobbing water bottles at officers after protesters said the police fired projectiles at them.
The federal courthouse in Portland has been the scene of nightly, chaotic demonstrations for weeks, which continued again into Sunday morning, as thousands participated in marches around the city, the 59th consecutive day of protests there. Earlier, a group of nurses in scrubs had joined an organized group of mothers in helmets and fathers in hard hats, all assembled against the fence of a federal courthouse where federal agents — a deployment that has been a key focus of the recent demonstrations — have been assembled.
Shortly after 1 a.m., the Portland police said the protest had become a riot and ordered the crowd to leave. Federal agents fired tear gas and left the courthouse to drive protesters from the streets, continuing to stretch the boundaries of their authority as legal experts questioned how far the agents could stray beyond federal property.
Protesters in several cities said the smoke-filled videos of federal agents firing tear gas and shoving protesters in Portland had brought them to the streets on Saturday.
“Portland is leading,” said Chantelle Hershberger, an organizer with Refuse Fascism who was part of the Los Angeles activists protesting the presence of federal agents in Portland, where city officials have opposed the presence of the federal officers. “They’re showing what it looks like to stay in the streets despite police oppression, despite the federal forces being sent in. This kind of energy is actually what’s needed.”
Bipasha Mukherjee, 52, of Kirkland, Wash., said she has been protesting on the streets since May and said it was worrisome to her to see such aggressive tactics by the police.
“This is not the country I immigrated to,” said Ms. Mukherjee, who arrived from India more than 30 years ago. “It feels like we are rapidly becoming a fascist state and a police state.”
Michaud Savage of Seattle said the protests there were aimed at both local authorities and the deployment of federal officers who have waged a crackdown against a long-running protest in Portland. Mr. Savage said the law enforcement tactics in Portland, which have included the use of tear gas and crowd-control munitions, were dangerous and inappropriate.
“It’s a very hard slide in an extremely violent direction,” Mr. Savage said as he washed his eyes of pepper spray and nursed a wound on his arm from a flash grenade.
But Ms. Best, the Seattle police chief, said a number of demonstrators also used violence. Some were tossing concrete blocks from a rooftop to the street below, she said. The coffee shop that was set afire had occupied apartments above it that had to be evacuated, she said.
“We support everyone’s First Amendment right for free speech and to gather and assemble in such a way,” she said. “But what we saw today was not peaceful. It was not a peaceful demonstration at all, and criminal acts were occurring throughout the city, and many people were at risk.”
Other demonstrations took place on Saturday in New York, Omaha and Oakland, Calif., among other cities.
In Omaha, KMTV-TV reported that demonstrators turned out in solidarity with the Portland protests and also in response to the death of James Scurlock, a Black man killed by a white bar owner in May. The police arrested 75 to 100 people Saturday night, KMTV reported.
In Richmond, Va., riot police fired chemical agents at hundreds of protesters who had marched through the city and gathered around the Richmond Police Department. The police said some protesters had set fire to a city-owned dump truck outside the station.
At a protest in Aurora, Colo., a hectic scene played out as people marched along an interstate highway.
During that protest, someone drove a car into demonstrators, the Aurora Police Department said, although it was unclear if the car struck any protesters. The police said a protester had also “decided to fire off a weapon,” which struck at least one other person. That person was taken to a hospital and was in stable condition, the police said, and a second person later showed up to the hospital with a graze wound.
In addition to marching in solidarity with the Portland protesters, the demonstration in Aurora was also in response to the death of Elijah McClain, a 23-year-old massage therapist who died several days after officers put him in a chokehold last summer.
Mr. McClain’s death was one of several that have occurred in police custody around the country that received fresh attention following the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis in May. Mr. Floyd’s death ignited mass protests that drew millions to the streets in dozens of cities, but the demonstrations waned in most places.
Seattle and Portland, however, have seen extended demonstrations. Seattle protesters at one point laid claim to several blocks of the Capitol Hill neighborhood and declared an autonomous zone. After a series of shootings there led the police to clear the area, protests had subsided.
Protests in Portland, meanwhile, have continued, with some of the heaviest demonstrations around federal buildings in the city. On Saturday, crowds marched from near the federal courthouse to a hotel several blocks away where federal agents who had been dispatched to the city were thought to be staying.
“Get out of bed with the feds,” the protesters chanted.
Later in the night, thousands of people returned to the federal courthouse. Some threw fireworks at the officers protecting the building, while others worked to break down the fence surrounding it. Just before midnight, federal officers began lobbing tear gas and flash grenades over the fence, dispersing crowds, while the group of mothers who have been a fixture at the protests stood firm with linked arms, protected with gas masks.
