15 August 20
We Have to Be Able to Trust You on Donations
At a point we have to make a decision between focusing our efforts on raising money or reporting, informing and making a difference. When raising money begins to dominate the process we can’t spend the time we need to spend on doing what our readers want us to do, what we want to do.
That requires a degree of trust that our readers will take funding the organization seriously enough that we are not forced to divert an unreasonable amount of our energy away from our mission to fundraising.
Trust matters. You have a stake in this too.
Marc Ash
Founder, Reader Supported News
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15 August 20
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Reader Supported News
ACLU | Dismantle the Department of Homeland Security. Its Tactics Are Fearsome.
Anthony D. Romero, ACLU
Romero writes: "As an organization dedicated to civil liberties, civil rights, and the rule of law, we at the American Civil Liberties Union believe that the government has both the authority and responsibility to enforce its laws - laws that promote justice, equality, and the general welfare."
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An election judge in Minneapolis receives an absentee ballot from a primary voter at a drive-through drop-off point Tuesday. (photo: Stephen Maturen/Getty Images)
Postal Service Tells 46 States That Mail-In Ballots May Not Arrive in Time to Be Counted
Erin Cox, Elise Viebeck, Jacob Bogage and Christopher Ingraham, The Washington Post
Excerpt: "Anticipating an avalanche of absentee ballots, the U.S. Postal Service recently sent detailed letters to 46 states and D.C. warning that it cannot guarantee all ballots cast by mail for the November election will arrive in time to be counted - adding another layer of uncertainty ahead of the high-stakes presidential contest."
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Minneapolis Officer Derek Chauvin is seen struggling to force George Floyd into the back seat of a police SUV in newly released body camera video recorded by Officer Tou Thao. (photo: Hennepin County/MPR/YouTube/NPR)
Body Camera Video of George Floyd and Police Offers New Details of Deadly Encounter
Brakkton Booker, NPR
Booker writes: "Newly released officer-worn body camera video is giving a fuller view of the tense scene in which George Floyd was killed in Minneapolis on Memorial Day. In it, bystanders clamor for officers to check Floyd's vital signs as Officer Derek Chauvin holds his knee on the man's neck."
The video, from former Officer Tou Thao, shows another vantage of Floyd's arrest as well as Thao's interactions with a crowd of bystanders. The recording was released by a judge's order in Hennepin County, Minn.
In the video, Thao seems to get increasingly agitated as the crowd becomes more vocal. Onlookers repeatedly ask him why Floyd's vital signs aren't being checked as other officers hold Floyd, who is handcuffed, on the pavement.
Floyd can be heard pleading with officers for air, including telling them, "I can't breathe" — the complaint that's been repeated by thousands of protesters as they call for an end to systemic racism and police brutality across the U.S. and internationally.
At one point, Thao tells the crowd, "This is why you don't do drugs, kids."
One bystander, a Black man in a black hoodie and shorts, tells the officers he trained at the police academy. He asks Thao about the tactic Chavin is using, asking if it's a "jiu-jitsu move."
Referring to Floyd, Thao repeatedly says, "He's talking, so he's fine."
Thao also tells the onlookers that officers tried for 10 minutes to get Floyd in the back of the police vehicle, although the actual time appears to have been less than five.
Thao arrived on the scene after Floyd was cuffed, and as fellow officers Chauvin, Alexander Kueng and Thomas Lane were struggling to place Floyd in the back of a police SUV.
All four officers have since been fired and charged in connection with Floyd's death. Chauvin faces a second-degree murder charge, while Thao, Kueng and Lane each face charges of aiding and abetting.
In the video, Thao primarily engages in crowd control as people gather on the sidewalk near the rear of the police vehicle. While Floyd appears at times, the video largely does not show what happened to him as he was held down on the pavement. Instead, it shows the crowd's reactions — which range from concern to anger.
Floyd died after Chauvin kneeled on his neck for several minutes. The Minneapolis officers initially confronted Floyd on the suspicion of using a counterfeit $20 bill to purchase cigarettes.
At about the 8:43 mark in the video, the man in the hoodie steps off the sidewalk and into the street, moving toward where Floyd is in the street. Thao yells at the man to get back on the sidewalk.
