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rerobinson03

Broadcasting 'the Shock, the Horror, the Outrage' Live, Again and Again - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ngs-atlanta-boulder-media.html

shared by rerobinson03 on 28 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • This time, it was 10 people dead at a grocery store in Boulder, Colo. Only a few days before, she had interviewed a survivor of the rampage at Atlanta-area massage parlors. In 2019, Ms. Keilar reported on the back-to-back shootings in El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio. In 2018, she spoke with relatives of students killed in the shooting in Parkland, Fla.
  • “I just was having this awful feeling of déjà vu,” Ms. Keilar said in an interview, as she recalled the emotional broadcast, which was widely shared on social media. “If you’re covering this all the time, it’s possible to become numb. Because it becomes somehow unremarkable. This thing that is completely unacceptable, and should be extraordinary, becomes unremarkable.”
  • Journalists who have reported on multiple mass shootings say these moments are borne of sadness, frustration, and, for some, a feeling of futility in the face of a bleak kind of repetition. There is now a well-developed playbook that network correspondents and newspaper writers, including many New York Times reporters, turn to as they travel to yet another afflicted town. Talk to those who knew the victims and the gunman; attend vigils and funerals; gather information from the police and the courts. Balance necessary reporting on the attack with the potential that too much attention could be seen as glorifying the attacker.
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  • Reporters have learned to spend more time focusing on victims, rather than perpetrators. It was a shift that played out vocally on social media, as readers on Twitter implored news organizations to focus more on the people who were killed in the Atlanta shootings, as well as the uptick in crimes against Asian-Americans, rather than the gunman’s supposed motive.
  • ournalists are usually expected to set their feelings aside as they gather disinterested facts about a tragic event. But it’s not always possible, and Mr. Holt said that it was important to “report these things as unusual, as not normal.”
  • “I think it’s OK to be a little pissed off,” Mr. Holt, of “NBC Nightly News,” said. “As a journalist, it’s not an editorial position to be upset or angry at mass murder, of people going about their day, shopping, getting cut down by a stranger. It’s OK to be upset about that.”
  • “Every journalist goes through tough stories,” he said. “We are not alone with it. It’s just unfortunate that we’ve had in Colorado, a number of these, that have given us, for lack of a better term, training in how to try to deal with these things. But it’s still going to be awful.”
Javier E

How Emergent BioSolutions Put an 'Extraordinary Burden' on the U.S.'s Troubled Stockpile - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...tions-anthrax-coronavirus.html