Craig Gabriel, an assistant U.S. attorney in Oregon, said at a news conference earlier on Saturday that federal agents had arrested 60 people at protests in Portland and were pursuing charges against 46 of them.
Several federal agents had been injured by fireworks and lasers that protesters shone into their eyes, he said.
Harry Fones, a spokesman for the Department of Homeland Security, whose agents are among those clashing with protesters, In on Saturday that the demonstrators were little more than “violent anarchists rioting on the streets.”
Protesters in Washington, D.C. planned to hold a demonstration on Sunday at the Virginia home of Chad Wolf, the Secretary of Homeland Security, in response to the deployment of federal agents in Portland.
After President Trump issued an executive order to protect statues and federal property, the Department of Homeland Security sent tactical teams to the city, beginning a series of clashes that have resulted in injured protesters, inspector general investigations and calls from local leaders for federal agents to leave.
Protest crowds in that city have swelled into the thousands, and demonstrations there were continuing. This week, federal officials deployed a tactical team to Seattle as well, and protesters cited that development as one reason for Saturday’s demonstrations.
Mike Baker reported from Seattle and Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs from New York. Reporting was contributed by Kate Conger and Sergio Olmos in Portland, Ore.; Hallie Golden in Seattle; Aimee Ortiz in New York; Manny Fernandez in Houston; and Austin Ramzy in Hong Kong.
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13) In Portland’s So-Called War Zone, It’s the Troops Who Provide the Menace
If President Trump is actually trying to establish order, he is stunningly incompetent.
By Nicholas Kristof, Opinion Columnist, July 25, 2020
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/25/opinion/sunday/portland-protest-federal-troops.html?action=click&module=Opinion&pgtype=Homepage
Federal agents clashing with protesters near the Federal District Courthouse in Portland, Ore., on Wednesday. Credit...Mason Trinca for The New York Times
PORTLAND, Ore. — To watch Fox News is to learn from Sean Hannity that the “Rose City” of Portland is “like a war zone” that has been, in Tucker Carlson’s words, “destroyed by the mob.”
So I invite Hannity and Carlson to escape their bubbles and visit Portland, stroll along the Willamette River and enjoy a glass of local pinot noir. They’ll be safe — unless they venture at night into the two blocks beside the federal courthouse.
Citizens need to be vigilant there, for armed groups periodically storm the streets to attack peaceful visitors. I’m talking, of course, about the uninvited federal forces.
I’ve watched them fire round after round of tear gas, along with occasional rubber bullets or other projectiles. They even repeatedly tear-gassed Portland’s mayor, Ted Wheeler, who has demanded that they go home, leaving him blinded and coughing on his own streets.
“They knocked the hell out of him,” President Trump boasted on Fox News. “That was the end of him.”
Trump is pretending that he is bringing law and order to chaotic streets, and now he has dispatched similar troops — what else can you call a militarized force like this but “troops”? — to Seattle, where that city’s mayor has also said they are unwanted. Yet if Trump is actually trying to establish order, he is stunningly incompetent. The ruthlessness of the federal forces has inflamed the protests, bringing huge throngs of Portlanders out to protect their city from those they see as jackbooted federal thugs.
“Their presence here escalates,” Kate Brown, Oregon’s governor, told me. “It throws gasoline on the fire.”
Brown noted that the federal troops may also be breaking the law. “We cannot have secret police abducting people into unmarked vehicles,” she said. “This is a democracy and not a dictatorship.”
The paradox is that Oregon is simultaneously begging for federal assistance to address a real threat — the coronavirus pandemic. Brown said she has been pleading for Covid-19 tests and for personal protective equipment, but the federal government has rebuffed the state.
“It’s appalling to me that they are using federal taxpayer dollars for political theater and making no effort to really keep our communities safe,” Brown said.
So let’s be real: Trump isn’t trying to quell violence in Portland. No, he’s provoking it to divert attention from 140,000 Covid-19 deaths in the United States. Once again, he’s tear-gassing peaceful protesters to generate a photo op — and he’s doing this every night in downtown Portland. This is a reckless campaign tactic to bolster his own narrative as a law-and-order candidate, a replay of Richard Nixon’s successful 1968 campaign theme.
It is true that some protesters are violent. Some start small trash fires. Others paint graffiti, including “kill pigs” and “kill cops,” or hurl water bottles or firecrackers at federal agents. Some protesters point lasers at officers and in one case a man allegedly hit an agent with a hammer.
