[…] When two other Black men — Robert Fuller, 24, and Malcolm Harsch, 38 — were found hanging from trees in two Southern California cities this spring, their families disputed suicide findings. Black people are far less likely to end their lives than white people, and the hangings, in the midst of protests against police violence, conjured America’s ugly legacy of lynchings of Black men, which authorities sometimes labeled suicides to cover up for white police and mobs.
Over 4½ years ending in mid-June, 196 people experiencing homelessness in Los Angeles County took their lives. In 2016, 40% of the suicides were by hanging; so far this year, it’s 55%, according to a Times analysis of coroner’s reports.
Many homeless people hanged themselves in public — on a freeway off-ramp or sidewalk, in an alley, field or vacant lot — but their deaths went largely unremarked.
“Homeless suicides have not been an issue,” said Mike Neely, former Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority commissioner. “I’m not sure people want to have that discussion; it goes to the heart of the neglect of people.”
Prospects for a quick deal to extend supplemental unemployment benefits and other stimulus for an economy still reeling from the coronavirus pandemic have taken a sharp turn for the worse, leaving millions of Americans in the lurch a week after many benefits expired.
The light at the end of the tunnel spotted Wednesday by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco) turned markedly more dire by Thursday. That light might not be a bipartisan agreement, she said, but rather it “may be a freight train.” […]
White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows … and Treasury Secretary Steven T. Mnuchin left that meeting with Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) more than three hours later without much visible progress. The two sides cited wide remaining gulfs on the overall price of a deal and the amount of money to help state and local governments with the impact of the illness, a top priority of Democrats.
Department of Homeland Security acting secretary Chad Wolf on Thursday defended his handling of the protests in Portland, Ore., and bristled at criticism from his predecessors, telling a Senate panel that former DHS secretaries Tom Ridge and Michael ] were “dead wrong” when they raised concerns that the Trump administration’s response had gone too far.
Appearing before the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, Wolf said DHS officers and agents were deployed to Portland to protect federal buildings from destructive attacks and claimed they did not interfere with peaceful protests. He faulted city and state officials as cutting off cooperation with the Trump administration, including a Portland City Council resolution that directed local police to sever ties with federal authorities. […]
Republican members of the Senate panel were generally sympathetic in their questions to Wolf, but he was pressed by some of the Democrats, including Sen. Kamala D. Harris (Calif.), who asked the DHS chief about the effects of chemical irritants, which federal forces used liberally to disperse crowds.
“There are mothers, including pregnant women, who attend these protests. I would advise you, sir, to consult with medical experts to determine the impact of chemical irritants on pregnant women,” Harris said, raising her voice as Wolf acknowledged he had not done so.
Elections officials across the country are accelerating their efforts to install ballot drop boxes, a move they hope will make absentee voting simple and safe for those wary of the mail or fear exposure to the novel coronavirus at polling places.
The efforts come as voters voice concerns about timely delivery of mail ballots. Already, postal workers are reporting days-long backlogs of mail across the country, calling into question whether ballots will arrive at elections offices in time to be counted in November. … Trump has also ramped up attacks on the integrity of mail voting, in a year when more voters than ever are expected to choose that method because of the pandemic.
But the use of these boxes — which often look similar to a mailbox and are typically under video surveillance or guarded — has come under attack in states newly adopting them this year. Some skeptics worry the boxes may not be properly monitored to prevent tampering, or that voters will not know how to use or find them. In the battleground state of Pennsylvania, these drop boxes are now in the center of a Trump campaign lawsuit raising similar concerns.
Portland police subjected Black people to force at higher rates than any other race in 2019, according to an oversight group’s report. The data shows the disproportionate policing of Black people, particularly young men, has persisted for years, even as overall use of force by officers has declined.
Half of the 232 Black people subjected to force were men in their 20s, according to a report issued July 8 by the police bureau’s training advisory council. The report analyzed patterns in force used by officers in 2019 using Portland police statistics.