government pandemic preparation

shared by Javier E on 07 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • Government purchases for the Strategic National Stockpile, the country’s emergency medical reserve where such equipment is kept, have largely been driven by the demands and financial interests of a handful of biotech firms that have specialized in products that address terrorist threats rather than infectious disease.
  • “Today, I think, we would not allow anthrax to take up half the budget for a guaranteed supply of vaccines,” he said, adding, “Surely after such a calamity as the last year, we should take a fresh look at stockpiles and manufacturing and preparing for the next pandemic.”
  • Under normal circumstances, Emergent’s relationship with the federal stockpile would be of little public interest — an obscure contractor in an obscure corner of the federal bureaucracy applying the standard tools of Washington, like well-connected lobbyists and campaign contributions, to create a business heavily dependent on taxpayer dollars.
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  • Security concerns, moreover, keep most information about stockpile purchases under wraps. Details about the contracts and inventory are rarely made public, and even the storage locations are secret.
  • Former Emergent employees, government contractors, members of Congress, biodefense experts and current and former officials from agencies that oversee the stockpile described a deeply dysfunctional system that contributed to the shocking shortages last year.
  • Purchases are supposed to be based on careful assessments by government officials of how best to save lives, but many have also been influenced by Emergent’s bottom line
  • The stockpile has long been the company’s biggest and most reliable customer for its anthrax vaccines, which expire and need to be replaced every few years.
  • In the two decades since the repository was created, Emergent’s aggressive tactics, broad political connections and penchant for undercutting competitors have given it remarkable sway over the government’s purchasing decisions related to the vaccines
  • While national security officials still consider anthrax a threat, it has not received specific mention since 2012 in the intelligence community’s annual public assessment of dangers facing the country, a report that has repeatedly warned of pandemics.
  • Emergent bought the license for the country’s only approved anthrax vaccine in 1998 from the State of Michigan. Over time, the price per dose the government agreed to pay Emergent increased nearly sixfold, accounting for inflation, contributing to record revenues last year that topped $1.5 billion
  • The company, whose board is stocked with former federal officials, has deployed a lobbying budget more typical of some big pharmaceutical companies
  • Competing efforts to develop a better and cheaper anthrax vaccine, for example, collapsed after Emergent outmaneuvered its rivals, the documents and interviews show.
  • preparations for an outbreak like Covid-19 almost always took a back seat to Emergent’s anthrax vaccines
  • the government approved a plan in 2015 to buy tens of millions of N95 respirators — lifesaving equipment for medical workers that has been in short supply because of Covid-19 — but the masks repeatedly lost out in the competition for funding over the years leading up to the pandemic
  • After Dr. Frieden and others in the Obama administration tried but failed to lessen Emergent’s dominance over stockpile purchases, the company’s fortunes rose under Mr. Trump, who appointed a former Emergent consultant with a background in bioterrorism to run the office that now oversees the stockpile
  • “If I could spend less on anthrax replenishment, I could buy more N95s,” Dr. Kadlec said in an interview shortly after leaving office. “I could buy more ventilators. I could buy more of other things that quite frankly I didn’t have the money to buy.”
  • And now, as some members of Congress push for larger reserves of ventilators, masks and other equipment needed in a pandemic, a trade group led in part by a top Emergent lobbyist has warned that the purchases could endanger companies focused on threats like anthrax and smallpox by drawing down limited funds.
  • Last year, as the pandemic raced across the country, the government paid Emergent $626 million for products that included vaccines to fight an entirely different threat: a terrorist attack using anthrax.
  • “I think it’s pretty clear that the benefit of the vaccine is marginal,” he said in an interview
  • “They’re very vicious in their behavior toward anybody they perceive as having a different point of view,” said Dr. Tara O’Toole, a former Homeland Security official who says she ran afoul of Emergent in 2010 after telling Congress that the nation needed a newer and better anthrax vaccine.
  • That year, the company that would become Emergent — then known as BioPort — paid Michigan $25 million to buy the license for a government-developed anthrax vaccine and an aging manufacturing plant.
  • The company opened its doors with one product, called BioThrax, and one customer, the Defense Department, which required the vaccine for service members.
  • Emergent’s anthrax vaccine was not the government’s first choice. It was more than 30 years old and plagued by manufacturing challenges and complaints about side effects. Officials instead backed a company named VaxGen, which was developing a vaccine using newer technology licensed from the military.
  • Emergent’s successful campaign against VaxGen — deploying a battalion of lobbyists, publicly attacking its rival and warning that it might cease production of its own vaccine if the government didn’t buy it — established its formidable reputation. By 2006, VaxGen had lost its contract and the government had turned to Emergent to supply BioThrax.
  • “They were totally feared by everybody,” Dr. Philip Russell, a top health official in the administration of President George W. Bush, said in an interview. He said that he clashed with Emergent when he backed VaxGen, and that his reputation came under attack, which was documented by The Times in 2006. (Dr. Russell died this January.)
  • the group of federal officials who make decisions about the stockpile and other emergency preparations — known as the Phemce, for the Public Health Emergency Medical Countermeasures Enterprise — ordered up a study. It found in 2010 that the government could not afford to devote so much of its budget to a single threat.
  • Instead, the review concluded, the government should invest more in products with multiple applications, like diagnostic tests, ventilators, reusable respirator masks and “plug and play” platforms that can rapidly develop vaccines for a range of outbreaks.
  • from 2010 through 2018, the anthrax vaccine consumed more than 40 percent of the stockpile’s budget, which averaged $560 million during those years.
  • Emergent and the government have withheld details of the stockpile contracts, including how much the company has charged for each dose of BioThrax, but executives have shared some of the missing information with investors.
  • The company in 1998 agreed to charge the government an average of about $3.35 per dose, documents show. By 2010, the price had risen to about $28, according to financial disclosures and statements by Emergent executives, and now it is about $30
  • Over the past 15 years, the company recorded a gross profit margin of about 75 percent for the vaccine, in an arrangement that one Emergent vice president called a “monopoly.”
  • Emergent’s rise is the stuff of lore in biodefense circles — a tale of savvy dealings, fortuitous timing and tough, competitive tactics.
  • One afternoon in October 2010, Wall Street investors gathered at the Millennium Broadway Hotel in Manhattan for a presentation by Mr. Burrows. He shared with them a secret number: 75 million.That was how many BioThrax doses the government had committed to stockpiling, and it was the backbone of Emergent’s thriving business. In pursuit of that goal, the government had already spent more than $900 million, and it continued to buy virtually every dose Emergent could produce. It had even awarded the company more than $100 million to expand its Michigan factory.
  • “The best approach toward anthrax is antimicrobial therapy,” Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the government’s top infectious-disease expert, told Congress as early as 2007.
  • In an analysis published in 2007, the firm determined that giving antibiotics immediately after a large outdoor anthrax attack was likely to reduce serious illnesses by more than 80 percent. Administering the vaccine would then cut serious illnesses only by an additional 4 percent.
  • Dr. Ali S. Khan, who ran the C.D.C. office managing the stockpile until 2014, said bluntly: “We overpaid.”
  • “A bunch of people, including myself, were sitting in a room and asking what kind of attack might happen,” said Dr. Kenneth Bernard, a top biodefense adviser to Mr. Bush, recalling a meeting in the months after the 2001 attacks.
  • “And somebody said, ‘Well, I can’t imagine anyone attacking more than three cities at once,’” he said. “So we took the population of a major U.S. city and multiplied by three.”
  • A team of Homeland Security and health officials began doing just that in 2013. The group determined, in a previously undisclosed analysis, that the government could stockpile less BioThrax and still be prepared for a range of plausible attacks, according to two people involved in the assessment. Separately, government researchers concluded that two doses of BioThrax provided virtually the same protection as three.
  • the National Intelligence Council, which helped draft the assessments during Mr. Obama’s second term, said in an interview that the idea of a three-city attack affecting 25 million people was “straining credulity.”
  • “If you talk to the head of the House Intelligence Committee,” Don Elsey, Emergent’s chief financial officer, told investors in 2011, “and you say, ‘What are you most worried about?’ he’ll say, ‘Let me see: Number one, anthrax; number two, anthrax; number three, anthrax.’”
  • Emergent’s sales strategy was to address that fear by promising the federal government peace of mind with its vaccine.
  • “There’s a political element involved,” Mr. Burrows, the company’s vice president of investor relations, said at an industry conference in 2016. “I don’t have a marketing expense. I have lobbying expense.”
  • Since 2010, the company has spent an average of $3 million a year on lobbying — far outspending similarly sized biotech firms, and roughly matching the outlays of two pharmaceutical companies with annual revenues at least 17 times greater, AstraZeneca and Bristol Myers Squibb
  • In 2015, as stockpile managers questioned the large purchases of BioThrax, the spending topped $4 million
  • “They were pouring it on — how poor they were and how this was going to ruin the company, and they’d have to close down factories, and America was going to be left without anthrax vaccine,”
  • “Their revolving door is moving at 60 miles per hour,” said former Senator Claire McCaskill, a Democrat from Missouri who had questioned spending on the vaccine while in the Senate. “There is really a lot of incestuousness because it’s such a specialized field.”
  • Ms. DeLorenzo, the Emergent spokeswoman, said the lobbying was necessary because government investment “in biodefense and other public health threats has not been as strongly prioritized as it should be.”
  • Over the past 10 years, Emergent’s political action committee has spread almost $1.4 million in campaign contributions among members of both partie
  • The move followed a yearslong pattern of retaining a bipartisan lobbying corps of former agency officials, staff members and congressmen, including Pete Hoekstra of Michigan, Tom Latham of Iowa and Jim Saxton of New Jersey.
  • “You have people coming and saying, ‘There’s no market for this — nobody’s going to produce this unless you buy enough of it to keep the production line open,’” he said. “It’s an absolutely appropriate argument to make.”
  • Emergent’s campaign proved effective. Despite the 2015 recommendation by the stockpile managers, Senate overseers made clear they opposed the reduction, and the government went ahead and bought $300 million worth of BioThrax.
  • Emergent executives, meanwhile, warned that there could be job losses at the factory in Lansing, Mich. — the capital of a swing state at the center of a contentious presidential campaign between Mr. Trump and Hillary Clinton.
  • Because Emergent was the sole manufacturer of a product deemed critical to national security, the company has played what one former executive described to The Times as “the we’re-going-to-go-bankrupt card.”
  • Dr. Hatchett said the idea gave him pause. But, he explained in an interview, “if there’s only one partner that can provide a product and only one customer for that product, the customer needs the partner to survive.”
  • Just a year later, Emergent spent about $200 million in cash, and made other financial commitments, to acquire Sanofi’s smallpox vaccine and GlaxoSmithKline’s anthrax treatment, two products with established pipelines to the stockpile. The purchases expanded Emergent’s hold over the reserve.
  • Ms. DeLorenzo said the acquisitions did not suggest the company was better off than it had claimed, but Dr. Bright said he and others involved in the bailout felt used.
  • a plan five years earlier to create an emergency supply of N95 respirators was simply not funded. A team of experts had proposed buying tens of millions of the masks to fill the gap during an outbreak until domestic manufacturing could ramp up, according to five officials involved in the assessment, which has not been previously disclosed.
  • By the time the novel coronavirus emerged, the stockpile had only 12 million of the respirators. The stockpile has since set a goal of amassing 300 million.
  • Dr. Kadlec, the Trump administration official overseeing the stockpile, said he used the previous administration’s mask recommendation to raise alarms as early as 2018.
  • Dr. Annie De Groot, chief executive of the small vaccine company EpiVax, spoke about the need to break Emergent’s lock on research dollars at a biodefense forum in 2015.
  • “Politicians want to look like they’ve addressed the problem,” she said. “But we need to actually listen to the scientists.”
  • Over the last five years, Emergent has received nearly a half-billion dollars in federal research and development funding, the company said in its financial disclosures.
  • “We know ahead of time when funding opportunities are going to come out,” Barbara Solow, a senior vice president, told investors in 2017. “When we talk to the government, we know how to speak the government’s language around contracting.”
  • The company used federal money to make improvements to BioThrax, and also found a way to earn government money from a competing anthrax vaccine it had excoriated. After the demise of VaxGen in 2006, Emergent bought the company’s unfinished vaccine and in 2010 persuaded the federal government to continue paying for research on it
  • By the time the research contract was canceled in 2016, Emergent had collected about $85 million, records show. The company then shelved the vaccine. “If the U.S. government withdraws funding, we re-evaluate whether there is any business case for continuing,” Ms. DeLorenzo said.
  • For more than 30 years, the government had been encouraging the development of a BioThrax replacement. In 2002, the Institute of Medicine had concluded that an alternative based on more modern technology was “urgently needed.” By 2019, there were three leading candidates, including one made by Emergent, known as AV7909.
  • Emergent’s candidate was hardly the breakthrough the government was seeking, former health officials said. AV7909 was essentially an enhanced version of BioThrax. The competitors were using more modern technology that could produce doses more rapidly and consistently, and were promising significant cost savings for the stockpile.
  • To qualify for emergency authorization, a vaccine must be at an advanced stage of development with no approved alternatives. Emergent acknowledged in its financial disclosures that there was “considerable uncertainty” whether the new vaccine met those requirements.
  • The election of Mr. Trump as president was good news for Emergent.
  • Dr. Lurie, the senior health official in the Obama administration who had tried to scale back BioThrax purchases, was out. Mr. Trump’s pick to replace her was Dr. Kadlec, a career Air Force physician and top biodefense official in the Bush administration who was fixated on bioterrorism threats, especially anthrax, current and former officials said
  • Soon after entering the Trump administration in 2017, Dr. Kadlec took a series of actions that he characterized as streamlining a cumbersome bureaucracy but that had the effect of benefiting Emergent.
  • He assumed greater control of purchasing decisions, diminishing the authority of the Phemce, the oversight group that had proposed buying less BioThrax. And in 2018, he backed a decision to move control of the stockpile to his office in the Department of Health and Human Services and away from the C.D.C., which is based in Atlanta and prides itself on being insulated from the influence of lobbyists.
  • Dr. Frieden, the former C.D.C. director, was strongly opposed. The move, he said, “had almost as an explicit goal to give the lobbyists more say in what got purchased.”
  • That July, the government made the announcement Emergent had been banking on, committing to buying millions of doses. Separately, it said it would stop funding Emergent’s competitors.
  • The decision to side with Emergent did not surprise Dr. Khan, the former C.D.C. official overseeing the stockpile.“Again and again, we seem unable to move past an old technology that’s bankrupting the stockpile,” he said.
  • Last month, as the death toll from Covid-19 neared a half-million, Mr. Kramer, the company’s chief executive, told analysts there had been no “evidence of a slowdown or a delay or a deprioritization,” and echoed a statement he had made in April when asked whether the pandemic might interrupt Emergent’s sales to the stockpile.“It’s pretty much business as usual,” he said then.
ethanshilling