Moments later, a white woman identifies herself as a Minneapolis firefighter as she approaches Thao and asks if Floyd has a pulse. He yells at her to get back on the sidewalk as well.
Things grow more tense as men and women in the crowd implore the officers to check on Floyd. As they do, some of them shout expletives at the officers.
"He's f***ing dead, bro," the man in the hoodie shouts as he steps into the street again.
Thao shoves the man back toward the sidewalk. He had taken out his cellphone to begin recording Floyd lying on the pavement.
"Don't not touch me again," Thao yells. People on the sidewalk shout back at Thao that the Black man never touched him.
Thao also pushes, though not as forcefully, a man wearing a white T-shirt, sending him back toward the sidewalk as people try to step into the street to get a better view of what's happening to Floyd.
The video is the latest officer-worn footage from the Minneapolis case to be released this week. On Monday, video captured by ex-Officers Lane and Kueng was released following a legal challenge by a group of media companies arguing for their public release, as the Star Tribune reported.
The Star Tribune also noted Robert Paule, Thao's attorney, filed his client's body camera video with the court to support a motion to get criminal charges against him dropped.
"Paule has argued in court filings that the case should be dropped because Thao was focused on crowd control and didn't have a full view of what was happening as three of his former colleagues restrained Floyd, among other reasons," the paper reported.
Hennepin County District Judge Peter Cahill is scheduled to hear oral arguments Sept. 11 on motions filed on behalf of Lane and Thao.
Immigrant children in a detention center. (photo: Ross D. Franklin)
120 Children Remain in ICE Detention Despite Court Order for Them to Be Released Due to COVID-19 Concerns
Jasmine Aguilera, TIME
Aguilera writes: "At least 120 children remain in detention by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), more than two weeks after the July 27 deadline set by a court order requiring the agency release them because of the health risk posed by COVID-19."
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White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany takes questions from journalists who are wearing masks and practicing social distancing at the White House. (photo: Jabin Botsford/WP)
White House Plants Pro-Trump Conspiracy Theorists Among Reporters in Briefing Room
Robert Mackey, The Intercept
Mackey writes: "In an apparent effort to make his daily news conferences even more like campaign events than they already are, the White House press office has been packing the briefing room with supporters of President Donald Trump from far-right media outlets who can be relied on to toss him softball questions and initiate attacks on his political rivals."
At every briefing this week, the president took a question from a website dedicated to smearing his political rivals.
Clearly in on the plot, Trump solicited a question each day this week from one of the guests invited by his press secretary, Kayleigh McEnany, to stand at the back of the room — where representatives of One America News, The Epoch Times and Gateway Pundit compromised the health of reporters by violating social distancing and mask-wearing guidelines.
On Monday, Trump called on Chanel Rion, a far-right Republican operative and conspiracy theorist now working as a correspondent for One America News, a San Diego cable channel dedicated to spreading lies about Joe Biden and elderly protesters battered by the police.
Rion gave Trump the opportunity to unleash a familiar riff from his pre-pandemic rallies by suggesting to him that Biden might have been considering President Barack Obama’s former national security adviser, Susan Rice, as his running mate because, “she can best cover up a lot of the Obamagate surveillance crimes that have taken place during your campaign.” Trump responded by accusing Obama and Biden of “probably treason.”
The next day, Rion triggered another familiar Trump diatribe by asking for his take on the resignation of Carmen Best, the first Black woman to lead Seattle’s police force, after the city council voted to cut her department’s budget. “What does this say about our country?” Rion asked Trump. “And what does this say about the Defund Police movement?” The president replied by repeating the lie that Seattle’s Democratic mayor had let “a radical left group, Antifa and others, take over a big portion of the city.”
On Wednesday, Rion drew Trump’s attention to what looked like a fairly lame conservative prank — the fact that the obscure website antifa.com was suddenly redirecting traffic to Biden’s campaign site. Suggesting that this stunt might somehow indicate support for Biden from the loose network of antifascist groups Trump has falsely portrayed as a shadow army, Rion asked if the president thought Biden and his running mate, Sen. Kamala Harris, should “publicly denounce the Antifa as a domestic terrorist organization?”
