22 August 20
Marc Ash | I Have to Evacuate a Wildfire Zone
My home office is in Sonoma County, California, and our area is threatened by a very dangerous wildfire. If you are reading this, I have been forced to evacuate and I will be offline for at least a few days.
Angela Watters, RSN’s Managing Editor, will be taking over fundraising duties while I am offline. Please lend her your support.
Thank you all very much.
I shall return.
Marc Ash
Founder, Reader Supported News
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22 August 20
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Robert Reich | Trump's "Law and Order" Campaign Is a Distraction
Robert Reich, Robert Reich's Blog
Reich writes: "Trump has refused to act to contain the coronavirus, opting to sit on the sidelines as the pandemic ravages the country. But when it comes to waging violence against his own people, he's quickly risen to the occasion."
Here are 6 ways Donald Trump has failed to attack the coronavirus, but instead has attacked Americans.
1. LEADERSHIP?
Trump has said he has “no responsibility” for the coronavirus pandemic, fobbing it off on governors and mayors whose repeated requests for federal help he’s denied.
But when it comes to assaulting Americans exercising their right to protest in defense of Black lives, Trump is quick to assert strong “leadership.” He called the NYC Black Lives Matter mural a “symbol of hate” and has sent federal agents to terrorize protestors even as mayors and governors urged him to stay out.
2. STRATEGY?
Trump has never offered a national strategy for testing, contact tracing, and isolating those who have the virus. He has provided insufficient funding for the schools he’s trying to force open, abysmal standards for reopening the economy, purchasing critical supplies, or helping the unemployed, and no clear message about what people and businesses should do.
But he has a strategy for attacking Americans. He deployed unidentified federal agents against protesters in Portland, Oregon, where his secret police pulled them into unmarked vans, and detained them without charges. Federal agents have since left the city, causing violence to go down almost immediately, but Trump has threatened to send agents to Kansas City, Albuquerque and Chicago. He also said he’ll send them to New York City, Philadelphia, Detroit, Baltimore and Oakland – not incidentally, all cities with Democratic mayors, large Black populations, and little violent unrest.
3. PERSONNEL?
Trump can’t find enough federal personnel to do contact tracing for the coronavirus.
But Trump has had no problem finding thousands of agents for his secret police, drawn from the Departments of Justice and Homeland Security.
4. EQUIPMENT?
Public health authorities don’t have adequate medical equipment to quickly analyze coronavirus tests.
But Trump’s police have everything they need to injure protesters, including military style armored vehicles, teargas, and tactical assault weapons – “the best equipment,” Trump boasted obnoxiously.
5. LEGAL AUTHORITY?
There is ample legal authority for Trump to contain the coronavirus.
But he’s likely exceeded the legal authority for him to send federal troops into cities where mayors don’t want them. The framers of the Constitution denied police power to the national government. The local officials in charge of public safety have rejected Trump’s troops. (The mayor of Portland was tear-gassed. The mayor of Kansas City called them “disgraceful.” Albuquerque’s mayor announced: “There’s no place for Trump’s secret police in our city.” Chicago’s mayor said she does “not welcome dictatorship.”)
6. THE TRUTH?
Trump has tried to suppress the truth about the coronavirus. The White House instructed hospitals to report cases to the Department of Health and Human Services rather than to the CDC. Trump muzzled the federal government’s most prominent and trusted immunologist, Dr. Anthony Fauci, while the White House tried to discredit him.
But the Trump campaign ran fictitious ads portraying cities as overrun by violent leftwing mobs, and Trump’s shameless Fox News lackeys have consistently depicted protesters as “rioters” and the “armed wing of the Democratic party.”
**
More than 160,000 Americans have already died from the coronavirus — tens of thousands more than would have died had Trump acted responsibly to contain it. And the economy is in freefall. No matter how hard he tries, we can’t let Trump shift public attention from his failure to attack the virus to his attacks on Americans protesting to create an America where Black lives matter and everyone can thrive.In fewer than 90 days, we must hold him accountable at the ballot box.