In interactions with Black people who were arrested in 2019, the report showed Portland officers were five to 14 times more likely to shoot less lethal impact munitions at Black people, force their hands together to handcuff them, place them in leg restraints and physically restrain them because an officer perceives they are resisting than to do those same things to white people, given their prevalence in the city’s population.
After their plan to get a police overhaul on the November ballot fell short, Minneapolis City Council members are recalibrating their plans for transforming public safety in the city.
The 2021 budget process, which kicks off next week, could provide an opportunity to do just that — though it wouldn’t necessarily be easy.
Mayor Jacob Frey will outline his first budget pitch Aug. 14, and council members will then have several months to negotiate changes.
Some on the City Council wanted voters to decide whether to eliminate the minimum police staffing requirement from the City Charter and replace it with a new community safety agency. But the Charter Commission on Wednesday blocked that initiative from getting on the November ballot.
A federal judge said Wednesday he would decide whether to alter election laws this fall purely on the basis of how the coronavirus pandemic will affect voting rights — and not on Wisconsin's swing-state status.
U.S. District Judge William Conley told attorneys the state's crucial role in the presidential election was "the elephant in the room."
"It is the parties' elephant. It is not the court’s," he said at the outset of a daylong telephone hearing.
"It is not something that I intend to discuss and I do not expect the parties to tell me about it," he said. "The questions here are purely ones of whether or not COVID-19 is impacting the ability of election officials to conduct this election and vindicate the rights of voters."
Milwaukee Police Chief Alfonso Morales was demoted to captain Thursday evening, less than a year after he was appointed to a four-year term as chief by the city's Fire and Police Commission.
He would not rule out suing the city to get his job back, his attorney said earlier Thursday.
Commissioners had sharp words for Morales before voting to demote him, with some accusing him of repeatedly lying. The vote was unanimous.
“His conduct is unbecoming, filled with ethical lapses and flawed decisions," said Commissioner Raymond Robakowski. "Mr. Morales has failed the men and women of the Milwaukee Police Department, the people of the city of Milwaukee and he has misled me. And none of this is acceptable."
In the course of "vetting" a vice presidential running mate, U.S. Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden might have accidentally spilled General Motors' future product plans.
In an 80-second campaign spot posted on Biden's Twitter account Wednesday, Biden surprises by not talking about politics but cars, and his love of the Corvette and the American car market. In it, he says, "They tell me" that GM is making an all-electric version of its iconic sports car that will go 200 mph.
Turns out there are plans. Someone familiar with Corvette production at its Bowling Green Assembly in Kentucky confirmed to the Free Press there is a plan for an all-electric version of the Corvette, but the timing and its maximum speed are unknown.
There's been a lot of talk about my vetting process lately. Here’s an inside look: pic.twitter.com/tFRKJOE3hi
Top executives of the National Rifle Association enriched themselves as well as favored staff and vendors in violation of New York's charities law, according to a lawsuit filed Thursday by state Attorney General Letitia James that seeks to dissolve one of the nation's most influential advocacy groups.
The suit accuses the NRA's leaders of illegally diverting millions of dollars from its charitable mission for personal use while also awarding contracts to close associates and family, and allegedly buying the silence of former employees through lucrative no-show arrangements.
James' suit accused the New York-chartered Second Amendment advocacy group with "years of self-dealing and illegal conduct that violates New York’s charity law and violates its own mission,” she said. “The NRA's influence has been so powerful that the organization went unchecked for decades, while top executives funneled millions into their own pockets.”
In total, James said the executives’ actions contributed to a nearly $64 million loss for the organization in just three years.
[…] Around the country, across industries and occupations, millions of Americans thrown out of work because of the coronavirus are straining to afford the basics now that an extra $600 a week in federal unemployment benefits has expired.
