Music: Phronesis — ‘Herne Hill’
Scant evidence of antifa shows how sweeping the protests for racial justice have become
The Washington Post reports: In the two weeks that saw an uprising against racial injustice and police brutality spread from the streets of Minneapolis to cities across America, the specter of violent, left-wing militants invoked by President Trump and a chorus of conservative voices has yet to materialize. Instead, multiracial crowds have appeared in every corner of the United States, as the president sent more than a dozen tweets blaming clashes with police on antifa, the label associated with anti-fascist…
John Lewis to Black Lives Matter protesters: ‘Give until you cannot give any more’
Jonathan Capehart writes: John Lewis stood with his backpack over his shoulders and his hands in the pockets of his trench coat. The 25-year-old’s eyes were fixed on the line of Alabama state troopers with billy clubs in their hands and gas masks covering their faces. The date was Sunday, March 7, 1965. Lewis and the 600 other African Americans with him set out to march from Selma, Ala., to Montgomery, the state capital, to demand the right to vote….
Racial justice groups flooded with millions in donations in wake of Floyd death
The New York Times reports: The killing of George Floyd and the ensuing nationwide wave of protests are generating a record-setting flood of donations to racial justice groups, bail funds and black-led advocacy organizations across America, remaking the financial landscape of black political activism in a matter of weeks. Money has come in so fast and so unexpectedly that some groups even began to turn away and redirect donors elsewhere. Others said they still could not yet account for how…
Black leaders regularly fail to rise to the challenges that confront young people
Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor writes: Young black people have exploded in rebellion over the grotesque killing of George Floyd. We are now witnessing the broadest protest movement in American history. And yet the response of black elected officials has been cautious and uninspired. The Congressional Black Caucus offered a familiar list of the kind of police reforms that have failed for decades to end police violence. After protesters vandalized CNN’s headquarters and set a police car on fire in Atlanta, the mayor,…
In Seattle, armed activists say they’re needed to ward off dangerous extremists
The Daily Beast reports: Seattle’s bustling Capitol Hill neighborhood has long been a hotbed of gentrification, but right now, the streets surrounding Cal Anderson Park are undergoing a different kind of transformation. Over the past several days of its remarkable existence, the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone (CHAZ) has captured radical imaginations across the country, and struck fear into the hearts of conservative politicians and right-wing media pundits (including the president). Also known as the Seattle Autonomous Zone, the six blocks…
Why Minneapolis was the breaking point
Wesley Lowery writes: For years, thousands of protesters have taken to the streets to demand a wholesale reimagining of the criminal-justice system. They have stated clearly that they believe American policing is inherently flawed. Black people in America, they argue, are chronically overpoliced and underserved. They are stopped and frisked while walking to the bodega and harassed while cooking out on their porches and patios. But when they are murdered? American police almost never deliver them justice. “We shouldn’t fear…
Trump rally called ‘dangerous move’ in age of coronavirus
The Associated Press reports: After months away from the campaign trail, President Donald Trump plans to rally his supporters next Saturday for the first time since most of the country was shuttered by the coronavirus. But health experts are questioning that decision. Trump will head to Tulsa, Oklahoma — a state that has seen relatively few COVID-19 cases. Yet the Tulsa City-County Health Department’s director told the Tulsa World over the weekend that he wished the Trump campaign would move…
Music: Tom Misch & Marcos Valle — ‘Parabéns’
Black Lives Matter protests in Trump country test his hold in rural white areas
The Associated Press reports: In the lake country 200 miles (320 kilometers) northwest of Detroit, hundreds danced, prayed and demanded racial justice in Cadillac, a Michigan town that was long home to a neo-Nazi group. It was not an isolated scene. In eastern Ohio, even more demonstrated in rural Mount Vernon, a town with its own current of racial intolerance, just as others did in Manheim, Pennsylvania, a tiny farming town in Lancaster County, with its small but active Ku…
Trump’s actions rattle the military world
The New York Times reports: Erin Fangmann grew up in a military family, has been married to a captain in the Air Force for 18 years and has voted Republican all her life, including for Donald J. Trump. But as with a number of other veterans, troops and military family members who have watched the president with alarm, her support has evaporated. “He has hurt the military,” said Ms. Fangmann, who lives in Arizona, one of several states in play…
As cities grew safer, police budgets kept growing
The New York Times reports: In Boston, Los Angeles and Milwaukee, about one in every 10 dollars of local government spending goes to the police. In Minneapolis, it’s about one in every 20 dollars. American society has not settled on what that number should be — how much of a priority the police ought to have, alongside schools and parks and housing and health care. But the police share of spending has grown over the past 40 years, even as…
Yes, we mean literally abolish the police
Mariame Kaba writes: Congressional Democrats want to make it easier to identify and prosecute police misconduct; Joe Biden wants to give police departments $300 million. But efforts to solve police violence through liberal reforms like these have failed for nearly a century. Enough. We can’t reform the police. The only way to diminish police violence is to reduce contact between the public and the police. There is not a single era in United States history in which the police were…
Most Covid-19 cases don’t spread virus — it’s the superspreaders we need to stop
Ars Technica reports: Much about how the new coronavirus spreads from one victim to the next remains a maddening mystery. But amid all the frantic efforts to understand transmission, there is one finding that appears consistent: that it is inconsistent. Some people—most, even—don’t spread the virus to anyone in the course of their infection. Others infect dozens at a time. It’s a phenomenon that looked, at first, like anomalous anecdotes—a large outbreak from a Washington choir practice, a South Korean…
The Covid-19 pandemic is unleashing a tidal wave of plastic waste
The Los Angeles Times reports: When he stepped onto a beach on Hong Kong’s uninhabited Soko Islands, Gary Stokes was surprised to find — amid the discarded water bottles, shopping bags and usual piles of plastic waste — a new type of garbage washing ashore. Masks. Dozens and dozens of disposable masks. On that overcast morning in late February, just weeks after Hong Kong had recorded its first coronavirus case, the environmental activist collected more than 70 discarded masks from…
48,000-year-old arrowheads reveal early human innovation in the Sri Lankan rainforest
M. C. Langley/Shutterstock/The Conversation By Michelle Langley, Griffith University; Oshan Wedage, Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, and Patrick Roberts, Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History Archaeological excavations deep within the rainforests of Sri Lanka have unearthed the earliest evidence for hunting with bows and arrows outside Africa. At Fa-Hien Lena, a cave in the heart of Sri Lanka’s wet zone forests, we discovered numerous tools made of stone, bone, and tooth – including…