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The audience laughed. “When you see these thugs being thrown into the back of a paddy wagon, you just see them thrown in, rough. I said, ‘Please don’t be too nice.’”

Floyd’s killing has sparked nationwide protests, despite the fact that the coronavirus outbreak, which has killed more than 100,000 Americans and left 40 million without work, is still killing about 1,000 people a day in the United States

A different president might have tried to quell the unrest and unify the nation, but Trump is incapable of that.

The chaos sweeping across the United States has many causes, but the one over which the president has the most control is the culture of lawlessness and impunity he has cultivated and embraced. When you attempt to impose “law and order” without justice, you get chaos.

The moral core of the protests is a simple demand: that police who abuse their authority be held accountable, that black Americans be able to live free lives without fearing that they will be cut short by a chance encounter with law enforcement

When a white dog-walker in Central Park threatened to call the police on a black bird-watcher and tell them that “an African American man is threatening my life,” she was leveraging their mutual understanding that the police exist to protect white people from black people.

Trump has few ideological convictions as consistent as his belief in the redemptive power of state violence against religious and ethnic minorities.

anyone who was deluded enough to believe the bad old problems aren’t still around only has to look at that video of a white police officer with his knee on George Floyd’s neck, staring stonily at the civilian who’s filming the whole ghastly thing.Bret: It’s one of the most upsetting and appalling images of the last decades, even worse than the beating of Rodney King in the ’90s or Bull Connor’s dogs attacking protesters in Birmingham in the ’60s. What I find especially horrifying are the other police officers who hold Floyd while ignoring the bystanders pleading for George Floyd’s life, as if nothing much were going on.

It’s a profound wake-up call to those of us, mostly white, who almost never experience this side of law enforcement. It shook me to my core.

Trump is congenitally incapable of rising to these kinds of occasions. Empathy is a word he can’t define, compassion an emotion he can’t experience, humility a virtue he can’t comprehend and kindness an act he will never undertake.

The Cabinet includes the vice president and the heads of 15 executive departments

Klain served as Biden's chief of staff in the Obama White House and was also a senior aide to the President.

Klain has been a top debate preparation adviser to Biden, Obama, Bill Clinton, Gore, John Kerry and Hillary Clinton.

O'Malley Dillon will join Biden's incoming administration as a deputy White House chief of staff. O'Malley Dillon was Biden's presidential campaign manager and has served numerous other political campaigns -- including former Rep. Beto O'Rourke's failed 2020 presidential primary campaign and both of Barack Obama's presidential campaigns.

Richmond is expected to leave Congress to join Biden's White House staff in a senior role.

Rice served in the Obama administration as UN ambassador and national security adviser.

During the Clinton administration, Blinken served as a member of the National Security Council staff at the White House, and held roles as the special assistant to the president, senior director for European affairs, and senior director for speechwriting and then strategic planning. He was Clinton's chief foreign policy speechwriter

Rice at one point was thought to be the clear choice to succeed Hillary Clinton as secretary of state, but in 2012 withdrew her name from consideration to avoid a bitter Senate confirmation battle.

Blinken served in the Obama administration as the deputy secretary of state, assistant to the president and principal deputy national security adviser.

A longtime Biden ally, Coons was one of the first members of Congress to endorse the former vice president when he declared his 2020 presidential candidacy.

Yates was fired by Trump from her role as acting attorney general.

Throughout his Senate career, Coons has been known for working across the aisle and forging strong relationships with high-profile Republicans who shared common interests.

Brainard currently serves as a member of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System

Brainard was the US representative to the G-20 Finance Deputies and G-7 Deputies and was a member of the Financial Stability Board. During the Clinton administration, Brainard served as the deputy national economic adviser and deputy assistant to the President.

Raskin was the deputy secretary of the US Department of the Treasury during the Obama administration. She was previously a governor of the Federal Reserve Board.

Outside of Sen. Elizabeth Warren, Raskin, a former deputy secretary at the department, would be the top choice for most progressives.

If chosen and confirmed, Flournoy would be the first female secretary of defense.