Such violence is wrong and plays into Trump’s narrative. Representative John Lewis, who died earlier this month, showed how much more powerful it is for changemakers to endure violence than to commit it.
But it’s also true that the vast majority of those in the crowds each evening are peaceful. They sing about racial justice, chant “Feds out now” and try to protect their city from violent intruders dispatched by Trump.
The protesters — including a “Wall of Moms” who turn out each night to lock arms and shield protesters — protect themselves with bicycle helmets and umbrellas, while suburbanites bring leaf blowers to dispel tear gas (this works surprisingly well). Medics attend to the injured, and cleanup crews collect litter.
“They have guns; I have an umbrella,” said a protester named Jackie — who added that she was fearful of the government and did not want her last name published. That’s common in dictatorships, but I find it ineffably sad to breathe tear gas in my beloved home state and to interview Americans with such fears of their own leaders.
On the streets, I have no fear of the protesters (except when they pull their face masks down to shout slogans, risking the spread of Covid-19), but it’s prudent to worry about the troops. In a few weeks, they:
fired “less lethal” munition at a peaceful protester named Donavan La Bella, fracturing his skull and requiring facial reconstruction surgery. Video shows that the shot was unprovoked.
clubbed a Navy veteran, Christopher J. David, as he tried to ask federal agents how they squared their actions with the Constitution.
allegedly sexually assaulted a lawyer who had been arrested after taking part in the “Wall of Moms.”
An iconic moment came when a woman known as Naked Athena confronted the troops while wearing only a hat and face mask. Her naked vulnerability as armed troops fired pepper balls at her feet underscored the absurdity of Trump’s narrative that he is “protecting” anything.
Beware. What you’re seeing in Portland may be coming to other cities. After all, Trump’s verdict on the troops: “In Portland, they’ve done a fantastic job.”
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14) As COVID-19 Ravages California’s Death Row, the State Attorney General Fights to Keep It Packed
By LARA BAZELON, JULY 27, 2020
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/07/california-death-row-covid-misconduct-becerra.htmlCalifornia Attorney General Xavier Becerra looks on during a news conference at the California Justice Department on Sept. 18 in Sacramento Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
More than a year after California’s Democratic governor, Gavin Newsom, issued a moratorium on executions, condemned prisoners are facing a new lethal enemy: COVID-19. San Quentin Prison, where 720 men live under sentences of death, has been engulfed by the virus. More than 2,100 people at San Quentin have been afflicted, including nearly one quarter of those on death row. To date, eight death row prisoners have died from complications stemming from COVID-19, comprising half the prison’s fatalities.
One major factor worsening the pandemic is the overcrowding in California prisons, and on death row in particular, where the population has swelled to 725. Yet as this crisis has unfolded, the state’s Democratic attorney general, Xavier Becerra, has continued to fight to cement these convictions. Becerra is often heralded as a hero of the left due to his numerous legal battles against the Trump administration. But back home, he is sending his deputies into court to uphold death sentences, including those involving egregious prosecutorial misconduct, false testimony, and racially biased arguments.
As the state’s chief law enforcement officer, Becerra has a legal and ethical obligation to be a “minister of justice.” His death penalty stance is fundamentally at odds with that role. The litigation undertaken by his administration to preserve these ill-gotten convictions—many against people of color who are now older people and thus particularly vulnerable to COVID-19—is pointlessly cruel.
The governor had many reasons for implementing the moratorium, which Becerra praised at the time as a “bold, new direction in California’s march toward perfecting our search for justice.” Newsom noted that the death penalty is racist in its implementation and snares the innocent in its net. Five death row prisoners in California have been freed because they were wrongfully convicted, and Newsom cited statistics indicating that there are more than two dozen others.
Consider the case of Michael Hill, a Black man who was sentenced to die in 1987 for shooting to death a store owner, Anthony Brice, and his 4-year-old son during a robbery. The state’s case hinged in part on the statements of Michael McCray, which McCray made while he himself was under interrogation for robbing and killing the Brices. McCray told the police—who were also investigating him for drug-related crimes—that the shooter was Hill. Even though he failed two lie detector tests, McCray was released. The Alameda County district attorney provided McCray with a written promise that he would not be charged with the robbery or murder of the Brices.