'Most absentee or mail-in ballots are rejected because required signatures are missing or don't match the one on record, or because the ballot arrives too late.' (photo: Elaine Thompson/AP)
More Than 550,000 Primary Absentee Ballots Rejected in 2020, Far Outpacing 2016
Pam Fessler and Elena Moore, NPR
Excerpt: "An extraordinarily high number of ballots - more than 550,000 - have been rejected in this year's presidential primaries, according to a new analysis by NPR."
That's far more than the 318,728 ballots rejected in the 2016 general election and has raised alarms about what might happen in November when tens of millions of more voters are expected to cast their ballots by mail, many for the first time.
Election experts said first-time absentee voters are much more likely to make the kinds of mistakes that lead to rejected ballots. Studies also show that voters of color and young voters are more likely than others to have their ballots not count.
Most absentee or mail-in ballots are rejected because required signatures are missing or don't match the one on record, or because the ballot arrives too late.
"If something goes wrong with any of this, that's a problem writ large, but it's also going to be one that hits some populations of the United States a bit harder than others, potentially disenfranchises different groups of folks at higher rates," said Rob Griffin of the Democracy Fund, which is conducting a sweeping survey of the 2020 electorate with researchers at UCLA.
Griffin said, so far, about a quarter of those who voted in person in the last election say they plan to vote by mail this November. The same is true for those who have never voted before and will be casting their first ballots in this year's election.
The numbers compiled by NPR are almost certainly an underestimate since not all states have made the information on rejected mail-in ballots available.
Battleground states
Even with limited data, the implications are considerable. NPR found that tens of thousands of ballots have been rejected in key battleground states, where the outcome in November — for the presidency, Congress and other elected positions — could be determined by a relatively small number of votes.
For example, President Trump won Wisconsin in 2016 by almost 23,000 votes. More than 23,000 absentee ballots were rejected in the state's presidential primary in April. More than 37,000 primary ballots were also rejected in June in Pennsylvania, a state Trump won by just over 44,000 votes.
The numbers are also significant because of large partisan differences in how Americans plan to vote this fall. Democrats have expressed more interest than Republicans in voting by mail — 47% to 28% in the Democracy Fund/UCLA survey. Forty-eight percent of those who intend to vote for Joe Biden say they will use mail-in ballots, compared with 23% of Trump supporters.
With so much at stake, the political parties and candidates have made voting options, and the rules that surround them, a central part of their campaigns.
Trump has repeatedly blasted mail-in voting as ripe for widespread fraud despite a lack of evidence. At the same time, Republicans are encouraging their supporters to vote by mail. In fact, Trump and his wife, Melania, did so this week in Florida's primary.
For their part, Democrats are pushing widespread mail-in voting but are also concerned that many of their voters' ballots could be rejected if the rules aren't relaxed. They're in court in more than half the states fighting to extend mail-in ballot deadlines and to waive witness and notary requirements. They also want voters to be given the opportunity to fix errors before their ballots are rejected.
At the same time, Democrats are calling on election offices to make in-person voting and other options available for those who don't want to vote by mail. These concerns have grown in recent weeks with news of cuts in the U.S. Postal Service that could impede ballot delivery.
"The parties are making this political calculus right now," said Daniel Smith, a political scientist at the University of Florida. He said they're trying to balance concerns about mail-in voting with the possibility that people won't turn out in person due to the health risks of voting during a pandemic.
Smith added that the rejection numbers are only part of the picture. He said they don't always take into account mail-in ballots that are initially accepted but then not counted because of other mistakes, such as a voter incorrectly choosing too many candidates or incorrectly circling a candidate's name instead of filling in the bubble next to it.
Such errors are usually caught at the polling place and can be corrected before voters casts their ballots. Most voting machines will also not allow people to overvote accidentally, or choose too many candidates in a given race.