During the mid-1990's, she served as principal deputy assistant secretary of defense for strategy and threat reduction, as well as deputy assistant secretary of defense for strategy

Mayorkas was deputy secretary of Homeland Security during the Obama administration, and served as the director of the Department of Homeland Security's United States Citizenship and Immigration Services

Monaco played a critical role in Biden's vice presidential selection committee, and served as Homeland Security and counterterrorism advisor to Obama.

Jones is the junior United States Senator from Alabama. He lost his reelection bid earlier this month to Republican Tommy Tuberville.

Jones was also involved in the prosecution of Eric Rudolph, whose 1998 attack on a Birmingham abortion clinic killed an off-duty police officer.

Rice was one of a handful of women on Biden's shortlist for a running mate.

Yates had been appointed by Obama and was set to serve until Trump's nominee for attorney general was confirmed.

Haaland is a congresswoman from New Mexico, and is one of the first Native American women to serve in Congress. Biden has said he wants an administration that looks like the country. Haaland, the vice chair of the House Natural Resources Committee, would be the first Native American Cabinet secretary if she were to get an offer and accept it.

Yang is an entrepreneur and former 2020 Democratic presidential candidate. He rose from obscurity to become a highly-visible candidate, and his supporters are sometimes referred to as the "Yang Gang." His presidential campaign was centered around the idea of universal basic income, and providing every US citizen with $1,000 a month, or $12,000 a year.

Nelson is the international president of the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA. She cemented her image as a rising star of the labor movement during a prolonged government shutdown that stretched from December 2018 to January 2019.

Sanders is reaching out to potential supporters in labor to ask for their support as he mounts a campaign for the job. But he is viewed as a long shot and so far has received mix reactions from labor leaders.

Walsh is AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka's pick for the job, a big endorsement in what could soon turn into a contentious debate between moderate Democrats and progressives, who will favor Sen. Bernie Sanders or Michigan Rep. Andy Levin

Levin is a popular progressive who is also growing his base of support with labor leaders, including at the Communications Workers of America.

But he also has credibility with climate activists for having helped create Michigan's Green Jobs Initiative.

Murthy, a doctor of internal medicine, is the co-chair of Biden's coronavirus advisory board

Bottoms is the mayor of Atlanta and is a rising star of the Democratic Party. Bottoms stepped into the national spotlight when she denounced vandalism in her city as "chaos" after demonstrations over the death of George Floyd, a Black man who was killed by police in Minneapolis. Bottoms is a former judge and city council member.

Weingarten is the president of the American Federation of Teachers, AFL-CIO and has long pushed for education reform

Inslee is the governor of Washington state, and previously served in the US House of Representatives.

Buttigieg is the former mayor of South Bend, Indiana, and a former 2020 Democratic presidential candidate. Buttigieg's presidential bid was historic -- he was the first out gay man to launch a competitive campaign for president, and he broke barriers by becoming the first gay candidate to earn primary delegates for a major party's presidential nomination.

the Rev. Jesse L. Jackson called on the President to commute the sentences of and pardon all the inmates scheduled for execution; and 23 elected and former prosecutors filed an amicus brief on Wednesday in support of Bernard's appeal due to allegations of prosecutorial misconduct.

Attorneys Alan Dershowitz and Ken Starr joined Bernard's legal team late on Thursday and had filed a petition with the Supreme Court requesting to delay the execution for two weeks so they could get up to speed on Bernard's case.

"Brandon's execution is a stain on America's criminal justice system. But I pray that even in his death, Brandon will advance his commitment to helping others by moving us closer to a time when this country does not pointlessly and maliciously kill young Black men who pose no threat to anyone," Bernard's attorney Robert Owens said in a statement.

The court's decision left Trump as Bernard's last hope. The President did not act.Trump was made aware of the case -- and of the calls by celebrities and activists to commute Bernard's sentence -- over the past several days

"the jury heard ample evidence indicating that Bernard did not have a leadership role in the gang -- and was not even a full-fledged member."