Global Action Is 'Very Far' From What's Needed to Avert Climate Chaos - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...reement-emissions-targets.html

world climate

shared by ethanshilling on 26 Feb 21 - No Cached
  • The global scientific consensus is clear: Emissions of planet-warming gases must be cut by nearly half by 2030 if the world is to have a good shot at averting the worst climate catastrophes.The global political response has been underwhelming so far.
  • The head of the United Nations climate agency, Patricia Espinosa, said the figures compiled by her office showed that “current levels of climate ambition are very far from putting us on a pathway that will meet our Paris Agreement goals.”
  • Still missing from the ledger is the United States, which has produced more greenhouse gas emissions than any other country in history.
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  • The tally was all the more damning because fewer than half of all countries submitted fresh targets to the United Nations. The Paris climate accord, designed to limit an increase in global temperatures, had urged them to do so by the end of 2020.
  • Likewise, China, which currently produces the largest share of emissions, has yet to submit new 2030 targets to the United Nations.
  • The Biden administration has said it aspires to net-zero emissions by 2050 but has yet to detail how it will get there.
  • Some of the biggest emitter countries — including Australia, Brazil and Russia — submitted new plans for 2030 without increasing their ambitions.
  • Mexico lowered its climate targets, which the Natural Resources Defense Council described as a signal that “Mexico is effectively retreating from its previous leadership on climate and clean energy.”
  • In contrast, 36 countries — among them Britain, Chile, Kenya, Nepal and the 27 countries of the European Union — raised their climate targets.
  • The end goal is to limit global temperature increase to within 1.5 degrees Celsius of 1990 levels.
  • “This report confirms the shocking lack of urgency, and genuine action,” Aubrey Webson, a diplomat from Antigua and Barbuda and the chairman of the alliance, said in a statement.
cartergramiak

Opinion | Cuomo and the Twilight of the Anti-Trump Idols - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...trump-cuomo-media-covid.html

politics trump culture

shared by cartergramiak on 01 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • Throughout the Trump presidency and especially in the Covid era, there was a quest for figures that could be held up as embodiments of everything that Trump’s opposition wanted to restore: reason, technical competence, idealism. Over time these figures took on the character of familiar dramatic archetypes — the Good Republican, the Heroic Whistleblower, the Beleaguered Expert, the Tough Blue State Governor, the Wise and Sophisticated Europeans.
  • You may have noticed, for instance, the long-overdue collapse of the heroic story around Andrew Cuomo, the Tough Blue State Governor par excellence, whose pandemic news conferences inspired such fawning media coverage — from late-night hosts who declared themselves admiring “cuomosexuals,” from his own CNN-host brother — that the governor wrote a book about “leadership lessons from the Covid-19 pandemic” while the pandemic was still going on.
  • Finally, the wheel has also turned for the Wise and Sophisticated Europeans, whose governments were once portrayed as having vanquished the pandemic with Science, while Trump’s America was a failed state where the coronavirus held illimitable dominion over all.
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  • Our society’s sickness may be particularly acute in Trump worship, but the affliction is more general. The stink of failure hangs over the liberal and cosmopolitan as well the populist and provincial, the “cuomosexual” parts of the media as well the conservative. And as we hopefully approach the end of this particular emergency, it’s not only Trump’s enablers but a much wider range of leaders and authorities who should feel shame at the stark and shocking number of the dead.
delgadool

