By Fran Spielman & Mitch Dudek @ Chicago Sun Times, updated July 20

While insisting she supports peaceful protests, she said on Friday, “what we saw … is a group of vigilantes” who formed a “phalanx,” then began “pummeling police with projectiles Frozen water bottles, cans, other projectiles.”

By Sydney Pereira @ Gothamist.com, July 19

An 18-year-old woman has been arrested for the murder of a man found dead on the roof of a McDonald's last week, the NYPD said on Saturday.

Ayame Stamoulis, of East Flatbush, was arrested and charged with the murder of a man found wrapped in a plastic bag on the roof of McDonald's in the South Bronx on East 149th Street near Morris Avenue about 6 a.m. Wednesday, according to an NYPD release. A maintenance worker reportedly found the body.

Stamoulis and two other men are suspected of breaking into victim Richard Hamlet's apartment, the Daily News reports.

They allegedly beat and choked him, and then threw his body onto the roof of the McDonald's near the apartment building, according to a copy of a criminal complaint obtained by the News. ABC7 reports the three of them also forced Hamlet to drink a caustic liquid [....]

The illiberal left is a lot less threatening than the right. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.

@ NYTimes.com/Coronavirus Live Updates, July 18

Dozens of fiercely loyal members of the ruling Sandinista National Liberation Front party — mayors, judges, police officials, council members and government bureaucrats — have died over the past two months.

All are thought to be victims of the coronavirus, though few have been acknowledged as such, as is the case with most virus fatalities in Nicaragua. Many are officially attributed to “atypical pneumonia.”

The string of fatalities has highlighted the fact that the disease is much more widespread than the government has publicly acknowledged.

And to critics of the government, the deaths underscore the consequences of President Daniel Ortega’s haphazard and politicized response to the pandemic — with no encouragement of wearing masks or social distancing measures, and little testing and no stay-at-home orders or shutdowns. The government held mass gatherings, including a March rally in support of other stricken countries called “Love in the Time of Covid-19.”

Several young epidemiologists, virologists and related specialists said in the medical journal Lancet that Nicaragua’s response “has been perhaps the most erratic of any country in the world to date.”

Officially, the government reports that just 99 people have died from the virus, although the Citizens Covid-19 Observatory, an anonymous group of doctors and activists in Nicaragua, have registered 2,397 probable deaths [....]