Five of the sentencing jurors came forward saying that if they had been aware of the undisclosed information, they would not have agreed to sentence Bernard to death, Owens said.

"The decision to move forward with all these super spreader events in the midst of a pandemic that has already killed a quarter of a million Americans is historically unprecedented," Dunham said.

According to Chief Judge Jane Magnus-Stinson's order denying the preliminary injunction, up to 125 people enter the facility for an execution, including nearly 40 out-of-state Bureau of Prisons employees who are part of the execution team.

Interactions between the execution team and Federal Correctional Center Terre Haute staffers are "extremely limited, and members of the execution team generally do not even enter the FCI or interact with inmates there. Plaintiffs do not interact with inmates on death row or with anyone in the execution facility,"

The Mexican author Octavio Paz, in his 1950 book, The Labyrinth of Solitude, described the pachuco (a word used to refer to young Mexican American men, many of them gang members, in the mid-1900s) as a “pariah, a man who belongs nowhere,” alienated from his Mexican roots but not quite of the United States either.

Gloria Anzaldúa, in her 1987 classic, Borderlands/La Frontera, described Chicana identity as the product of life along the U.S.-Mexico border, “una herida abierta [an open wound] where the Third World grates against the first and bleeds.”

We need to understand that they want the same freedoms, comforts, and securities that all people have wanted since the beginning of civilization: to have a “home with a place to paint, or a big, comfortable chair to sit in and read under a lamp, with a cushion under the small of our backs.”

offers a more intimate look into the barrios, homes, and minds of people who, he argues, have been badly, and sometimes willfully, misunderstood.

Tobar’s main focus is on how the migrant experience has shaped Latino identity.

More than these other works, though, it engages in contemporary debates and issues, such as how Latinos have related to Blackness and indigeneity, the question of why some Latinos choose to identify as white, and the political conservatism of certain Latino communities

“To be Latino in the United States,” Tobar writes, “is to see yourself portrayed, again and again, as an intellectually and physically diminished subject in stories told by others.”

Even when migrants survive the journey and settle across the United States, Tobar sees a dark thread connecting them: “Our ancestors,” he writes, “have escaped marching armies, coups d’état, secret torture rooms, Stalinist surveillance, and the outrages of rural police forces.” Tobar is referring here to the domestic conflicts, fueled by the U.S. military, in Guatemala, Cuba, El Salvador, Nicaragua, and other countries during the Cold War, leading to unrest and forcing civilians in those places to flee northward.

For Tobar, this history of violence is something all Latinos have in common, no matter where in the country they live.

He writes, “I want a theory of social revolution that begins in this kind of intimate space,” not in the symbols “appropriated by corporate America,” like the Black Lives Matter banners displayed at professional sporting events, or the CEO of JPMorgan Chase kneeling at a branch of his bank, which critics have read as virtue signaling. Mere intimacy and the recognition of common histories isn’t the same as justice, but it is a necessary starting point for healing divisions.

there are many Latino stories that he does not, and probably cannot, tell. For one, he conceives of Latino history as the history of a people who have endured traumas because of the actions of the U.S. But this framing wouldn’t appeal to Latinos who see the United States as the country where their dreams came true, where they’ve built careers, bought homes, provided for their families.

If the small number of conservative Latinos Tobar interviewed are anything like the Hispanic Republicans I’ve talked with over the years, they would tell him that it is the Republican Party that best represents their economic, religious, and political values.

If our aim is to understand the full story of Latinos—assuming such a thing is possible—we should explore all of the complexities of those who live in a country that is becoming more Latino by the day. For that, we’ll need other books besides Our Migrant Souls, ones that describe the inner worlds, motives, and ambitions of Latinos who see themselves and their place in this country differently.

Things that were long big fun now overwhelm, exhaust and annoy. The holiday season is an extended exercise in excess and loud, often sleazy sweaters.

Which means it is nothing of the sort. This is the drag equivalent of fun and suggests that fun is done.

Adults assiduously record themselves appearing to have something masquerading as “fun,” a fusillade of Coachellic micro social aggressions unleashed on multiple social media platforms. Look at me having so much FUN!