Maryland Lifts Many Covid Restrictions - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ryland-covid-restrictions.html

politics Pandemic

shared by delgadool on 11 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • Across Maryland on Wednesday, mayors, county executives, business owners and public health officials were parsing Gov. Larry Hogan’s surprise Tuesday announcement that he was loosening statewide Covid restrictions.
  • “With the pace of vaccinations rapidly rising and our health metrics steadily improving, the lifting of these restrictions is a prudent, positive step in the right direction and an important part of our economic recovery,” Mr. Hogan said. He was joined at his announcement by Dr. Robert R. Redfield, a former director the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, who is now a senior adviser to the governor.
  • “I was shocked, I thought it was a joke,” said Dr. Leana Wen, a public health professor at George Washington University and former Baltimore health commissioner.
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  • Baltimore County Executive John A. Olszewski, Jr., said, “leaders across Maryland have been forced to scramble to meet with our legal teams, health officials, and neighboring jurisdictions to understand how this impacts our own executive orders and to determine if and how to use our own local authority moving forward.”
  • Maryland ranks in the middle of states in the percentage of its people who have been given at least one vaccine dose, according to a New York Times database, and somewhat above average in the number of new cases it has been reporting lately relative to its population — 13 per 100,000 residents. All three of the variants of the virus that are being tracked by the C.D.C. have been reported there, but only one in significant numbers: B.1.1.7, which was first identified in Britain and is more transmissible and possibly more lethal than earlier versions of the virus.
saberal

Police Officer Is Arrested Over London Woman's Disappearance - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...rah-everard-disappearance.html

Politics US Police

shared by saberal on 11 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • A police officer is being held on suspicion of murder in connection with the disappearance of a woman who went missing last week as she was on her way home in South London, the police said on Wednesday.
  • Ms. Dick said the police couldn’t confirm the identity of the remains, adding that it could take “considerable time.”
  • hundreds of officers have been involved in the investigation, the police said, searching more than 750 houses in South London, a woodland area and a property in Kent, and urging witnesses to come forward. The arrest was the most significant development in the case, the police said, but the discovery of the remains made chances to find the 33-year-old woman alive slimmer.
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  • The officer remained in custody on Wednesday on suspicion of murder, and for a separate allegation of indecent exposure, according to the police, and the woman also remained in custody.
  • “I speak on behalf of all my colleagues when I say that we are utterly appalled at this dreadful, dreadful news,” Ms. Dick said, adding that the news that a police officer had been arrested had sent “shock waves and anger through the public and through the Met.”
  • Although city officials have acknowledged that “too many women feel unsafe when traveling, working or going out at night,”
  • Another woman, Jess Jones, wrote on the platform, “When people are no longer safe walking home through residential streets of South London isn’t it time for lockdown to end??”
  • London has nearly 700,000 CCTV cameras, according to one estimate, and throughout the week the Metropolitan Police have urged residents to check their private security systems.
mimiterranova

Meghan and Harry to Oprah: Racism Drove Us From Royal Family | Time - 0 views

time.com/...meghan-markle-oprah-racism

racism royal family

shared by mimiterranova on 12 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • here was one clear thread throughout Meghan Markle and Prince Harry’s dynamic interview with Oprah Winfrey on Sunday night: They believe they were driven from the royal family because of racism.
  • that a member of the royal family came to Harry while Markle was pregnant with their son Archie with “concerns and conversations about how dark his skin might be when he was born.” Meghan is American and identifies as biracial.
  • Markle said that she was shocked to learn that Archie, the first mixed-race great-grandchild of Queen Elizabeth II, would not be given the title of prince—and would also be denied security protection, something that concerned Markle given the racist harassment she and her family have received since becoming a royal.
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  • Racism has long been one of the overarching issues that has shaped Markle’s time as a royal, even before she was an official member of the family.
mimiterranova

Anti-Asian hate crimes increased by nearly 150% in 2020, mostly in N.Y. and L.A., new report says - 0 views

www.nbcnews.com/...rly-150-2020-mostly-n-n1260264

hate crimes culture

shared by mimiterranova on 12 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • he analysis released by the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University, San Bernardino, this month examined hate crimes in 16 of America’s largest cities. It revealed that while such crimes in 2020 decreased overall by 7 percent, those targeting Asian people rose by nearly 150 percent.
  • What Trump did is that he weaponized it in a way,” Ramakrishnan said. “Trump's rhetoric helps set a certain narrative in place — and presidents have an outsized role in terms of shaping narrative. They don't call it a bully pulpit for nothing, and especially Trump, the way he frequently used Twitter as well as press conferences and off-the-cuff remarks to campaign rallies to frame the narrative in a particular way, it likely played a role.”
  • The analysis revealed a surge in cities such as New York, where anti-Asian hate crimes rose from three in 2019 to 28 in 2020, a 833 percent increase. Los Angeles and Boston also experienced notable rises, from seven to 15 and six to 14, respectively. Meanwhile, Washington, D.C., experienced a decline from six to three anti-Asian hate crimes. Chicago remained unchanged, with two crimes each year.
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  • The first spike in anti-Asian hate crimes occurred in March and April last year. However, it occurred alongside a rise in Covid-19 cases and ongoing negative associations of Asian Americans with the virus, the analysis noted.
  • A separate study revealed that the use of “China virus” language to refer to the coronavirus, particularly by GOP officials and conservative outlets, has already resulted in a shift in how many people in the U.S. perceive Asian Americans. The significant uptick in discriminatory coronavirus speech that occurred on March 8 — the day Rep. Paul Gosar, R-Ariz., tweeted about the “Wuhan virus,” which coincided with then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s interview the day before on "Fox and Friends" in which he referred to the "China virus" — was followed by a rapid reversal of a decadelong decline in anti-Asian bias.
  • "Many of these Chinatowns are in places that are low income and also suffering economically. So that might be one set of explanations as to why this phenomenon is taking this particular shape," he said. "On top of that, we live in an age of viral social media, and … especially the shock value of some of these videos increases awareness and maybe anxiety in the community.
ethanshilling