“They should,” Trump replied. “I think they’re afraid to. In my book, it’s virtually a part of their campaign: Antifa.” There was nothing remotely surprising in Trump making the absurd argument that Biden, a centrist Democrat, is secretly part of an antifascist subculture, but Rion’s play-acting as a White House correspondent is not intended to elicit any new information from the president. The point of these exchanges is to shield Trump from actual questions about his failure to lead a coordinated federal response to the Covid-19 pandemic and to give him an opportunity to repeat lines he has already rehearsed, delivered as if they were answers to questions of vital importance.
Rion, who has been attending briefings as a guest of the White House press secretary since April, previously traveled to Ukraine with the president’s lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, to promote false accusations about Biden spread by the pro-Russian lawmaker Andriy Derkach. An American intelligence assessment released last week concluded that Derkach was involved in a Russian plot to undermine Biden’s candidacy and the Democratic Party by “spreading claims about corruption — including through publicizing leaked phone calls” from 2016 between the former vice president and Ukraine’s president.
On Thursday, shortly after Trump praised the crackpot legal scholar who invented a racist conspiracy theory that Harris was not eligible to be vice president, even though she was born to immigrant parents in Oakland, he turned again to Rion. This time, however, she asked if he would, instead, take a question from Emel Akan of The Epoch Times, another of his press secretary’s guests from an equally rabid pro-Trump media outlet.
When Trump agreed, Akan asked him how the U.S. would respond to “the recent attack on press freedom in Hong Kong,” specifically the arrest of the publisher of the popular Apple Daily tabloid news site, Jimmy Lai, who has been an outspoken critic of the pro-Beijing leadership in the semiautonomous Chinese city. Lai could be charged with “collusion” with the United States for meeting Vice President Mike Pence and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo in Washington last summer to discuss Hong Kong’s pro-democracy protest movement.
Although Trump began by saying, “Well, I think it’s a terrible thing,” he appeared to have little familiarity or interest in the subject of press freedom, or democracy in Hong Kong, pivoting quickly into his stock complaints about China’s trade policies. He even seemed to gloat a bit when he said that, as a result of the U.S. withdrawing the “tremendous financial incentives” for businesses based in Hong Kong, American companies might profit from the crackdown on the territory.
“We’ve now withdrawn all of those incentives. It’s going to be very hard for Hong Kong to compete,” Trump said. “And I will tell you that the United States… will end up making a lot more money because of it, because we lost a lot of business to Hong Kong,” he added. “We made it very convenient for people to go there, for companies to go there. We’ve withdrawn all of that and the United States will be a big beneficiary from an economic standpoint.”
While Trump’s answer was not the kind of stirring endorsement of press freedom Akan might have expected from an American president, inciting an attack on China’s government was probably gratifying to the owners of The Epoch Times. The paper is owned by members of the dissident Chinese Falun Gong spiritual movement who have spent heavily to promote Trump as a useful battering ram against their ultimate enemy: the Chinese Communist Party that considers the banned sect a cult. An Epoch Times coronavirus explainer video echoes Trump’s rhetoric that China is to blame for the global pandemic, but urges people to call it not “the China Virus,” as Trump does, but the “CCP Virus.”
The White House press secretary’s invitation to the Epoch Times writer to participate in the briefing alongside reporters and photographers from some of America’s leading news organizations is remarkably brazen given that last year, when The Epoch Times was the largest buyer of pro-Trump ads on Facebook outside of the president’s own campaign, the site spent heavily to promote the baseless conspiracy theory that Biden had abused his power as vice president in 2016 to protect his son’s business interests in Ukraine.
Since then, the site has been banned from advertising on Facebook, after NBC reported that the newspaper had secretly placed Facebook ads promoting President Trump. Last week, Facebook also removed 303 fake accounts linked to The Epoch Times for spreading misinformation about Covid-19 and pro-Trump conspiracy theories about supposedly shadowy figures behind the ongoing racial justice protests in the wake of George Floyd’s murder.