Vacations are overscheduled with too many activities, FOMO on steroids, a paradox of choice-inducing decision fatigue, so much so that people return home exhausted and in need of another one.

Weddings have morphed into multistage stress extravaganzas while doubling as express paths to insolvency: destination proposals for the whole family, destination bachelorette and bachelor blowouts, destination weddings in remote barns with limited lodging, something called a “buddymoon” (bring the gang!) and planners to help facilitate the same custom cocktailsness of it all.

What could be a greater cause for joy or more natural than having a baby? Apparently, not much these days. Impending parenthood is overthought and over-apped, incorporating more savings-draining events that didn’t exist a few decades ago: babymoons and lethal, fire-inducing, gender-reveal gatherings and baby showers so over-the-top as to shame weddings.

Retirements must be purposeful. Also, occasions for an acute identity crisis. You need to have a plan, a mission, a coach, a packed color-coded grid of daily activities in a culture where our jobs are our identities, our worth tied to employment.

“I feel like I should be having more fun than I’m actually having,” says Alyssa Alvarez, a social media marketing manager and DJ in Detroit, expressing a sentiment that many share. “There are expectations of what I want people to believe that my life is like rather than what my life is actually like.”

“The world is so much less about human connection,” says Amanda Richards, 34, who works in casting in Los Angeles and is a graduate of Cudworth’s course. “We do more things virtually. People are more isolated. And there’s all this toxic positivity to convince people of how happy you are.”

For eons, early adulthood was considered an age of peak fun. Now, according to several studies, it’s a protracted state of anxiety and depression.

Because there is now a coach for everything, Alvarez hired the “party coach” Evan Cudworth, taking his $497 course this fall on how to pursue “intentional fun.” (It now costs $555.)

Blame it on an American culture that values work, productivity, power, wealth, status and more work over leisure

Blame it on technological advances that tether us to work without cessation

Blame it on the pandemic, which exacerbated so much while delivering Zoomageddon.

Blame it on 2004, with the advent of Facebook, which led to Twitter (okay, X), Instagram, Threads, TikTok and who-knows-what lurking in the ether.

Blame it again on 2004 and the introduction of FOMO, our dread of missing out, broadcast through multiple social media spigots

“So many people are retreating into their phones, into anxiety,” says Cudworth, 37, from Chicago. “I’m helping people rediscover what fun means to them.”

His mandate is redefining fun: cutting back on bingeing screen time, eradicating envy scrolling, getting outside, moving, dancing. “With technology, we don’t allow ourselves to be present. You’re always thinking ‘something is better around the corner,’” Cudworth says, the now squandered in pursuit of the future.

Instead of this being the most wonderful time of the year, we battle holiday fatigue, relentless beseeching for our money and, if Fox News is to be believed, a war on Christmas that is nearing its third decade.

ow do Americans spend their leisure hours when they might be having fun with others, making those vital in-person connections? Watching television, our favorite free time and “sports activity” (yes, that’s how it’s classified), according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, an average of 2.8 hours daily.

“That’s way more television than you really need. We put play on the back burner,” says Pat Rumbaugh, 65, of Takoma Park, Md. She’s “The Play Lady,” who organizes unorganized play for adults

Catherine Price, the author of “The Power of Fun: How to Feel Alive Again,” believes “we’re totally misdoing leisure” and “not leaving any room for spontaneity.”

To Price, True Fun is the confluence of connection (other people, nature), playfulness (lightheartedness, freedom) and flow (being fully engaged, present), which is not as challenging as it sounds. “You can have fun in any context. Playfulness is about an attitude,”

Back in the day, co-workers were friends. (Sometimes, more.) After hours, they gathered for drinks, played softball. Today, because of email, Slack and remote work, offices are half empty and far quieter than libraries.

“We go to work and there’s no sense of connection and camaraderie,” says Davis, who was long employed by his city’s department of parks and recreation. “People feel emotionally disconnected. Healthy conversations are the precursor of fun. We’ve lost the art of communication. Our spirit comes home with us. If you don’t communicate at work, what are you coming home with?”