"Those mistakes are avoided when you vote in person," Smith said. "You have seven, 10 people who can assist you in terms of making sure that you know about the ovals having to be filled out." As a result, only about one-hundredth of a percent of in-person ballots are rejected compared with about 1% of mail-in ballots.
Smith found that in Florida's March primary – where 18,000 ballots were rejected — black and Hispanic voters were more likely to be voting by mail for the first time and, if so, were twice as likely to have their ballots rejected than white voters who were voting by mail for the first time. These differences will likely be exacerbated in the general election when turnout is much greater.
"If you have 1% of maybe up to 6 million votes, you're talking tens of thousands of votes that potentially are going to be rejected, and they are not rejected evenly across the electorate," Smith said.
That could not only affect the outcome of the presidential election but other races as well. In 2018 in Florida, Republican Rick Scott beat incumbent Democrat Bill Nelson for the Senate by just over 10,000 votes.
Legal storm clouds
Even though Democratic-leaning voters appear to be most at risk of having their mail-in ballots rejected, Republicans and conservatives have been most vocal about the risks of voting by mail. It's part of a broader campaign to prevent the expansion of mail-in and absentee voting, which they fear Democrats could use to their advantage.
Jason Snead, executive director of the Honest Elections Project, a conservative advocacy group, noted that mail-in voting in the primaries has not only led to thousands of ballots being rejected but widespread confusion. He cited New York City's primary, which took six weeks to resolve, in part because many mail-in ballots were rejected for not having a postmark. A federal judge later ordered those ballots to be counted.
Snead predicted that if the margin of victory in November is "smaller than the number of ballots that have been rejected for various reasons, I think that we can anticipate litigation to change the procedures for tallying those votes," similar to the post-Election Day legal challenges in the 2000 presidential race between George W. Bush and Al Gore.
Democrats and progressive voter groups argue that the answer is not to limit mail-in voting but to eliminate the barriers that lead to rejections in the first place — the focus of their legal challenges of existing rules.
They also said it's crucial that voters know what to do so their ballots aren't rejected. Multiple nonprofit groups and campaigns have launched social media and online efforts encouraging voters to request their mail-in ballots early, learn the rules and return their completed ballots as soon as possible — either by mail, at a secure drop box or at their local election office.
At their presidential nominating convention this week, Democratic leaders repeatedly urged supporters to make sure they have a plan to vote, in person or by mail. "We've got to request our mail-in ballots right now, tonight, and send them back immediately and follow up to make sure they're received. And then, make sure our friends and families do the same," former first lady Michelle Obama said.
Election officials of both parties are also trying to get the word out in an effort to limit ballot rejections. Many states have detailed instructions on their websites on how to get, fill out and return an absentee or mail-in ballot.
This summer, Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson filmed a public service announcement where she filled out her own absentee ballot and explained the process step-by-step.
Pennsylvania, one of the states where the extent of rejected mail-in ballots might well determine the outcome of the election, is planning an ad campaign soon, urging people who have applied for absentee ballots to return them immediately, so they don't risk having them not count because they arrived too late.
Immigration officials have continued to separate some children from their parents at the border. (photo: Eric Gay/AP)
Trump Cabinet Members Voted in 2018 White House Meeting to Separate Migrant Families, Officials Say
Julia Ainsley and Jacob Soboroff, NBC News
Excerpt: "In early May 2018, after weeks of phone calls and private meetings, 11 of the president's most senior advisers were called to the White House Situation Room, where they were asked, by a show-of-hands vote, to decide the fate of thousands of migrant parents and their children, according to two officials who were there."
"If we don't enforce this, it is the end of our country as we know it," said Trump adviser Stephen Miller, according to officials present at a White House meeting.
President Donald Trump's senior adviser Stephen Miller led the meeting, and, according to the two officials, he was angry at what he saw as defiance by Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen.
It had been nearly a month since Jeff Sessions, then the attorney general, had launched the Trump administration's "zero tolerance" policy, announcing that every immigrant who crossed the U.S. border illegally would be prosecuted, including parents with small children. But so far, U.S. border agents had not begun separating parents from their children to put the plan into action, and Miller, the architect of the administration's crackdown on undocumented immigrants, was furious about the delay.