At trial, Hill testified that McCray was the shooter. Hill admitted that he was present at the scene and that he let McCray into the store at Brice’s request. Hill stated that almost immediately upon entering, McCray began firing at the Brices, causing Hill to flee. He also acknowledged taking some of the jewelry after McCray gave it to him to sell. But Hill has consistently denied participating in the Brices’ murders or knowing of McCray’s plans to shoot them.
McCray did not testify at Hill’s trial. Instead, edited excerpts of his interview were read to the jury after the prosecutor assured the court that McCray was “unavailable” because he was asserting his right to remain silent. The prosecutor never told the court the truth: that McCray had no reason to fear charges because the district attorney had already promised not to bring any. Of the 11 witnesses who did testify against Hill, the prosecutor promised financial rewards to nine, including two people who were state informants. None of that information, or the criminal histories of the witnesses, was disclosed to Hill’s trial attorneys.
It wasn’t until 2007, more than 20 years later, that the state’s misconduct to come to light. At that point, rather than concede error, the Attorney General’s Office, led by former California Gov. Jerry Brown, doubled down. In multiple filings in federal court—the most recent one being on Thursday—Becerra’s deputies hewed to this position, arguing that Hill’s claims should not be addressed at all because the state court had been denied the opportunity to review the evidence first—evidence that Becerra’s predecessors in the Attorney General’s Office had joined with the district attorney to keep hidden. Becerra is “fully complicit with the Alameda County District Attorney’s Office in the suppression of the truth, resulting in Michael Hill’s wrongful incarceration on death row for decades,” Hill’s attorneys wrote in a May court filing.
Becerra’s office also fought to defend the conviction of Vicente Figueroa Benavides, a Mexican-born farmworker who was falsely accused of murdering a 21-month child. After every expert but one recanted their testimony in December 2012, Benavides sought relief in the state’s highest court. Over Becerra’s objection, the California Supreme Court reversed Benavides’ convictions, and the local district attorney later dropped all the charges. Benavides is a free man today, despite Becerra’s efforts to keep him locked up.
Then there is the attorney general’s embrace of a peculiar race-based argument for execution. The United States Supreme Court decided in 2002 that the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment forbids the execution of those suffering from intellectual disability. Becerra’s office has asked for an “ethnic adjustment” in a Black defendant’s IQ score to raise it enough to clear that constitutional bar and put him to death.
In the case of Robert Lewis Jr., a Black man with an IQ of 70, the attorney general sent his deputy into the California Supreme Court in 2018 to argue that the justices should automatically raise Lewis’ IQ score. The deputy argued that Lewis was among a group of “African American children [who] scored much more poorly on these tests than did the group against which the test was normed. And what does that tell us? It tells us that this test may underestimate his intelligence.”
As others have pointed out, this theory isn’t just alarming—it appears to violate the U.S. Constitution’s guarantee that all people are entitled to the equal protection of the law. Lewis’ attorney explained to the justices, “You can’t ethnically adjust scores to get a job as a police officer, you can’t ethically adjust scores to get into college, to get an education, and therefore you cannot ethnically adjust scores to kill somebody.” (Legislation to abolish this kind of race-based argument is pending in the California state Senate after the state’s Assembly voted unanimously to enact it. The attorney general has not taken a public position.)
Soundly rejecting Becerra’s race-based adjustment to his IQ, the California Supreme Court ruled 7–0 that Lewis was intellectually disabled and threw out his death sentence, noting that he “was unable, as opposed to unmotivated, to learn.”
But Michael Hill remains on San Quentin’s death row. And there are many more like him—condemned people whom the attorney general is fighting tooth and nail to execute, even though their convictions are fundamentally flawed and they are older adults at grave risk of contracting the deadly disease ravaging the prison.
There are a few cases in which Becerra has agreed not to appeal a ruling in favor of a death row inmate, and several in which he has taken a more measured position in court. These are commendable developments, but they are also outliers. Becerra’s default position is to pretend the moratorium does not exist and to litigate like a typical pro–death penalty prosecutor. But Newson has “supreme executive power” under the California Constitution, which means that he can order Becerra to halt every single death penalty prosecution in California and cease defending those that have already been obtained. It is imperative to act now that COVID-19 poses a mortal threat to the lives of so many.
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tion: none; } #ygrp-sponsor #ov li { font-size: 77%; list-style-type: square; padding: 6px 0; } #ygrp-sponsor #ov ul { margin: 0; padding: 0 0 0 8px; } #ygrp-text { font-family: Georgia; } #ygrp-text p { margin: 0 0 1em 0; } #ygrp-text tt { font-size: 120%; } #ygrp-vital ul li:last-child { border-right: none !important; } -->
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