How Democrats Who Lost in Deep-Red Places Might Have Helped Biden - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...democrats-down-ballot.html

biden democrats politics

shared by ethanshilling on 16 Apr 21 - No Cached
  • Ebony Carter faced an uphill climb when she decided to run for the Georgia State Senate last year. Her deeply Republican district south of Atlanta had not elected a Democrat since 2001, and a Democrat hadn’t even bothered campaigning for the seat since 2014.
  • State party officials told her that they no longer tried to compete for the seat because they didn’t think a Democrat could win it. That proved correct. Despite winning 40 percent of the vote, the most for a liberal in years, Ms. Carter lost.
  • The president, who eked out a 12,000-vote victory in Georgia, received a small but potentially important boost from the state’s conservative areas if at least one local Democrat was running in a down-ballot race, according to a new study by Run for Something, an organization dedicated to recruiting and supporting liberal candidates.
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  • The phenomenon appeared to hold nationally. Mr. Biden performed 0.3 percent to 1.5 percent better last year in conservative state legislative districts where Democrats put forward challengers than in districts where Republicans ran unopposed, the study found.
  • The study showed a reverse coattails effect: It was lower-level candidates running in nearly hopeless situations — red districts that Democrats had traditionally considered no-win, low-to-no-investment territory — who helped the national or statewide figures atop the ballot, instead of down-ballot candidates benefiting from a popular national candidate of the same party.
  • In 2005, when Howard Dean became the chairman of the Democratic National Committee, he tried to institute a “50-state strategy” to build up party infrastructure and candidate recruitment at every level and in every state — even in solidly Republican districts.
  • For the last few cycles, Democrats’ major priorities have been retaking the House, the Senate and the presidency. Now, with the party in control of all three, down-ballot organizers want the party to shift some of its focus to state legislative races.
  • “Now that we’ve gotten through the 2020 election, we really need to make sure that this is what we’re focused on,” Mr. Morales Rocketto said. “We’ve elected Joe Biden, but Trump and Trumpism and the things he’s said and stood for are not gone, and we could lose everything again.”
  • Republicans have lapped Democrats in their legislative infrastructure for years, said Jim Hobart, a Republican pollster. “Democrats are pretty open at a legislative level that they’re playing catch-up,” he said. “For whatever reason, Democrats have gotten more fired up about federal races.”
  • “It came as a shock to everybody that Republicans ran as strong in those districts as they did,” Mr. Hobart said. “But if you have candidates on the ballot for everything, it means you’re primed to take advantage of that infrastructure on a good year.”
  • In Georgia, Run for Something believes that Ms. Carter’s presence on the ballot significantly helped Mr. Biden’s performance in her area of the state. While the group said that district-level data alone could be misleading, and needed to be combined with other factors taken into account in its analysis, Mr. Biden averaged 47 percent of the vote in the three counties — Newton, Butts and Henry — in which Ms. Carter’s district, the 110th, sits.
  • Ms. Carter said she spent a lot of time during her campaign trying to educate people on the importance of voting, especially in local races that often have more bearing on day-to-day life, like school and police funding.
  • “I thought it was a lot of the work that people didn’t want to do or felt like it wasn’t going to benefit them,” she said. “We are not going to win every race, but we could win if we just did the legwork.”
Javier E

Opinion | The G.O.P. Is Getting Even Worse - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...trump-gop.html

gop trump crisis Culture politics radicalization pessimism apocalypse illiberal catastrophe

shared by Javier E on 23 Apr 21 - No Cached
  • What’s happening can only be called a venomous panic attack. Since the election, large swathes of the Trumpian right have decided America is facing a crisis like never before and they are the small army of warriors fighting with Alamo-level desperation to ensure the survival of the country as they conceive it
  • When asked in late January if politics is more about “enacting good public policy” or “ensuring the survival of the country as we know it,” 51 percent of Trump Republicans said survival; only 19 percent said policy.The level of Republican pessimism is off the chart
  • A February Economist-YouGov poll asked Americans which statement is closest to their view: “It’s a big, beautiful world, mostly full of good people, and we must find a way to embrace each other and not allow ourselves to become isolated” or “Our lives are threatened by terrorists, criminals and illegal immigrants, and our priority should be to protect ourselves.”
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • Over 75 percent of Biden voters chose “a big, beautiful world.” Two-thirds of Trump voters chose “our lives are threatened.”
  • This level of catastrophism, nearly despair, has fed into an amped-up warrior mentality.
  • With their deep pessimism, the hyperpopulist wing of the G.O.P. seems to be crashing through the floor of philosophic liberalism into an abyss of authoritarian impulsiveness.
  • With this view, the Jan. 6 insurrection was not a shocking descent into lawlessness but practice for the war ahead. A week after the siege, nearly a quarter of Republicans polled said violence can be acceptable to achieve political goals.
  • “The decent know that they must become ruthless. They must become the stuff of nightmares,” Jack Kerwick writes in the Trumpian magazine American Greatness. “The good man must spare not a moment to train, in both body and mind, to become the monster that he may need to become in order to slay the monsters that prey upon the vulnerable.”
  • Philosophic liberals — whether on the right side of the political spectrum or the left — understand people have selfish interests, but believe in democracy and open conversation because they have confidence in the capacities of people to define their own lives, to care for people unlike themselves, to keep society progressing.
  • Liberal democracy is based on a level of optimism, faith and a sense of security. It’s based on confidence in the humanistic project: that through conversation and encounter, we can deeply know each other across differences; that most people are seeking the good with different opinions about how to get there; that society is not a zero-sum war, but a conversation and a negotiation.
  • The G.O.P. response to the Biden agenda has been anemic because the base doesn’t care about mere legislation, just their own cultural standing.
  • There are new and transformed magazines and movements like American Purpose, Persuasion, Counterweight, Arc Digital, Tablet and Liberties that point out the excesses of the social justice movement and distinguish between those who think speech is a mutual exploration to seek truth and those who think speech is a structure of domination to perpetuate systems of privilege.
  • Republicans and conservatives who believe in the liberal project need to organize and draw a bright line between themselves and the illiberals on their own side.
  • apocalyptic pessimism has a tendency to deteriorate into nihilism, and people eventually turn to the strong man to salve the darkness and chaos inside themselves.
Javier E