“My worst nightmare is coming true,” said Liz Ness, a laid-off recruiter at a New Orleans staffing agency who fears she will be evicted next month without the added help from Washington. “Summer 2020 could be next year’s horror movie.” […]
Up to 30 million Americans, their jobs lost or income slashed by an outbreak that has paralyzed the economy and killed close to 160,000 people in the U.S., are trying to get by solely on state unemployment benefits, which on average are less than $400 a week.
As president, Trump hasn’t personally squared off against the ACLU from the witness stand, but the broader warning has been borne out. As of this week, the ACLU has filed nearly 400 lawsuits and other legal actions against the Trump administration, some meeting with setbacks but many resulting in important victories.
“The assault on civil liberties and civil rights is greater under this administration than any other in modern history,” said the ACLU’s executive director, Anthony Romero. “It’s meant we’ve been living with a three-alarm fire in every part of our house.”
Photos of a crowded high school hallway have propelled the 30,000-student Paulding County School District into the national news this week and into debates over school safety and free speech.
The photos, reportedly taken by students on the first few days of classes and posted to social media, show the hallway packed with students at North Paulding High School, with few masks to be seen — both in conflict with the safety protocols advised by epidemiologists who say social distancing is key to fighting the spread of COVID-19 and masks are crucial when six feet of distance isn’t possible.
The photos quickly drew angry responses from people questioning school administrators’ handling of the back-to-school safety plans. That anger intensified with reports that at least one student who photographed the crowded hallway was suspended after being applauded online as a whistleblower.
Boooooy, y’all’s presumptive Democratic nominee appears to be bound and determined to join y’all’s president in making the upcoming presidential race as excruciatingly cringeworthy has humanly possible. This racism vs. diet racism Pepsi challenge we’re all being subjected to is getting… well… interesting. […]
Out of nowhere, this shit happened...
.@JoeBiden: “Unlike the African-American community, with notable exceptions, the Latino community is an incredibly diverse community" pic.twitter.com/CFO4Q40jEI
First of all: Why the fuck is Black people’s name in his mouth in the first place? We weren’t even part of the conversation. This man threw us under a bus that wasn’t even driving down our street. […]
Listen: I know we all want Cheeto McButthole-Mouth out of the White House, but as Biden’s dog whistle slowly but surely morphs into a bullhorn, it’s getting harder and harder for us to justify casting that ballot in his name.
Biden’s strategy from here on out should be to shut the entire fuck up until November and let Trump continue digging his own grave. Maybe choosing a Black woman as a running mate who will snatch his caucasity-filled ass up when he starts to speak wrong will also help.
Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden apologized late Thursday for comments he made earlier in the day that suggested that the African-American community was not diverse.
“In no way did I mean to suggest the African-American community is a monolith — not by identity, not on issues, not at all,” Biden said in an series of tweets.
In an interview with Black and Latino journalists published early Thursday, Biden said that “unlike the African-American community, with notable exceptions, the Latino community is an incredibly diverse community with incredibly diverse attitudes about different things.”
Donald Trump signed a pair of executive orders prohibiting U.S. residents from doing any business with TikTok, WeChat or the apps’ Chinese owners beginning 45 days from now, citing the national security risk of leaving Americans’ personal data exposed.
The move coincides with Trump’s push for the sale of TikTok, the popular video app owned by ByteDance Ltd., to an American company, and it comes a day after Secretary of State Michael Pompeo urged U.S. businesses to remove Chinese apps from their stores. The measure threatens penalties on any U.S. resident or company that engages in any transactions with TikTok, WeChat or their owners after the order takes effect.
Mark Zuckerberg’s net worth passed $100 billion for the first time Thursday after Facebook Inc. hit a record high on optimism about the release of its TikTok competitor Reels.
The 36-year-old joins fellow tech titans Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates as the only people in the world who currently have centibillionaire status, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. Zuckerberg’s fortune is largely derived from his 13% stake in Facebook.