ALL THREE REPORTS INCLUDE quintessentially Trumpian scenes, consistent in their depictions of the former president’s methods, and very much in keeping with numerous journalistic accounts of how he sought to manipulate people, rules and institutions.

The three investigations tell different stories, but the misdeeds all run together, more overlapping than sequential

Still, each investigation offers a slightly different theory of Trump. In the Mueller report, Trump and his aides come across as the gang that can’t cheat straight — too haphazard to effectively coordinate with a foreign government, too ignorant of campaign finance laws to purposely violate them, often comically naïve about the gravity of their plight.

The Ukraine report, by contrast, regards Trump as more strategic than chaotic, and it does not wallow in the netherworld between the president’s personal benefit and his public service. “The president placed his own personal and political interests above the national interests of the United States, sought to undermine the integrity of the U.S. presidential election process, and endangered U.S. national security,”

All three reports show Trump deploying the mechanisms of government for political gain.

The Mueller report argues that viewing the president’s “acts collectively can help to illuminate their significance.” The Ukraine report shows that the conversation that Trump described as “a perfect call” was not the ask; it was the confirmation. When Trump said, “I would like you to do us a favor, though,” Zelensky and his aides had already been notified of what was coming. The Ukraine scandal was never about a single call, just as the Jan. 6 report was not about a single day.

The Jan. 6 report takes seriously the admonition to view the president’s actions collectively, not individually; the phrase “multipart plan” appears throughout the report, with Trump as the architect.

Even more so than the Ukraine report, the Jan. 6 report repeatedly emphasizes how Trump knew, well, everything

There is no room here for the plausible deniability that the Mueller report entertained, for the notion that Trump didn’t know better, or that, in the immortal words of Attorney General William P. Barr when he creatively interpreted the Mueller report to exonerate Trump of obstruction of justice, that the president was “frustrated and angered by his sincere belief that the investigation was undermining his presidency.”

This alleged sincerity underscored the president’s “noncorrupt motives,” as Barr put it. In the Jan. 6 report, any case for Trumpian sincerity is eviscerated in a six-page chart in the executive summary, which catalogs the many times the president was informed of the facts of the election yet continued to lie about them. “Just say the election was corrupt and leave the rest to me and the Republican congressmen,” Trump told top Department of Justice officials in late December 2020, the report says.

Just announce an investigation into the Bidens. Just say the 2020 election was rigged. Trump’s most corrupt action is always the corruption of reality.

The studious restraint of the Mueller report came in for much criticism once the special counsel failed to deliver a dagger to the heart of the Trump presidency and once the document was so easily miscast by interested parties

for all its diffidence, there is power in the document’s understated prose, in its methodical collection of evidence, in its unwillingness to overstep its bounds while investigating a president who knew few bounds himself.

The Ukraine and Jan. 6 reports came at a time when Trump’s misconduct was better understood, when Mueller-like restraint was less in fashion and when those attempting to hold the chief executive accountable grasped every tool at hand. For all their passion and bluntness, they encountered their own constraints, limits that are probably inherent to the form

“It’s the stuff that kills that we want to talk about, the stuff that stunts lives that we want to talk about, the stuff that deforms lives that we want to talk about.”

The outgoing chair pointed to the increasing concern of a school-to-prison pipeline in the UK, where young minority ethnic children excluded from schools are forced into pupil referral units where they are groomed by criminal gangs – a clear example of systemic racism, he claims.

“To talk about unconscious biases is an obvious sidestepping of the matter. And it’s also wanting to let people off,” Prescod said.

The institute “insistently” talked about institutional racism then, but was in the minority and faced significant opposition, Prescod said. “In the end, it stuck because we then had the Macpherson report amongst others using a term which was not invented by them, but by communities of resistance.”

: “Ambalavaner Sivanandan [former director of IRR] and we at the institute were taking our cue from what the communities of resistance were saying. Institutionalised racism was not invented in the academy. It’s not invented by the politicians, it comes off the ground.