My dad predicted Trump in 1985 - it's not Orwell, he warned, it's Brave New World | Media | The Guardian - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...il-postman-trump-orwell-huxley

crisis culture entertainment discourse technology Huxley

shared by Javier E on 03 Feb 17 - No Cached
  • But an image? One never says a picture is true or false. It either captures your attention or it doesn’t. The more TV we watched, the more we expected – and with our finger on the remote, the more we demanded – that not just our sitcoms and cop procedurals and other “junk TV” be entertaining but also our news and other issues of import.
  • This was, in spirit, the vision that Huxley predicted way back in 1931, the dystopia my father believed we should have been watching out for. He wrote:
  • What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture.
  • ...17 more annotations...
  • Today, the average weekly screen time for an American adult – brace yourself; this is not a typo – is 74 hours (and still going up)
  • The soundbite has been replaced by virality, meme, hot take, tweet. Can serious national issues really be explored in any coherent, meaningful way in such a fragmented, attention-challenged environment?
  • how engaged can any populace be when the most we’re asked to do is to like or not like a particular post, or “sign” an online petition?
  • How seriously should anyone take us, or should we take ourselves, when the “optics” of an address or campaign speech – raucousness, maybe actual violence, childishly attention-craving gestures or facial expressions – rather than the content of the speech determines how much “airtime” it gets, and how often people watch, share and favorite it?
  • Our public discourse has become so trivialized, it’s astounding that we still cling to the word “debates” for what our presidential candidates do onstage when facing each other.
  • Who can be shocked by the rise of a reality TV star, a man given to loud, inflammatory statements, many of which are spectacularly untrue but virtually all of which make for what used to be called “good television”?
  • Who can be appalled when the coin of the realm in public discourse is not experience, thoughtfulness or diplomacy but the ability to amuse – no matter how maddening or revolting the amusement?
  • First: treat false allegations as an opportunity. Seek information as close to the source as possible.
  • Later in that passage, Czesław Miłosz, winner of the Nobel prize for literature, is cited for remarking in his 1980 acceptance speech that that era was notable for “a refusal to remember”; my father notes Miłosz referencing “the shattering fact that there are now more than one hundred books in print that deny that the Holocaust ever took place”.
  • “An Orwellian world is much easier to recognize, and to oppose, than a Huxleyan,” my father wrote. “Everything in our background has prepared us to know and resist a prison when the gates begin to close around us … [but] who is prepared to take arms against a sea of amusements?”
  • I wish I could tell you that, for all his prescience, my father also supplied a solution. He did no
  • “Television is a speed-of-light medium, a present-centered medium,” my father wrote. “Its grammar, so to say, permits no access to the past … history can play no significant role in image politics. For history is of value only to someone who takes seriously the notion that there are patterns in the past which may provide the present with nourishing traditions.”
  • Second: don’t expect “the media” to do this job for you. Some of its practitioners do, brilliantly and at times heroically. But most of the media exists to sell you things.
  • Finally, and most importantly, it should be the responsibility of schools to make children aware of our information environments, which in many instances have become our entertainment environments
  • “what is required of us now is a new era of responsibility … giving our all to a difficult task. This is the price and the promise of citizenship.”
  • We must teach our children, from a very young age, to be skeptics, to listen carefully, to assume everyone is lying about everything. (Well, maybe not everyone.)
  • we need more than just hope for a way out. We need a strategy, or at least some tactics.
mattrenz16

Live Updates: Ryanair Criticizes Belarus After Arrest of Roman Protasevich - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...belarus-ryanair-protasevich

shared by mattrenz16 on 24 May 21 - No Cached
  • MOSCOW — International outrage mounted on Monday as new details emerged about a brazen operation by the country’s strongman leader to divert a Ryanair passenger jet and arrest a dissident Belarusian journalist traveling on board.
  • Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken condemned the forced diversion of a civilian airliner and the arrest of the journalist, saying it was a “shocking act” that “endangered the lives of more than 120 passengers, including U.S. citizens.”
  • Sofia Sapega, the girlfriend of the arrested journalist, Roman Protasevich, was also detained when the plane landed in Minsk on Sunday after a bogus bomb threat during its flight from Athens to Vilnius, Lithuania, her university in the Lithuanian capital said.
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  • Mr. O’Leary said some of the passengers may have been agents of the Belarusian intelligence service, which is still known by its Soviet-era initials.
  • The Lithuanian government called for Belarusian airspace to be closed to international flights in response to what it called a hijacking “by military force.”
  • The Lithuanian police said they had opened a criminal investigation, on suspicion of hijacking and kidnapping. Of 126 passengers who took off from Athens, 121 arrived in Vilnius, the police said. (Officials had earlier said there were about 170 passengers on the plane, and that six had stayed behind in Minsk.)
  • The Lithuanian police spoke to the pilots after they landed in Vilnius on Sunday evening, Renatas Pozela, the Lithuanian police commissioner general, said in a telephone interview.
yehbru

Opinion: The shocking detention of a journalist in flight - CNN - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

Politics Belarus Journalist Media Russia

shared by yehbru on 31 May 21 - No Cached
  • The arrest of Belarusian journalist and activist Roman Protasevich on Sunday should not have come as a surprise to anyone following events in the former Soviet republic.
  • Europe's last dictator, Aleksander Lukashenko, has long been an enemy of independent media. Last year, he stepped up censorship after claiming victory in the contested presidential election of August 9 -- a claim widely seen as fraudulent and which set off a wave of giant protests.
  • Protasevich was the co-founder of NEXTA, one of the most popular channels on the Telegram messaging app and a leading source of information on the anti-Lukashenko protests.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • Sviatlana Tikhanouvskaya, a Belarusian opposition leader and a 2020 presidential candidate, said in a tweet that Protasevich faced the death penalty.
  • Protasevich's detention came soon after the May 18 raid and shutdown of another major online media outlet, Tut.by. and detentions of at least 10 of its staff, including three journalists
  • Belarusian authorities raided the studios of another prominent media outlet -- Belsat, a Poland-based satellite broadcaster, which has also been reporting on anti-Lukashenko protests.
  • Now, Pratasevich's life could be in danger and the survival of independent media as a whole is at stake. Many journalists who are not in jail fled Belarus and are trying to find ways and funding to continue journalism from abroad.
  • Belarus has strong political, economic and security ties with Russia, and some observers believe Russia's FSB helped Belarus' KGB in the operation to arrest Pratasevich.
  • Providing support to in-country and exiled media outlets, journalists, press freedom and human rights organizations is the only way to guarantee we can continue to receive objective information about media crackdowns and human rights violations in Belarus.
rerobinson03

Opinion | August Vollmer 'Abolished' the Police - in 1905 - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...st-vollmer-abolish-police.html

shared by rerobinson03 on 03 Jun 21 - No Cached
  • August Vollmer has been hailed by many in law enforcement as the father of modern American policing. He has also been criticized for pioneering the militarization of the police and espousing the racist theories of eugenics. What’s rarely talked about, however, is that he began his tenure as the head of the police department of Berkeley, Calif., in 1905 by forcing all of his deputies to resign — arguably a kind of early experiment in abolishing the police. He eventually replaced them with college-educated people, hoping they would usher in a new, progressive era in policing.
  • Today, as governments and citizens contemplate the future of local law enforcement, it’s worth remembering that reshaping American policing is not some shocking new idea from the radical left.
  • Meanwhile, Mr. Vollmer systemized the practices of policing and built in accountability. He mandated that his officers create written records of their work (the first that the city ever kept) to measure their progress in reducing crime. He popularized the idea of crime labs, where officers could study evidence using science — an idea that rapidly spread to other departments, along with his record-keeping methods. And his department partnered with social organizations for at-risk youth, such as the scouts and Boys’ Club
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  • Mr. Vollmer’s 1936 textbook makes a similar suggestion, though more as an approach to reducing crime than Ms. Kaba’s goal of creating a cooperative society in which police are obsolete. Mr. Vollmer asserted that school, welfare, health, and recreation were more likely to prevent crime than jails.
  • To this point, Mr. Vollmer would perhaps respond that reforming the police doesn’t come cheap — and that public funds could be used to educate would-be officers. When he forced out his deputies, he rebuilt the department with extra money from the city for education, raises and lab equipment. The proposals of Ms. Kaba and other police abolitionists would put public funds toward educating a wide range of people in community support jobs: mental health experts, conflict de-escalation teams, addiction specialists and advocates who can help the unhoused find shelter.
anonymous

