The carefully staged spectacle made it clear that Washington will be expanding its brutal economic war on Nicaragua as the country’s general elections approach in November.
Virginians have started casting ballots for governor. Recent polls suggest a close race.A Monmouth University poll attributed the tight margin in part to the division between urban and rural Virginia.
In this way, the Virginia race is a microcosm of recent trends. In 2020, urban voters supported Joe Biden 2-to-1, while rural areas backed Donald Trump by the same proportion. This urban-rural divide has expanded dramatically in the past decade, reaching its widest point in the last presidential election. What drives this deepening divide — and will we see it again in next year’s midterm elections? Our research suggests that the answer lies in Americans’ ideas about race.
From HuffPost
A longtime television journalist and producer this week said that Chris Cuomo inappropriately touched her at a 2005 party.
Shelley Ross, who was Cuomo’s executive producer at ABC’s “Primetime Live,” detailed her claims in an opinion essay published Friday in The New York Times. In the article, she accuses Cuomo of squeezing “the cheek of my buttock” while at “a going-away party for an ABC colleague” and in full view of her husband.
“Whether he understood it at the time or not, his form of sexual harassment was a hostile act meant to diminish and belittle his female former boss in front of the staff,” Ross wrote.
The article includes a screenshot of a 2005 email that Cuomo sent to Ross after the party in which he apologized for his behavior. He offered amends once again in a statement provided to The New York Times that also appears in the piece. “As Shelley acknowledges, our interaction was not sexual in nature,” he said. “It happened 16 years ago in a public setting when she was a top executive at ABC. I apologized to her then, and I meant it.”
When contacted by HuffPost, a representative for Cuomo reiterated the statement but did not comment further.
From WaPo
A Pennsylvania school district that had banned a list of anti-racism books and educational resources by or about people of color — including children’s titles about Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King Jr. — reversed its nearly year-long decision this week after backlash and protests from students, parents and educators in the community.
The Central York School District had implemented “a freeze” last fall on a lengthy list of books and educational resources that focused almost entirely on titles related to people of color. The school district claimed the books on race and social justice, which some in the southern Pennsylvania community hoped would help bolster the educational curriculum following George Floyd’s murder and the racial-justice protests of 2020, were frozen, not banned, after some parents raised concerns about the materials.
The school board announced Monday it had voted unanimously to reinstate access to the books that mainly involved people of color, district spokeswoman Julie Randall Romig confirmed to The Washington Post.
Critical Race Theory was but one of the covers used by school districts to ban discussions of race.
The indictment of Hillary Clinton attorney Michael Sussmann offers new evidence that the Trump-Russia conspiracy theory that engulfed Trump’s term in office was itself the product of fabrications involving Clinton’s 2016 campaign.
When, this past spring, a succession of stories about communities pushing back, angrily, against the supposed teaching of critical race theory in their school districts began to overtake my social media feeds, I had a hunch that it was a direct result of white fear. But a recent data analysis from NBC News confirms it.
Reporters found that the districts hosting some of the most combative debates over diversity and inclusion initiatives—including just teaching about racism—have seen a steady increase in students of color attending its schools. In Gwinnett County, Georgia, where parents have squared off over critical race theory, there has been a 52.4 percent increase in students of color since 1994. And in Loudoun County, Virginia, where the rights of transgender students and teaching racism have become ugly, loud battleground issues, there has been a 29.5 percent increase in that span of time.
If you’ve been following how whiteness has evolved since the 2016 election, this isn’t surprising. But it is nice to have the numbers to back it up. It reminded one of my colleagues of a similar, equally unsurprising yet very real finding following the Capitol riot. Political scientist Robert Pape, after going through polling and demographic data, discovered that most people who participated in the riots came to D.C. from places where residents were terrified of being replaced by people of color and immigrants. More specifically, as the New York Times put it, “counties with the most significant declines in the non-Hispanic white population are the most likely to produce insurrectionists.”
“If you look back in history, there has always been a series of far-right extremist movements responding to new waves of immigration to the United States or to movements for civil rights by minority groups,” Pape told the New York Times. “You see a common pattern in the Capitol insurrectionists. They are mainly middle-class to upper-middle-class whites who are worried that, as social changes occur around them, they will see a decline in their status in the future.”
Similarly, in response to NBC’s findings on the CRT panic, Stanford University professor Tomás Jiménez said, “In virtually any community, when there is rapid demographic change you see a backlash.” (Or as one Black mom told NBC of the pushback in her town, “Folks like me welcome [diversity], and there are a lot of folks who do not feel that way—I think they feel very threatened.”)
Months before George Floyd was murdered by police in Minneapolis, the death of Elijah McClain in Aurora, Colorado, sparked broad outrage at what critics painted as lethal brutality by racist cops.
On Wednesday, state attorney general Phil Weiser added new fuel to the fire, releasing a damning probe that detailed systemic racism in the department behind the young man’s brutal demise.
In August 2019, McClain, a 23-year-old Black man, was walking home in Aurora when local police tackled him and handcuffed him after 911 calls had flagged a “sketchy” person in the area. Later, McClain—who was wearing a ski mask and listening to music at the time of his run-in with police—was sedated by fire rescue personnel with a large dose of ketamine.
The young man went into cardiac arrest, and died three days later in a hospital. The cause of death was listed as “undetermined” in a coroner’s report.
A large protest movement around McClain’s death put pressure on police, and—buoyed by the national wave of rage after Floyd’s murder—helped push lawmakers to pass a sweeping police accountability bill giving the state AG new power to go after local cops.
Meanwhile, earlier this month, two Aurora Police Department officers, an ex-officer, and two paramedics were criminally charged for McClain’s death by Weiser.
Regardless of how that case plays out, Weiser’s report on Wednesday found that the department’s problems go well beyond one disturbing incident. And it suggested local officials faced a long road to getting out of the national spotlight.
Weiser’s report detailed the results of a 14-month investigation that included ride-alongs with officers, analyzing troves of police records and body-camera footage, and hearing from community members and police officers. It found that the police department has a pattern and practice of racially biased policing, using excessive force, and failing to document dubious investigative stops as required by the new police accountability measures put into place.
The report also suggests the police department should enter into a consent decree to address these issues, a tool often used by the federal government under the Obama administration to force change by rogue cops.
From the Root
On Wednesday, the Minnesota Supreme Court overturned the third-degree murder conviction of former Minneapolis police officer Mohamed Noor, who shot and killed Justine Ruszczyk Damond, a dual American and Australian citizen, in 2017.
According to the Star Tribune, Noor’s attorney, Thomas Plunkett, had petitioned the high court in June arguing that his client’s actions did not fall under the requirements needed to convict for third-degree murder.
The Tribune notes that according to the state’s statute, a third-degree murder charge can only be applied when a defendant kills someone “by perpetrating an act eminently dangerous to others and evincing a depraved mind.”
Because only a single person was involved, the charge did not apply
By Addy Baird and Lissandra Villa @ BuzzFeedNews.com, Sept. 13 at 9:20 p.m. ET
Former staffers who worked for Rep. Pramila Jayapal, a House Democrat who built her reputation on being a champion of workers, say her treatment of her staff was often inconsistent with her public image.
NBC News4’s Derrick Ward has reaction from neighbors and community leaders, 2 hours ago
Previous CRIME News thread HERE, covering 8/21 thru 9/10
Important for converted guys/Afghanistan vets to be able to choke women fairly in MMA competition, since they/we suffer so much blowback doing this at home. Good way to overcome PTSD. Yay sports!
(yeah, it's pretty awful to be agreeing with Gateway pundit)
