Attention to the Unseen

The Oregonian reports: For weeks, it was unclear how Oregon leaders could defuse the increasingly violent standoff between federal officers and protesters in downtown Portland and convince Homeland Security officers to leave. Gov. Kate Brown’s administration says that proved relatively easy in the end because the Trump administration was clearly looking for a way out. Trump administration officials did not demand any concessions or pledges from Brown before they agreed officers would depart, Brown’s chief of staff Nik Blosser told…

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Ross Andersen writes: Northwest of Beijing’s Forbidden City, outside the Third Ring Road, the Chinese Academy of Sciences has spent seven decades building a campus of national laboratories. Near its center is the Institute of Automation, a sleek silvery-blue building surrounded by camera-studded poles. The institute is a basic research facility. Its computer scientists inquire into artificial intelligence’s fundamental mysteries. Their more practical innovations—iris recognition, cloud-based speech synthesis—are spun off to Chinese tech giants, AI start-ups, and, in some cases,…

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The Washington Post reports: With an umbrella in his left hand and a hammer in his right, the man in black lobbed his weapon so nonchalantly into an auto parts shop’s windows that it surprised many others in Minneapolis marching nearby in a May 27 protest after George Floyd’s death. Soon after the abrupt attack, the mostly calm demonstration near a police precinct erupted into looting and arson — the first fire in riots that eventually caused $500 million in…

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The New York Times reports: From the earliest days of the recent protests against police brutality and racism, some top federal law enforcement officials viewed the demonstrators with alarm and called for an aggressive federal response that two months later continues to escalate. A memo from the deputy director of the F.B.I., dated June 2, demanded an immediate mobilization as protests gathered after George Floyd’s death while he was in police custody a week earlier. David L. Bowdich, the F.B.I.’s…

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The New York Times reports: The Marble Collegiate Church on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan was packed with developers, politicians and New York celebrities, more than 600 in all, for the funeral of Fred C. Trump, the builder whose no-frills brick rental towers transformed Brooklyn and Queens. Three of his four living children, who had grown up listening to the sermons of the church’s most famous minister, Norman Vincent Peale, offered loving eulogies to their father. Then it was Donald Trump’s…

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NBC News reports: The threat of terrorism — particularly from the far right — should be a major concern for governments on both sides of the Atlantic as coronavirus restrictions continue to ease, according to multiple experts and former law enforcement officials who have experience monitoring violent extremist activity. High unemployment levels due to the pandemic, poor economic prospects and the spread of disinformation through the internet and social media could accelerate radicalization, they said. And after a major drive…

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