On Friday, after Trump twice refused to answer a question from The Associated Press about whether he believes the QAnon conspiracy theory in which he is a central figure, he solicited one from Alicia Powe, a proponent of the Pizzagate conspiracy theory who writes for the far-right Gateway Pundit blog.
Powe, who has claimed that the Clinton Foundation controls the FBI and is stifling investigations of child sex-trafficking rings and the murder of Seth Rich, asked Trump to comment on the accusation that Biden had claimed credit for the normalization of relations between Israel and the United Arab Emirates.
Powe’s question was based on a blog post by the founder of Gateway Pundit, Jim Hoft, which amplified an attack on Biden from the Kremlin-owned site Russia Today. Hoft’s post also quotes the analysis of Heshmat Alavi, a supporter of a militant Iranian cult called the Mojahedin-e-Khalq, who, as my colleague Murtaza Hussain revealed last year, is a fictional character.
McEnany did not respond to a question about whether she or someone else in her office invited Powe to the briefing on Friday, but Powe is a former blogger for WorldNetDaily, the far-right website that helped create the racist “birther” conspiracy theory to undermine President Barack Obama. Alyssa Farah, the White House director of strategic communications, is the daughter of Joseph Farah, who founded WorldNetDaily. In the 1990s, Joseph Farah was a leading proponent of the conspiracy theory that deputy White House counsel Vince Foster might have been murdered.
The presence of Rion, Akan and Powe also infuriated the White House Correspondents Association, whose members have agreed to send only 14 reporters a day during the pandemic, to maintain safe social distance. The WHCA also wants the aisles at the sides and the back of the room to be open for photographers and video crews to operate safely. “It is outrageous that the White House continues to invite ‘guests’ to press briefings, putting the health and safety of everyone in that workspace at greater risk,” the WHCA president, Zeke Miller, said in an email. “The WHCA’s social distancing guidelines were crafted in consultation with the White House based on the recommendations of the CDC and the nation’s leading public health professionals. Trampling on those guidelines endangers the critical work of reporters who have maintained independent press coverage of the presidency throughout the pandemic.”
Unlike the original, freewheeling coronavirus task force briefings — which came to a sudden halt in April when Trump mused that doctors should “check” to see if injecting patients suffering from Covid-19 with bleach or isopropyl alcohol, or exposing them to ultraviolet light, might cure them — the president’s current news conferences are much shorter and seem designed mainly to get his lengthy, written opening statements on the air and get him out of the briefing room after taking just a handful of questions.
Trump’s opening statements at the latest briefings are often nakedly political in nature, featuring crude, jarring attacks on Biden and other Democrats. “Today, we saw Joe Biden continue to politicize a pandemic and to show his appalling lack of respect for the American people. That’s what it is,” Trump said at the start of Thursday’s briefing. “At every turn, Biden has been wrong about the virus, ignoring the scientific evidence and putting left-wing politics before facts and evidence.”
After then blatantly lying about Biden’s suggested response to the pandemic in the most idiotic terms — “Sleepy Joe rejects the scientific approach in favor of locking all Americans in their basements for months on end” — Trump concluded, with a stunning lack of self-awareness: “To Joe, I would say: Stop playing politics with a virus. Too serious. Partisan politics has no place here. It’s a shameful situation for anybody to try and score political points while we’re working to save lives and defeat the pandemic.”
Trump’s prepared remarks at these briefings almost always feature highly misleading health and economic statistics intended to convey the false impression that the federal government’s pandemic response is the envy of the world.
At Tuesday’s briefing, for example, Trump said in his opening statement: “Since the end of July, the seven-day average for cases in the United States has fallen by nearly 20 percent, but the virus continues to increase in nations across the globe. Last week, France and Germany both recorded their highest daily number of new cases in three months — not that I want to bring that up, but might as well explain it to the media.” While those statistical measures of the increase by percentage of new cases in Europe and decrease by percentage in the U.S. were accurate, what they hid was the fact that, in raw numbers, the pandemic is obviously far less under control here than there. The day Trump made those remarks, 53,315 new Covid-19 infections were confirmed by testing in the U.S. Germany’s highest number of daily infections in three months, recorded this week, was 1,445. Cases are down more in the U.S. but from a very high level to a slightly less high level. In much of Europe, cases are rising but from very low baseline. Adjusted for population, the U.S. recorded 154 new cases per million on Friday, while France had 41 and Germany 17.