For at least the last two months, a key Instagram feature, which algorithmically pushes users toward supposedly related content, has been treating hashtags associated with President Donald Trump and presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden in very different ways. Searches for Biden also return a variety of pro-Trump messages, while searches for Trump-related topics only returned the specific hashtags, like #MAGA or #Trump — which means searches for Biden-related hashtags also return counter-messaging, while those for Trump do not.
Earlier this week, a search on Instagram for #JoeBiden would have surfaced nearly 390,000 posts tagged with the former vice president’s name along with related hashtags selected by the platform’s algorithm. Users searching Instagram for #JoeBiden might also see results for #joebiden2020, as well as pro-Trump hashtags like #trump2020landslide and #democratsdestroyamerica. […]
Nina Jankowicz, a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars who studies disinformation, said Instagram’s admission of a bug shows the company understands its suggestion algorithm impacts the content people consume. Related hashtags have also been used to spread conspiracy theories on the platform, and has been gamed by bad actors and foreign trolls. […]
While Facebook and Instagram have ramped up investment to protect against election interference and check for disinformation, researchers like Jankowicz believe there’s still more to be done. She advocated for more human review, particularly around political hashtags.
Lebanese security forces have reportedly fired tear gas to disperse dozens of anti-government demonstrators angered by a huge and deadly explosion widely seen as the most shocking expression yet of their government’s incompetence.
The scuffles in central Beirut took place in a ravaged street leading to parliament, amid wreckage from Tuesday’s explosion still littering the area. Protesters had sparked a blaze, vandalised stores and lobbed stones at security forces, according to the state-run National News Agency.
Police responded with tear gas to disperse the small, but angry crowd, wounding some demonstrators, NNA said. Tuesday’s blast killed nearly 150 people, wounded at least 5,000 and destroyed entire districts of the capital.
[…] The Chinese fleet, numbering more than 200 vessels, is in international waters just outside a maritime border around the Galápagos Islands and also Ecuador’s coastal waters, said Norman Wray, the islands’ governor.
Chinese fishing vessels come every year to the seas around the Galápagos, which were declared a Unesco world heritage site in 1978, but this year’s fleet is one of the largest seen in recent years. Of the 248 vessels, 243 are flagged to China including to companies with suspected records of illegal, unreported and unregulated, or IUU, fishing, according to research by C4ADS, a data analysis NGO.
The fleet includes fishing boats and refrigerated container – or reefer – ships to store enormous catches.
It was her wedding day and Dr. Israa Seblani, 29, was dressed all in white, posing for a video meant to commemorate the celebration in Beirut, Lebanon, when a deadly blast ripped through the capital on Tuesday.
The footage from videographer Mahmoud Nakib captured the instant a powerful wave of pressure from the explosion rolled through the city. The blast killed at least 135 people and injured over 5,000.
In the video, Seblani can be seen smiling and posing in her wedding dress in a city square when suddenly the roar of the blast can be heard. A bouquet of flowers on the ground is blown out of the shot and the bride's veil and the skirt of her dress are thrown back by the force of the shock.
"I think I've just had enough," says Naila Saba as she stands among the debris of her eviscerated Beirut business.
"I felt the blast, I saw the news, and I was unable to be any more moved. I am exhausted. I have no more tears," said the 42 -year-old co-owner and chef at Aaliya's Books, a fixture of the city's historic Mar Mikhail neighbourhood.
Her thoughtfully arranged bar and bookstore was no more. The steel and glass-panel doors that made up its exterior had been ripped from their hinges in the massive explosion that tore through Beirut on Tuesday, killing at least 137 people, injuring 5,000 and displacing up to 300,000.
The Trudeau government is promising to impose retaliatory tariffs on American products after … Donald Trump announced Thursday he is restoring an import tax on raw aluminum from Canada later this month.
“In response to the American tariffs, Canada intends to swiftly impose dollar-for-dollar countermeasures,” Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland said in a written statement.
