Group items matching

in title, tags, annotations or url

WASHINGTON - Already reeling from the coronavirus pandemic and unemployment levels not seen since the Great Depression, cities across the United States smoldered on Tuesday after a seventh consecutive night of protests and civil unrest related to the death of African American George Floyd while in the custody of Minneapolis police last week.   As business owners and residents yet again clean up the debris, there is growing concern that the economic damage to many of the communities where violence is taking place will persist long after the last window pane is replaced and the last burned out car is towed away. Businesses and neighborhoods where protests have turned violent will have to contend not just with the aftermath of the protests, but with multiple aggravating factors that will make recovery even more difficult. 

Many businesses had already been pushed to the edge of solvency by months of lockdown related to the coronavirus, and the slow and careful re-openings envisioned by many state and local leaders were not designed to allow commerce to rebound to pre-pandemic levels immediately.  Layered on top of that is the Depression-level unemployment currently afflicting the nation and the prospect of an economy that will, at the very least, be in recession for the foreseeable future. On Tuesday, the Congressional Budget Office delivered an analysis to Congress warning that the virus will adversely impact the economy through much of the next decade, cutting some $8 trillion from Gross Domestic Product over that period. Another distinct possibility is a second wave of the coronavirus, either arising naturally or helped along by massive protests in which people have been gathering in close proximity. The understandable rage at the death of Floyd, who was handcuffed by police and died  after a police officer knelt on his neck for nearly nine minutes, sparked protests in well over 100 cities across the country. His death has become the most potent recent symbol of a system in which black Americans are, with disturbing regularity, abused and even killed by law enforcement officers, frequently on camera. And while the vast majority of the protesters have been non-violent, in many cases there have been incidents of property destruction and looting, as well as attacks on police officers.

President Donald Trump's debasing of fact, divide-and-rule tactics and endless quest for new political enemies may be disastrous in a pandemic. But such behavior, combined with the promise of an American comeback, still adds up to a formidable electoral arsenal.

The President gave every impression Thursday of battling for his political life during a visit to Michigan, a state that crystallizes the themes of his bid for a second term and that could be decisive in his clash with Democrat Joe Biden. It was his most explicit display yet of his plans to beat treacherous pandemic politics and criticism of his leadership in pursuit of an even more logic-busting victory than in 2016.

"A permanent lockdown is not a strategy for a healthy state or a healthy country. To protect the health of our people we must have a functioning economy,"

a theory: The protests exploded in scale and intensity because the police seemed to go out of their way to illustrate exactly the arguments that Black Lives Matter has been raising online since 2013.

For the last two weeks, the police reaction to the movement has been so unhinged, and so well documented, that it couldn’t help but feed support for the protests. American public opinion may have tipped in favor of Black Lives Matter for good.

By “the police,” I mean not just state and municipal police across the country, but also the federal officers from various agencies that cracked down on protesters in front of the White House, as well as their supporters and political patrons, from police chiefs to mayors to the attorney general and the president himself.

“I’m sorry, but I still don’t understand,” said one young man, his pitch a blend of curiosity and exasperation. “What do Republicans believe? What does it mean to be a Republican?”

You could forgive a 17-year-old, who has come of age during Donald Trump’s reign, for failing to recognize a cohesive doctrine that guides the president’s party. The supposed canons of GOP orthodoxy—limited government, free enterprise, institutional conservation, moral rectitude, fiscal restraint, global leadership—have in recent years gone from elastic to expendable.

Far more difficult is answering the question of what, quite specifically, has filled it.

The Rosedale of the 1970s was a predominantly white working-class neighborhood of about 25,000, home to civil service workers, police officers and firefighters of mainly Italian, Irish and Jewish descent. But like much of New York City at that time, demographics were shifting as black and immigrant families moved in and, in response, some white families headed out.

Mr. Moyers, who served as press secretary to President Lyndon B. Johnson, said he was drawn to Rosedale as a journalist because he was interested in the societal ramifications of the Johnson administration’s efforts to put an end to segregation. Mr. Moyers and his camera crew set out to understand its impact and stumbled upon its real-world consequence on a street corner: the attack on their peers by children steeped in hate.

What he discovered in Queens, he said, was racism enmeshed with economic anxiety — a belief that the newcomers would bring waves of crime and slash property values. Plus, there was a toxic fear held by white residents of losing their dominance, he said, something he sees echoed in the politics of today.

oping with a pandemic is one of the most complex challenges a society can face. To minimize death and damage, leaders and citizens must orchestrate a huge array of different resources and tools.

I have heard military and intelligence officials describe some threats as requiring a “whole of nation” response, rather than being manageable with any one element of “hard” or “soft” power or even a “whole of government” approach. Saving lives during a pandemic is a challenge of this nature and magnitude.

“If he had just been paying attention, he would have asked, ‘What do I do first?’ We wouldn’t have passed the threshold of casualties in previous wars. It is a catastrophic failure.”

State police in body armor and riot gear lined up Friday morning near the Minneapolis police precinct that was set ablaze by protesters overnight following the death of an unarmed black man this week in city officers' custody.

Others tossed fireworks toward the precinct, which is closest to where Floyd was captured on video with an officer kneeling on his neck Monday before he died. Before state police arrived, the precinct was deserted after officers were evacuated Thursday.