While the pandemic is resurgent in many parts of the world, Trump has been unable so far to brow-beat the public into accepting his obviously false claims that things are better in the United States than in Europe or Asia. A new poll released by Monmouth University on Thursday showed that 52 percent of Americans “think the United States’ handling of the pandemic is worse than other countries,” while just 15 percent feel the U.S. is doing a better job than others and 29 percent say it is doing about the same.
Workers at the potash producer Belaruskali, where strikes in Belarus have spread in recent days. (photo: bnpunion/Instagram)
Belarus: Workers Strike Against Election Fraud
Maxim Edwards, Jacobin
Edwards writes: "In the days after Alexander Lukashenko stole Belarus's election, the state has unleashed intense repression against all who dared to protest. But now workers from metro drivers to oil refinery employees have gone on strike against Lukashenko's fraud - a powerful stand for their democratic rights."
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UQ study lead Francisca Ribeiro inspects oysters. The study of five different seafoods revealed plastic in every sample. (photo: University of Queensland)
Seafood Study Finds Plastic in 100% of Samples
Tiffany Duong, EcoWatch
Duong writes: "A new study of five different kinds of seafood revealed traces of plastic in every sample tested."
Researchers bought raw samples of popular seafood from a market in Australia, including 10 oysters, 10 farmed tiger prawns, 10 wild squid, five wild blue crab and 10 wild sardines, reported Daily Mail. At least trace levels of plastic contamination were found in each, with the highest content found in sardines, according to the research.
The scientists used a new technique to identify and measure five different types of plastics contained within the tissues of each sample of seafood simultaneously, reported Intrafish. They did so in order to better understand the potential harm microplastics in seafood could have on human health, lead author Francisca Ribeiro said in a University of Queensland press release.
The study, published by the University of Exeter and the University of Queensland in Environmental Science & Technology, found greatly varying amounts of plastic in each of the different types of seafood tested as well as in the individual species, said a University of Exeter press release.
"From the edible marine species tested, sardines had the highest plastic content, which was a surprising result," Riberio told the University of Queensland. "Another interesting aspect was the diversity of microplastic types found among species, with polyethylene predominant in fish and polyvinyl chloride the only plastic detected in oysters."
Riberio compared the exposure levels to microplastics in the University of Exeter release: "Considering an average serving, a seafood eater could be exposed to approximately 0.7mg of plastic when ingesting an average serving of oysters or squid, and up to 30mg of plastic when eating sardines, respectively …. For comparison, 30mg is the average weight of a grain of rice."
The new method is a "major step forward" towards plastic quantification techniques in seafood because it allows results to be reported in a mass unit, something wasn't possible before, noted the University of Queensland release.
"We can now define what microplastic levels can be considered harmful to human health," Ribeiro said in the release.
The plastics found by the scientists are commonly used in plastic packaging and synthetic textiles, including polystyrene, polyethylene, polyvinyl chloride, polypropylene and poly (methyl methacrylate), reported Intrafish. Polyvinyl chloride was found in all samples, while the plastic found in highest concentrations was polyethylene, the world's most popular plastic, reported Daily Mail.
These plastics frequently end up in waterways and oceans, where they continue to break down into microplastics, very small pieces of plastics that are often eaten by marine creatures of all sizes and types. Microplastics are absorbed by plankton, bioaccumulate as they are carried up the food chain and eventually end up on our plates, reported Energy Live News.
Humans are exposed to microplastics not only in the seafood we eat, but also through bottled water, sea salt, beer, honey, and even dust that settles on our meals, the University of Exeter release said.
"We do not fully understand the risks to human health of ingesting plastic, but this new method will make it easier for us to find out," co-author Tamara Galloway said in the release.
The next phase of the research will seek to identify the sources of the plastic contamination found in the seafood tested, noted the University of Queensland release.
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