Music: Daniel Herskedal — ‘Kurd Bayat Nahawand to Kurd’
The virus isn’t done with us
Alexis C Madrigal and Robinson Meyer write: After months of deserted public spaces and empty roads, Americans have returned to the streets. But they have come not for a joyous reopening to celebrate the country’s victory over the coronavirus. Instead, tens of thousands of people have ventured out to protest the killing of George Floyd by police. Demonstrators have closely gathered all over the country, and in blocks-long crowds in large cities, singing and chanting and demanding justice. Police officers…
William Barr, Trump’s ‘law and order’ enabler
David Rohde writes: Over the past week, Attorney General William Barr has taken a series of actions that will likely forever tie his legacy to that of Donald Trump. All of them were in defiance of Barr’s duty, as the country’s chief law-enforcement officer, to foster public faith in the American criminal-justice system by acting as apolitically as possible. All of them echoed the political messaging of Donald Trump. On Sunday, May 31st, as protests over the police killing of…
Minneapolis’ Third Precinct served as ‘playground’ for renegade cops
Star Tribune reports: Long before former officer Derek Chauvin knelt on George Floyd’s neck, the Third Precinct in south Minneapolis had a reputation for being home to police officers who played by their own rules. One officer kicked a handcuffed suspect in the face, leaving his jaw in pieces. Officers beat and pistol-whipped a suspect in a parking lot on suspicion of low-level drug charges. Others harassed residents of a south Minneapolis housing project as they headed to work, and…
Why military leaders like me are speaking out
Admiral James Stavridis (ret.) writes: The demonstrations set off by the death of George Floyd are creating remarkable crosscurrents in American society, from new ideas about police reform to an increased focus on the disparate health and economic damage African-Americans have suffered from Covid-19. There is increasing turmoil in terms of the use of the military as well. A number of retired generals and admirals have spoken out with alarm over the last week about adding active-duty military to law…
Asymptomatic spread of coronavirus is ‘very rare,’ WHO says
CNBC reports: Coronavirus patients without symptoms aren’t driving the spread of the virus, World Health Organization officials said Monday, casting doubt on concerns by some researchers that the disease could be difficult to contain due to asymptomatic infections. Some people, particularly young and otherwise healthy individuals, who are infected by the coronavirus never develop symptoms or only develop mild symptoms. Others might not develop symptoms until days after they were actually infected. Preliminary evidence from the earliest outbreaks indicated that…
Shutdowns prevented 60 million coronavirus infections in the U.S., study finds
The Washington Post reports: Shutdown orders prevented about 60 million novel coronavirus infections in the United States and 285 million in China, according to a research study published Monday that examined how stay-at-home orders and other restrictions limited the spread of the contagion. A separate study from epidemiologists at Imperial College London estimated the shutdowns saved about 3.1 million lives in 11 European countries, including 500,000 in the United Kingdom, and dropped infection rates by an average of 82 percent,…
Hospitals got bailouts and furloughed thousands while paying CEOs millions
The New York Times reports: HCA Healthcare is one of the world’s wealthiest hospital chains. It earned more than $7 billion in profits over the past two years. It is worth $36 billion. It paid its chief executive $26 million in 2019. But as the coronavirus swept the country, employees at HCA repeatedly complained that the company was not providing adequate protective gear to nurses, medical technicians and cleaning staff. Last month, HCA executives warned that they would lay off…
Music: Derrick Hodge — ‘Dances With Ancestors’
The foundations of the Trump regime are starting to crumble
Franklin Foer writes: Over the course of his presidency, Donald Trump has indulged his authoritarian instincts—and now he’s meeting the common fate of autocrats whose people turn against them. What the United States is witnessing is less like the chaos of 1968, which further divided a nation, and more like the nonviolent movements that earned broad societal support in places such as Serbia, Ukraine, and Tunisia, and swept away the dictatorial likes of Milošević, Yanukovych, and Ben Ali. And although…
Even when racism doesn’t go viral, it’s still deadly
Nicholas Kristof writes: Imagine that no one had shot video of George Floyd being killed by the police in Minneapolis. There would have been a bland statement that he had died resisting arrest, and none of us would have heard of him. Instead, the horror of that video has ignited protests around the world. Racism in that video is as visceral as a lynching. Yet there is no viral video to galvanize us about other racial inequities: There is no…
Why protesters want to defund police departments
Time reports: When you talk to activists who are pushing to defund police departments, there’s a specific word that comes up often: Reimagine. The idea that police are the only answer to preventing crime and protecting people is one that has been so ingrained into American society that it can be hard to imagine a different reality. But amid a national uprising against police brutality and systemic racism, activists say it’s time to reimagine what the public actually needs. In…
Park Police, a force trained to safeguard peaceful protests, suddenly turned violent
The Associated Press reports: Few have watched how the U.S. Park Police deals with protesters for as long and as closely as Ellen Thomas, an anti-nuclear activist who anchored a continuous sit-in vigil day and night on the pavement in front of the White House over two decades. So Thomas, 73, speaks from great familiarity in describing her surprise at the force used by the U.S. Park Police and other law enforcement officers in front of the White House last…
Democrats’ legislation would overhaul police accountability
The Associated Press reports: Democrats are proposing to overhaul legal protections for police, create a national database of excessive-force episodes and ban police choke holds in legislation coming Monday in response to the deaths of black Americans at the hands of law enforcement, according to a draft outline obtained by The Associated Press. “We’re in a real moment in our country,” Rep. Karen Bass, D-Ca., chairwoman of the Congressional Black Caucus, said Sunday on CNN’s “State of the Union,” speaking…
The labor movement faces a reckoning over police unions
HuffPost reports: Carmen Berkley spent four years directing the AFL-CIO’s civil rights department, trying to advance the cause of underrepresented communities at the country’s largest labor federation. Her tenure overlapped with seismic social justice events, including the protests that followed the killing of Michael Brown by a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014. Berkley felt that the AFL-CIO often broached difficult conversations about race, but failed to follow through. With the country now engulfed in anger over police…
What’s a journalist supposed to be now?
Margaret Sullivan writes: With the country in turmoil over racial injustice, a public health crisis and devastating job losses, it should be no surprise that journalists are caught up in the tumult. Still, the extent of that upheaval is remarkable. Consider just a slice of what’s happened in recent days: Numerous New York Times journalists publicly denounced their editorial page management for publishing a commentary article by a U.S. senator — headlined “Send In the Troops” — that advocated deploying…