“It comes out of slow realisation where you start with one case that shows you injustice and after a while you pull that out and you realise that you’re looking at a whole string of things that tell you there’s something more than simply a wrongdoer in this situation.”

Prescod was not surprised at the government’s recent decision to drop crucial reform commitments made after the Windrush scandal. “This is not unlike what happened after the Macpherson report, which says very clearly institutionalised racism exists. And this is not just in the police. Any number of institutions have been looked at in this kind of way

When asked what he felt was the most significant change in Britain in terms of race, Prescod turned to a lyric from the British jazz band Sons of Kemet: “Don’t wanna take my country back, mate. I wanna take my country forward.” He said he finds it powerful black youth have claimed the country as their own.

“We now have populations here who are not thinking of themselves from some other place or going to some other place, but here, and are aware of their history of struggle. When Sons of Kemet says something like ‘we want to take our country forward’, notice all the words in the phrase.” He believes it shows a significant cultural shift of “new generations [of black Britons] born here, belonging here, speaking with a different kind of authority”.

Prescod said while there was no room for “triumphalism” when looking at racial progress, he was leaving his position with some hope. “There is always resistance. It’s only too clear. If you look at any situation in which somebody starts to be down-pressed, you will realise that there is somebody who is saying: get off my back, get off my throat. We don’t simply curl up.”

Bonobos became famous for showing that nature didn’t always have to be red in tooth and claw. “Bonobos are an icon for peace and love, the world’s ‘hippie chimps,’” Sally Coxe, a conservationist, said in 2006.

Because bonobos live in remote, swampy rainforests, it has been much more difficult to observe them in the wild than chimpanzees. More recent research has shown that bonobos live a more aggressive life than their reputation would suggest.

In a study based on thousands of hours of observations in the wild published on Friday, for example, researchers found that male bonobos commit acts of aggression nearly three times as often as male chimpanzees do.

“There is no ‘hippie ape,’”

As our closest living relatives, bonobos and chimpanzees can offer us clues about the roots of human behavior. We and the two species share a common ancestor that lived about 7 million years ago. About 5 million years later, bonobos split off from chimpanzees.

In 2012, a trio of Harvard researchers proposed that bonobos evolved much like dogs did. Less aggressive wolves were not as likely to be killed by humans, which over time led to the emergence of dogs. In a similar fashion, the researchers argued, female bonobos preferred to mate with less aggressive males, giving birth to less aggressive offspring.

The researchers called their idea the self-domestication hypothesis. In later years, they speculated that humans may have undergone a self-domestication of their own.

Dr. Mouginot soon became perplexed, as she saw that male bonobos acted aggressively on a regular basis. Unlike male chimpanzees, who started their days in a mellow mood, the male bonobos seemed to wake up ready for a fight.

She and her colleagues trained field assistants, who made more observations throughout the pandemic. The new analysis, based on 9,300 hours of observations on 12 male bonobos and 14 male chimpanzees, found that bonobos committed aggressive acts 2.8 times as frequently as than the chimpanzees did.

Dr. Mouginot found that the frequent bonobo aggressions almost always involved a single male attacking another male. Chimpanzees, in contrast, often ganged up to attack a victim.

the study set a new standard for comparing aggression in bonobos and chimpanzees.

Dr. Mouginot speculated that male chimpanzees engage in one-on-one aggression less often because it poses bigger dangers: A victim of aggression may not want to go on a border patrol with the perpetrator, for example. Or he may bring back some of his own allies to wreak vengeance.

It may be easier for male bonobos to get away with aggression, Dr. Mouginot said, because in their female-dominated society they don’t face the risks that come with male alliances. “I think that’s why we see more aggression in bonobos — because it’s less risky to act aggressively against other males,”

the apes that carried out the most aggressive acts were also the ones who mated most often.

parts of the self-domestication hypothesis “clearly need refinement.” It may be important to consider the effect that different kinds of aggression have on a species, rather than lumping them altogether, he said.

Still, he argued that the differences between the two species remained significant. “Chimpanzees murder, and bonobos don’t,