15 July 20
We are not over the top yet for July and we still sincerely need your support. However we really need to take a moment to salute those who contribute and sustain Reader Supported News.
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Marc Ash
Founder, Reader Supported News
Founder, Reader Supported News
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14 July 20
The Invention of the Police
Jill Lepore, The New Yorker
Lepore writes: "To police is to maintain law and order, but the word derives from polis - the Greek for 'city,' or 'polity' - by way of politia, the Latin for 'citizenship,' and it entered English from the Middle French police, which meant not constables but government."
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Jill Lepore, The New Yorker
Lepore writes: "To police is to maintain law and order, but the word derives from polis - the Greek for 'city,' or 'polity' - by way of politia, the Latin for 'citizenship,' and it entered English from the Middle French police, which meant not constables but government."
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A rally outside the Montclair, N.J., town hall on July 1. Protesters hung 1,101 absentee ballots to represent the number of votes that weren't counted in a mayoral election that was decided by just 195 votes. (photo: Kate Albright/Montclair Local)
Pam Fessler and Elena Moore, NPR
Excerpt: "Mail-in voting, which tens of millions of Americans are expected to use this November, is fraught with potential problems. Hundreds of thousands of ballots go uncounted each year because people make mistakes, such as forgetting to sign the form or sending it in too late."
Susie Sonneborn of Montclair, N.J., says she tried to be extra-careful to make sure her ballot was postmarked on time when she voted in a mayoral race in May. But when she heard that more than 1,100 ballots — 9% of the total — had been rejected, she checked with the local election office and was shocked to discover that hers was one of them.
"It was just really disappointing and surprising that by following the instructions that are printed on the ballot, I was set up for failure," she says. Sonneborn insists that she didn't see anywhere that her ballot needed to be received within two days of the election to count, which was especially frustrating because the mayor's race was decided by only 195 votes. Residents held a rally outside town hall the day the new mayor was sworn in, calling for officials to "count every vote" in future elections.
Other states are also reporting large numbers of rejected ballots. More than 5% were not counted in Virginia's June primary because they arrived too late. More than 1% of the ballots in Pennsylvania and Nevada were also not counted last month for the same reason.
In Wisconsin's chaotic April primary, 2,659 ballots were rejected for missing the deadline, but the number could have been much higher. About 79,000 ballots were received after Election Day but within a six-day period that was allowed on an emergency basis.
Tens of thousands of other ballots were discarded this year for other reasons, most often because of a missing or mismatched signature. Last week, the League of Women Voters filed suit in New York state, where more than 34,000 absentee ballots — or 14% of the total — were rejected in 2018. The group wants voters to have the opportunity to correct any problems before their ballots are discarded.
Dennis Wyman's undated mug shot. (photo: Torrence Police Department/VICE)
Tess Owen, VICE
Owen writes: "A white man from southern California is facing hate crime and assault charges for allegedly driving into a crowd of Black people after yelling racial slurs at them."
Dennis Wyman, 42, of Redondo Beach, joins a KKK leader and dozens of others in charges linked to the wave of recent car attacks. It’s not clear why the victims were congregating in this case, but the attack bore disturbing similarities to scores of recent incidents targeting Black Lives Matter protesters across the country since George Floyd’s death at the end of May.
Police said that Wyman encountered a group of Black people standing in a hotel parking lot in Torrance, roughly 16 miles southwest of Los Angeles, at about 11.30 p.m. on June 29. Wyman allegedly started to hurl racist insults at the group, before getting in his car and speeding towards them.
One of the individuals in the group, a 50-year-old off-duty security guard, pulled out his handgun and fired several shots at the vehicle before he was hit by the car. By the time police responded to the reports of shots fired, Wyman had allegedly fled. The security guard was taken to hospital where he was treated for “lower extremity injuries.” Wyman was finally located and arrested on July 8.
Since George Floyd was killed by police on May 25, there have been at least 72 car-ramming incidents, according to data compiled by Ari Weil, deputy research director at the Chicago Project on Security and Threats of the University of Chicago.
A slew of distressing videos from protests, which have ended up online, show cars ramming into crowds of people. In at least one case, the results have been deadly. Summer Taylor, 24, was killed during a protest in Seattle earlier this month.
Of the 72 incidents, 65 were by civilian drivers and 7 by law enforcement, Weil found. And of the 65 civilians, 30 have been charged.
Suspects facing charges include the state leader of the Virginia Ku Klux Klan and a man from Bakersfield, California, who had a neo-Nazi tattoo.
All of the incidents are reminiscent of the deadly car attack during the violent Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August 2017. A young neo-Nazi, who had memes glorifying car attacks on his phone, plowed into a crowd of protesters leaving dozens injured and killing Heather Heyer.
Similar memes, often with the hashtag #AllLivesSplatter, have recently proliferated online, according to Weil. The function of those memes is to dehumanize protesters and justify acts of violence, Weil wrote in an NBC News op-ed this week. For example, Weil wrote, one meme shared 5,000 times on Facebook since June showed Jackie Chan with the text ““If your lives matter so much, why do you stand in the middle of the road?”