She called Trump’s decision to reimpose tariffs on Canadian aluminum “unwarranted and unacceptable” and suggested his timing couldn’t be worse.
With the expected date of Joe Biden's vice presidential decision growing ever nearer, the rumblings that campaign insiders are waging something of a shadow war against Sen. Kamala Harris have grown louder.
In late July, news reports emerged that certain supporters of the presumptive Democratic nominee felt that Harris was "too ambitious" for the job. "She would be running for President the day of the inauguration," Florida bundler John Morgan told CNBC. The buzz was loud enough that Harris herself seemed to address it on Friday, while speaking via live stream at the Black Girls Lead 2020 conference: "There will be a resistance to your ambition, there will be people who say to you, 'You are out of your lane.'"
But it seems that voters might think that lane is actually a perfectly good place for Harris and other female politicians to be.
Joe Biden said Sen. Kamala Harris is “very much in contention” to be his running mate on the 2020 Democratic ticket, clarifying that he doesn’t hold a grudge against the California lawmaker for attacking him in an early primary debate. […]
CBS News correspondent Errol Barnett asked Biden about those reports during an interview that aired Thursday morning as part of the virtual convention of the National Association of Black Journalists and the National Association of Hispanic Journalists.
“No, he didn't say that to the press, he was talking to somebody offline, and it was repeated,” Biden said, referring to Dodd’s comments. “Now, I don't hold grudges. I've made it really clear that I don't hold grudges. I think it was a debate, it was as simple as that. And she's very much in contention.”
Amid various reports that Republican and Trump-affiliated political operatives are trying to get Kanye West onto various state ballots for November’s presidential election, the billionaire rap superstar indicated, in an interview by text today, that he was in fact running to siphon votes from the presumptive Democratic nominee, Joe Biden.
Asked about that directly, West said that rather than running for president, he was “walking,” quickly adding that he was “walking . . . to win.”
When it was pointed out that he actually can’t win in 2020—that he won’t be on enough ballots to yield 270 electoral votes, and that a write-in campaign isn’t feasible—and thus was serving as a spoiler, West replied: “I’m not going to argue with you. Jesus is King.”
[…] The Trump administration’s attempt to cut census operations short will likely reduce the counts in hard-to-count areas across the US, particularly in numerous congressional districts where the response rates remain at least 10 points below the 2010 response rate. […]
Latino and immigrant advocates have called the decision to conclude census operations early a blatant attempt to suppress the voting power of their communities. About 62 percent of Latino registered voters identify with or lean toward the Democratic Party, according to a January 2020 Pew Research survey.
“It’s an attempt at political beheading of the Latino vote,” Domingo Garcia, the national president of the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), said. “It just reeks of political opportunism.”
In Texas, a historically red state, Latinos make up roughly 40 percent of the population and are expected to become the largest population group in the state by 2022, according to Census Bureau projections. But as of now, Texas as a whole remains 6.4 points behind its final 2010 self-response rate.
[…] Saul Griffith is trying to answer those same questions on climate change: what is necessary, given the trajectory of global warming, and what is possible, given the resources in the US economy.
A physicist, engineer, researcher, inventor, serial entrepreneur, and MacArthur “genius” grant winner, Griffith’s recent work spans two organizations. First, he is founder and chief scientist at Otherlab, an independent research and design lab that has mapped the energy economy. […]
In a nutshell, he has shown that it’s possible to eliminate 70 percent to 80 percent of US carbon emissions by 2035 through rapid deployment of existing electrification technologies, with little-to-no carbon capture and sequestration. Doing so would slash US energy demand by around half, save consumers money, and keep the country on a 1.5° pathway without requiring particular behavior changes. Everyone could still have their same cars and houses — they would just need to be electric.