European Union Bans Flights From Flying Over Belarus Airspace : NPR - 0 views

www.npr.org/...es-flights-around-its-airspace

shared by anonymous on 05 Jun 21 - No Cached
  • International relations are still tense following the shocking arrest of journalist Roman Protasevich by the Belarusian government last month in which it forced the plane he was aboard to land in Minsk.
  • European Union ambassadors on Friday approved a plan to ban Belarus airlines from flying over EU territory or landing in EU airports.
  • That affects about 400 civilian flights that usually fly over Belarus every day, according to European air traffic control agency Eurocontrol. That includes 300 overflights, about 100 operated by EU or British carriers.
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  • On Thursday, the Belarusian government ordered the number of staff at the U.S. Embassy in Minsk to be reduced effective June 13.
  • The Belarusian Foreign Ministry said it was cutting an unspecified number of both "diplomatic and administrative-technical" staff at the embassy. The agency also announced that Belarus would restrict visa procedures and revoke permission for USAID to work in the country.
  • The moves come after the Biden administration reimplemented full sanctions against nine state-owned enterprises in Belarus, effective Thursday.
  • U.S. State Department spokesperson Ned Price blamed Belarus for the poor state of relations, saying it's due to the "relentless and intensifying repression against" Belarusian citizens, culminating in the arrest of Protasevich.
  • For two days this week, airline traffic between Russia and Germany was suspended. Germany halted landings of Russian airlines in the country because Russia didn't allow arrivals of Lufthansa flights into its airports.
Javier E

Opinion | When it comes to knowing U.S. history, we should all be 'woke' - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...-history-we-should-all-be-woke

woke hypocrisy ideals American idea history crimes

shared by Javier E on 28 May 21 - No Cached
  • If being “woke” means knowing the full story of your community and country, including the systemic racism that still shapes them, then every thinking adult should be.
  • books such as Johnson’s are a needed corrective to history as pious propaganda. But for a fuller explanation of what patriotism means in a flawed nation, there are more reliable guides.
  • Frederick Douglass, for example, felt incandescent anger at the “hideous and revolting” hypocrisy of the free country where he was born into enslavement.
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  • How can you love a place while knowing the crimes that helped produce it? By relentlessly confronting hypocrisy and remaining “woke” to the transformational power of American ideals.
  • For Douglass, however, this founding crime did not discredit American ideals; it demonstrated the need for their urgent and radical application. He insisted that the Constitution was “a glorious liberty document.”
  • “There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of the United States. … The existence of slavery in this country brands your republicanism as a sham, your humanity as a base pretense and your Christianity as a lie.”
  • I grew up in St. Louis, in a placid, White, middle-class suburb. At school, I was inflicted with classes in Missouri history that emphasized the role of the region in the exploration and settlement of the American West. I visited the Museum of Westward Expansion in the base of the Gateway Arch, which glorified the sacrifices of American pioneers.
  • “The Broken Heart of America” is a strong antidote to such lessons. In this telling, St. Louis was “the juncture of empire and anti-Blackness” and “the morning star of U.S. imperialism.
  • It was the home of vicious lynch mobs and racial redlining. “Beneath all the change,” Johnson argues, “an insistent racial capitalist cleansing — forced migrations and racial removal, reservations and segregated neighborhoods, genocidal wars, police violence and mass incarceration — is evident in the history of the city at the heart of American history.”
  • And so on. My first reaction, honestly, was to bristle. Was every character in the American story a villain? Must one accept Marxist economic and social analysis to believe in social justice?
  • It is my second thought, however, that has lingered. Historians such as Johnson might dwell on historical horrors and put them into narrow ideological narratives, but the events they recount are real.
  • And it’s true that white-supremacist ideology pervaded institutions and systems — labor policies, construction contracts, city planning, racist policing, the exclusion of Black children from public pools.
mattrenz16

Steel and lumber prices are sky-high. Lifting Trump's tariffs could help - CNN - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

shared by mattrenz16 on 02 Jun 21 - No Cached
  • The US economy is so hot the supply of key materials can't keep up with surging demand — sparking shortages and price spikes in everything from computer chips and copper to chlorine.
  • This choice underscores the challenging position Biden finds himself in. Despite what his critics may say, he doesn't have a magic wand to immediately stabilize prices. And some of the issues can be attributed to the unique nature of the crisis: a self-imposed shutdown of the economy followed by an intense rebound.
  • Trump's lumber and steel tariffs, introduced in 2017 and 2018 respectively, were aimed at protecting American industry and jobs against alleged unfair trade tactics — and the steel industry says they've been essential to keeping the sector afloat during the pandemic. But the logic of the tariffs is being undermined by not only supply shortages but also breathtaking price spikes.Read More
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • Despite a 20% pullback in recent weeks, random-length lumber futures are still up more than 400% from their April 2020 low. Lumber prices have skyrocketed so much that it's causing remodeling nightmares and creating even more sticker shock in the booming housing market.
  • Likewise, prices for US hot-rolled, coil steel, the most widely produced finished steel product, have spiked almost 270% since bottoming out last August and hit a record high of $1,616 per ton on Friday, according to S&P Global Platts. Before this boom, the prior peak was $1,100 in 2008.
  • Murphy, whose organization opposed the Section 232 steel tariffs from the beginning, argued tariff relief is a way government can help accelerate the recovery while simultaneously easing inflation jitters.
  • Meanwhile, both the steel and lumber industries are strongly urging Biden to keep the tariffs in place. Removing them could prove to be politically unpopular, especially among steel workers in battleground Rust Belt states.
  • Scott argued the steel tariffs effectively supported the industry and that removing them, along with quotas limiting imports, would lead to both a "hemorrhaging of jobs" and importing steel that is in many cases worse for the environment than what is made in America.
  • The Biden administration does not appear to have made a decision yet on lifting the steel or lumber tariffs, though new efforts are being made to address rising inflation concerns.
  • Biden announced late last week his administration will soon take unspecified steps to fight supply chain pressures, beginning with construction materials and transportation bottlenecks.
mattrenz16