Weil also pointed out that similar memes circulated in far-right online circles around 2015 and 2016, during a rash of car attacks on Black Lives Matter protesters and Standing Rock protesters.
Migrant looking over the Rio Grande river on International Bridge 1 Las Americas, a legal port of entry which connects Laredo, Texas, in the U.S. with Nuevo Laredo, Mexico. (photo: Marco Ugarte/AP)
"Release Is Only Way to Save Lives": Migrant Families Face Separation as COVID Spreads in ICE Jails
Democracy Now!
Excerpt: "As the United States leads the world in coronavirus infections, we go behind the walls of immigrant jails, where infection rates are also soaring, and also look at how thousands more jailed migrant parents may be separated from their children starting Friday."
Democracy Now!
Excerpt: "As the United States leads the world in coronavirus infections, we go behind the walls of immigrant jails, where infection rates are also soaring, and also look at how thousands more jailed migrant parents may be separated from their children starting Friday."
ESPN. (photo: Getty Images)
ESPN Employees Describe Racism Behind the Camera
Kevin Draper, The New York Times
Draper writes: "The nationwide conversation over systemic racism and equality has prompted a series of discussions and forums at ESPN, where Black employees, many of them behind the cameras, have begun speaking out about the everyday racism and barriers they face at the sports media giant."
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Kevin Draper, The New York Times
Draper writes: "The nationwide conversation over systemic racism and equality has prompted a series of discussions and forums at ESPN, where Black employees, many of them behind the cameras, have begun speaking out about the everyday racism and barriers they face at the sports media giant."
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A woman is briefed on a pre-natal checkup under new safety protocols in Manila. (photo: Ana Santos/Al Jazeera)
Philippines Faces Baby Boom After Lockdown Hits Family Planning
Ana P Santos, Al Jazeera
Santos writes: "Before beginning her daily three-kilometre walk to the government health clinic where she works as a midwife, Stella Marie Alipoon packs a bottle of water for herself and birth control pills, condoms and injectables for the patients she is about to meet."
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Ana P Santos, Al Jazeera
Santos writes: "Before beginning her daily three-kilometre walk to the government health clinic where she works as a midwife, Stella Marie Alipoon packs a bottle of water for herself and birth control pills, condoms and injectables for the patients she is about to meet."
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Nearly 250 U.S. oil and gas companies are expected to file for bankruptcy by the end of next year. (photo: Joshua Doubek/Wikimedia Commons/CC by 3.0)
Bankrupt Fracking Companies Are Harming the Climate and Taxpayers
Climate Nexus
Excerpt: "Fracking companies are going bankrupt at a rapid pace, often with taxpayer-funded bonuses for executives, leaving harm for communities, taxpayers, and workers, the New York Time reports."
Climate Nexus
Excerpt: "Fracking companies are going bankrupt at a rapid pace, often with taxpayer-funded bonuses for executives, leaving harm for communities, taxpayers, and workers, the New York Time reports."
Nearly 250 U.S. oil and gas companies are expected to file for bankruptcy by the end of next year — more than went under in the last five years combined — as demand craters due to the pandemic, a global price war, and falling renewable energy prices. These failing companies often neglect well maintenance and plugged well repairs to save money, causing tons of ultra-heat-trapping methane to continue gushing into the atmosphere.
Shale wells typically cost $300,000 to close — far more than the estimates used by companies, regulators and financial analysts — and an analysis prepared for the Times found companies have failed to reserve sufficient funds, as required by law, to remediate their well sites, leaving taxpayers to foot the cleanup bill.
As a result, early estimates show substantial increases in methane concentrations over Texas and New Mexico oil fields in March and April 2020 compared to the previous year. The Trump administration is seeking to effectively eliminate methane leak detection and repair requirements.
One drilling site, abandoned by Extraction Oil & Gas in Greeley, Colorado, is situated just 700 feet from an elementary school serving the community's fast-growing immigrant population where air pollution monitors recorded 100 periods of elevated levels of toxic benzene over the course of seven months last year.
Those wells were originally planned to lie closer to a more affluent, majority white charter school, but were moved after an outcry from that school's parents. Extraction Oil & Gas paid 18 of its officers and key employees a combined $6.7 million in "retention agreements" last month, three days before it filed for bankruptcy protection.
Extraction is hardly alone, Chesapeake Energy declared bankruptcy in May after paying $25 million in executive bonuses just weeks before. Diamond Offshore Drilling got a $9.7 million COVID-stimulus tax refund in March and then paid its executives the same amount as cash incentives to remain with the company as it undergoes bankruptcy proceedings.
"It seems outrageous that these executives pay themselves before filing for bankruptcy," Kathy Hipple, an analyst at the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis and a finance professor at Bard College told the Times. "These are the same managers who ran these companies into bankruptcy to begin with."
The recent spate of oil & gas bankruptcies hurts the firms' workers as well, with lawsuits against the companies arising from workers injured and killed on the job put on hold.
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