A CNN crew has been released from police custody after they were arrested Friday during a live broadcast at the site after clearly identifying themselves to officers. CNN correspondent Omar Jimenez was placed in handcuffs while the cameras rolled, shortly followed by producer Bill Kirkos and photojournalist Leonel Mendez.

no fever, only slightly elevated blood pressure and a blood oxygen level in the healthy range.

But when reporters asked him for results of Mr. Trump’s chest X-rays and lung scans — crucial measures of how severely the president has been sickened by Covid-19 — Dr. Conley refused to answer, citing a federal law that restricts what doctors can share about patients.

it was premature to declare victory over an unpredictable, poorly understood virus that has killed more than 210,000 people in the United States.

By now, with worldwide infections at thirty-five million and counting, and with near-total silence on the part of the Chinese government, the market has become a kind of petri dish for the imagination.

One common Chinese conspiracy theory claims that the U.S. Army deliberately seeded the virus during the 2019 Military World Games, which were held in Wuhan that October. On the other side of the world, a number of Americans believe that the virus was released, whether accidentally or otherwise, from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, whose research includes work on coronaviruses.

There’s no evidence to support these theories, and even the prevalent animal-market connection is unclear. There weren’t many wildlife dealers in the market—about a dozen stalls, according to most published reports—and Wuhan natives have little appetite for exotic animals.

Walter Wallace Jr.'s family is seeking justice but they are not advocating for the officers who killed the 27-year-old Black man to be charged with murder.

According to their attorney, Shaka Johnson, the brief 30 to 40 second video put on display the systematic failings of the Philadelphia Police Department who armed the officers with "a tool by which to assassinate" instead of a less lethal device such as a Taser.

When asked why the family, who has yet to bury Wallace, would not want to pursue murder charges against the two officers who fired seven rounds each into him on Monday, Johnson replied, "Here's why: they were improperly trained and did not have the proper equipment by which to effectuate their job."

Later, Mr. Trump also refused to say he would abide by the results of the election and declined to tell his supporters to stay calm and avoid civil unrest.

His mocking of Mr. Biden’s decision to regularly wear a mask — which health officials have recommended — underscored his rejection of science when it suits his political purposes.

The group of Trump campaign officials came carrying cellphone cameras and a determination to help the president’s re-election efforts in Philadelphia. But they were asked to leave the city’s newly opened satellite election offices on Tuesday after being told local election laws did not permit them to monitor voters coming to request and complete absentee ballots.

On social media and right-wing news sites and in the presidential debate on Tuesday night, President Trump and his campaign quickly suggested nefarious intent in the actions of local election officials, with the president claiming during the debate that “bad things happen in Philadelphia” and urging his supporters everywhere to “go into the polls and watch very carefully.”

The calls for his followers to monitor voting activity are clear. What’s less apparent is how the Trump campaign wants this to play out.

Shouting, interruptions and often incoherent cross talk filled the air as Mr. Trump purposefully and repeatedly heckled and blurted over his rival and the moderator alike in a 90-minute melee that showcased the president’s sense of urgency to upend a race in which polls show him trailing.

The impact on the race of the messy affair — given that 90 percent of voters say they are already decided — is an open question.

He bulldozed Mr. Biden and the moderator, Chris Wallace, throughout the evening. But his goal, other than making for a convoluted contest, was less clear. Mr. Trump seemed principally focused on undercutting and disorienting Mr. Biden, rather than on presenting an agenda or a vision for a second term in the White House.

An audio recording of the grand jury inquiry into the killing of Breonna Taylor was made public on Friday, a rare disclosure that shed light on the evidence jurors considered in the proceedings.

15 hours long

captured interviews with witnesses, audio of 911 calls and other evidence presented to jurors over two and a half days.

Biederman argued that the show is, at its heart, about the bathetic nature of decline. “Decline not as a romantic, singular, aesthetically breathtaking act of destruction,” he said, but as a humiliating, slow-motion slide down a hill into a puddle of filth. “You don’t flee a burning Rome with your beautiful beloved in your arms, barely escaping a murderous horde of barbarians; you sit down for 18 hours a day, enjoy fewer things than you used to, and take on the worst qualities of your parents while you watch your kids take on the worst qualities of you.”

The show’s depiction of contemporary America as relentlessly banal and hollow is plainly at the core of the current interest in the show, which coincides with an era of crisis across just about every major institution in American life.

“The Sopranos” has a persistent focus on the spiritual and moral vacuum at the center of this country, and is oddly prescient about its coming troubles: the opioid epidemic, the crisis of meritocracy, teenage depression and suicide, fights over the meaning of American history.

As Malcolm Forbes Baldwin, the acting chairman of the president’s Council for Environmental Quality, told industry executives in 1981, “There can be no more important or conservative concern than the protection of the globe itself.”

Among those who called for urgent, immediate and far-reaching climate policy were Senators John Chafee, Robert Stafford and David Durenberger; the E.P.A. administrator, William K. Reilly; and, during his campaign for president, George H.W. Bush.

It was understood that action would have to come immediately. At the start of the 1980s, scientists within the federal government predicted that conclusive evidence of warming would appear on the global temperature record by the end of the decade, at which point it would be too late to avoid disaster.