Michael Flynn and the endless insurrection - CNNPolitics - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

shared by mattrenz16 on 02 Jun 21 - No Cached
  • The insurrection is far from over.In the same week, the sitting US President warned that US democracy is in peril, a group of scholars said the American experiment could fail and a retired US general -- who served, briefly, as national security adviser -- seemed to endorse a military coup.
  • On the one hand, the retired general -- that's Michael Flynn -- is disgraced in the eyes of his former colleagues, was prosecuted on charges of lying and foreign lobbying and then pardoned by Trump. He appeared this past weekend at a fringe conspiracy theory conference and said there's no reason what's happening in Myanmar (a violent coup by the country's military) shouldn't happen in the US.
  • "Let me be VERY CLEAR - There is NO reason whatsoever for any coup in America, and I do not and have not at any time called for any action of that sort," he said. Read more from CNN's Donie O'Sullivan.
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • At the same conference this weekend, he and Powell suggested Trump could just be reinstated. Here's a fact check on that from CNN's Tara Subramaniam.
  • A coup after an election, actually. What's happening in Myanmar wasn't just any coup; the military seized control of the country after the election in November. QAnon extremists have been fixated on it.
  • So is it sedition? Richard Painter, the White House ethics lawyer under President George W. Bush, now a Democrat, argued Monday on CNN that Flynn should be prosecuted for sedition.
  • Treason: "Whoever, owing allegiance to the United States, levies war against them or adheres to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort within the United States or elsewhere, is guilty of treason and shall suffer death, or shall be imprisoned not less than five years and fined under this title but not less than $10,000; and shall be incapable of holding any office under the United States."
  • Rebellion or insurrection: "Whoever incites, sets on foot, assists, or engages in any rebellion or insurrection against the authority of the United States or the laws thereof, or gives aid or comfort thereto, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than ten years, or both; and shall be incapable of holding any office under the United States."
  • Seditious conspiracy: "If two or more persons in any State or Territory, or in any place subject to the jurisdiction of the United States, conspire to overthrow, put down, or to destroy by force the Government of the United States, or to levy war against them, or to oppose by force the authority thereof, or by force to prevent, hinder, or delay the execution of any law of the United States, or by force to seize, take, or possess any property of the United States contrary to the authority thereof, they shall each be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than twenty years, or both."
  • It's also not that Republicans in Arizona and Georgia are still trying to selectively audit their states' election results months after the elections ended and a shocking number of Republican voters question the legitimacy of Biden's win.
  • To them, it is the raft of restrictive voting laws being passed in key states by Republican legislatures around the country that threatens democracy.
  • "Democracy is more than a form of government. It's a way of being; it's a way of seeing the world. Democracy means the rule of the people -- the rule of the people. Not the rule of monarchs, not the rule of the moneyed, not the rule of the mighty -- literally, the rule of the people."
mimiterranova

FedEx Shooting: Gunman Kills 8 In Indianapolis : NPR - 0 views

www.npr.org/...edex-warehouse-in-indianapolis

fedex shooting indianapolis

shared by mimiterranova on 16 Apr 21 - No Cached
  • A man opened fire at a FedEx warehouse facility in Indianapolis late Thursday night, killing eight people and injuring others. The suspect shot himself and is among the nine dead, according to police.
  • "We are deeply shocked and saddened by the loss of our team members following the tragic shooting at our FedEx Ground facility in Indianapolis.
  • The safety of our team members is our top priority, and we are fully cooperating with investigating authorities."
  • mimiterranova on 03 Jun 21
     
    my highlights did not show up
anonymous

Chauvin Could Face 30 Years In Prison. His Defense Wants Time Served : Live Updates: Trial Over George Floyd's Killing : NPR - 0 views

www.npr.org/...d-sentence-george-floyd-murder

shared by anonymous on 06 Jun 21 - No Cached
  • Prosecutors are seeking a 30-year sentence for the former Minneapolis police officer convicted of murder in George Floyd's death, but a defense attorney is asking that Derek Chauvin be sentenced to probation and time already served, according to court documents filed Wednesday.
  • Chauvin is scheduled to be sentenced June 25 following his conviction on murder and manslaughter charges. Judge Peter Cahill previously ruled there were aggravating factors in Floyd's death. That gives him the discretion to sentence Chauvin above the range recommended by state guidelines, which top out at 15 years.
  • Prosecutors said Chauvin's actions were egregious and a sentence of 30 years would "properly account for the profound impact of Defendant's conduct on the victim, the victim's family, and the community." They said that Chauvin's actions "shocked the Nation's conscience."
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • Mark Osler, a former federal prosecutor and now a professor at the University of St. Thomas School of Law, said it's not unusual for attorneys to make these kinds of requests as a sort of "opening offer." He said there is zero chance that Chauvin will get probation, and prosecutors are also unlikely to get the 30 years they are requesting.
  • Chauvin was convicted in April of second-degree unintentional murder, third-degree murder and second-degree manslaughter for pressing his knee against Floyd's neck for about 9 1/2 minutes as the Black man said he couldn't breathe and went motionless. Floyd's death, captured on widely seen bystander video, set off demonstrations around the United States and beyond as protesters demanded changes in policing.
  • Even though Chauvin was found guilty of three counts, he'll only be sentenced on the most serious one — second-degree murder. Under Minnesota sentencing guidelines, with no criminal record he faces a presumptive sentence of 12 1/2 years on that count. Cahill can sentence him to as little as 10 years and eight months or as much as 15 years and stay within the guideline range.
  • Prosecutors said that even one of those factors would warrant the higher sentence.
  • "In spite of the notoriety surrounding this case, the Court must look to the facts. They all point to the single most important fact: Mr. Chauvin did not intend to cause George Floyd's death. He believed he was doing his job," he wrote.
  • Nelson is also seeking a new trial for Chauvin — which is a fairly routine request after a conviction. He argued extensive pretrial publicity tainted the jury pool and denied Chauvin his right to a fair trial. He also said Cahill also abused his authority when he declined defense requests to move the trial out of Minneapolis and sequester the jury.
  • Nelson is also asking for a hearing to investigate whether there was juror misconduct. Nelson alleged that an alternate juror who made public comments indicated she felt pressured to render a guilty verdict, and another juror who deliberated did not follow jury instructions and was not candid during jury selection. That juror, Brandon Mitchell, did not mention that he had participated in an Aug. 28 march in Washington, D.C., to honor Martin Luther King Jr.
  • Chauvin has also been indicted on federal charges alleging he violated Floyd's civil rights, as well as the civil rights of a 14-year-old he restrained in a 2017 arrest. The three other former officers involved in Floyd's death were also charged with federal civil rights violations; they await trial in state court on aiding and abetting counts.A federal trial date has not been set. Federal prosecutors are asking for more time to prepare for trial, saying the case is complex because of the sheer volume of evidence and the separate but coordinated state and federal investigations.
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