[…] Today, telehealth has resurrected the house call more than a century after it fell out of favor. This newfangled iteration of a bygone practice is less intimate than having a doctor sitting at your bedside, but more personal than sitting on your doctor’s exam table. For some people, virtual home visits are about as uncomfortable as being poked and prodded in a hospital gown, but they allow doctors to once again observe quotidian details of their patients’ health that they might not otherwise glimpse. “The doctor’s office is a stressful place for everyone,” Mark Fendrick, a primary-care doctor with Michigan Medicine, told me. “There are some things we look for that are more artificial in a doctor’s office and more real-world at home.” […]
However, as the Kansas City University medical historian Kirby Randolph points out, keeping one’s personal life private might be the point of going into a generic doctor’s office. “A lot of patients don’t want the doctor to see their home environment, because they’re self-conscious,” she told me. Domesticating medicine’s turf won’t cure the biases baked into its history—racism, classism, homophobia, sexism, sizeism, and ageism among them—that could color how a clinician interprets a patient’s surroundings.
Will we have a coronavirus vaccine by Inauguration Day, or will it still be several months off? If we do have a vaccine, will it have been competently distributed, or will America be a haphazard patchwork of immunity? Will the spread of infection, and the deaths that follow, slow or quicken? Will the economy have stabilized, or will the country be careening into the worst hole in human memory?
Joe Biden does not know the answers to any of those questions—no one does. But the many uncertainties make it exceptionally hard for the presumptive Democratic nominee to plan what he’d do if he is elected president.
“When President Biden is sworn in, in January, who knows how many people will have died by then?” California Representative Karen Bass, a potential vice-presidential candidate, told me. “And then who knows what the economy would be? We could be in a depression.”
Jaime Harrison, the former chairman of the South Carolina Democratic Party, is tied with Republican U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham, a close ally of President Donald Trump, in the race for U.S. Senate, according to a new poll out Thursday.
According to the survey from Quinnipiac University, each candidate has 44% support from South Carolina voters, while 9% of voters are undecided.
The poll also found 85% of voters said their minds are made compared with 13% who said they could change their preference.
Since the President’s acquittal in the Senate back in January, several key senators have been working to turn their committee’s oversight functions into both an information laundry as part of the Black PSYOP against Vice President Biden and an oppo research and distribution arm of the President’s reelection campaign. These efforts are being led by Senator Ron Johnson, who chairs the Homeland Security Committee; Senator Charles Grassley, who chairs the Finance Committee; and Senator Lindsey Graham, who chairs the Judiciary Committee and are intended to do one thing and one thing only: dirty up Vice President Biden ahead of his election, as well as a number of his senior advisors who would be expect to have senior appointments in a Biden administration should he win in November. Should he indeed win, expect the Senate Republicans to use these hearings to either deny, should they hold their majority, or try to derail and deny, should they be in the minority, the Senate confirmation for these senior Biden aides and advisors. In this way the Black PSYOP campaign against VP Biden has metastasized in a new ugly way: to not just try to make him unelectable, but to damage many of his most senior and trusted aides and advisors so that they would be unconfirmable should he be elected and appoint them to the most senior positions in his administration.
More than a decade has passed since researchers demonstrated serious privacyand security holes in satellite-based Internet services. The weaknesses allowed attackers to snoop on and sometimes tamper with data received by millions of users thousands of miles away. You might expect that in 2020—as satellite Internet has grown more popular—providers would have fixed those shortcomings, but you’d be wrong.
In a briefing delivered on Wednesday at the Black Hat security conference online, researcher and Oxford PhD candidate James Pavur presented findings that show that satellite-based Internet is putting millions of people at risk, despite providers adopting new technologies that are supposed to be more advanced.
Oprah Winfrey erecting 26 billboards of Breonna Taylor around Louisville https://t.co/ORqrp4f2gJ
Vice President Biden just released a remarkable statement about his faith and values, in the face of Trump’s attacks today. Worth reading in full. This is how a leader faces a bully. pic.twitter.com/WS5OINQRRY