Those invited included Sessions, Nielsen, Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar and newly installed Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, according to documents obtained by NBC News.
Nielsen told those at the meeting that there were simply not enough resources at DHS, nor at the other agencies that would be involved, to be able to separate parents, prosecute them for crossing the border and return them to their children in a timely manner, according to the two officials who were present. Without a swift process, the children would enter into the custody of Health and Human Services, which was already operating at near capacity.
Two officials involved in the planning of "zero tolerance" said the Justice Department acknowledged on multiple occasions that U.S. attorneys would not be able to prosecute all parents expeditiously, so sending children to HHS was the most likely outcome.
As Nielsen had said repeatedly to other officials in the weeks leading up to the meeting, according to two former officials, the process could get messy and children could get lost in an already clogged system.
Miller saw the separation of families not as an unfortunate byproduct but as a tool to deter more immigration. According to three former officials, he had devised plans that would have separated even more children. Miller, with the support of Sessions, advocated for separating all immigrant families, even those going through civil court proceedings, the former officials said.
While zero tolerance ultimately separated nearly 3,000 children from their parents, what Miller proposed would have separated 25,000 more, including those who legally presented themselves at ports of entry seeking asylum, according to Customs and Border Protection data from May and June 2018.
That plan never came to fruition, in large part because DHS officials had argued it would grind the immigration process to a halt. But after Sessions' announcement that all families entering illegally would be prosecuted, the onus had fallen on DHS to act.
At the meeting, Miller accused anyone opposing zero tolerance of being a lawbreaker and un-American, according to the two officials present.
"If we don't enforce this, it is the end of our country as we know it," Miller said, according to the two officials. It was not unusual for Miller to make claims like that, but this time he was adamant that the policy move forward, regardless of arguments about resources and logistics.
No one in the meeting made the case that separating families would be inhumane or immoral, the officials said. Any moral argument about immigration "fell on deaf ears" inside the White House, one of the officials said.
"Miller was tired of hearing about logistical problems," one of the officials said. "It was just 'Let's move forward and staff will figure this out.'"
Frustrated, Miller accused Nielsen of stalling and demanded a show of hands. Who was in favor of moving forward? he asked.
A sea of hands went up. Nielsen kept hers down. It was clear she had been outvoted, according to the officials.
In the days immediately following the meeting, Nielsen had a conversation with Kevin McAleenan, then the Customs and Border Patrol commissioner, in her office at the Ronald Reagan Building and then signed a memo instructing DHS personnel to prosecute all migrants crossing the border illegally, including parents arriving with their children.
Nielsen did so despite her stated reservations in the Situation Room and her having been warned in a legal memo by DHS General Counsel John Mitnick — which was also sent to her chief of staff at the time, Chad Wolf, who is now the acting secretary of DHS — that the decision would result in separation of families. Of the practice, Mitnick wrote, "a court could conclude that the separations are violative of the INA, Administrative Procedure Act, or the Fifth Amendment Due Process clause."
Less than two months later, Trump signed an executive order halting family separations and a federal judge in California ordered family reunifications on the grounds that the separated families' due process rights were violated.
At the time, no plan was in place to track the children who had been separated or to create a system to reunite thousands of separated families, according to the two former officials.
According to an invitation list obtained by NBC News, those expected to be in attendance at the meeting included: Sessions, Nielsen, Miller, Pompeo, Azar, Undersecretary of Defense John Rood, then-White House chief of staff John Kelly, White House deputy chief of staff Chris Liddell, then-White House counsel Don McGahn and Marc Short, who was then director of legislative affairs and is now chief of staff to Vice President Mike Pence.
Asked about the show-of-hands vote, Judd Deere, a White House spokesman, said, "This is absolutely not true and did not happen."
In response to a request for a comment about the meeting and the show of hands, HHS spokesman Michael Caputo said, "This never happened."
The State Department and DHS referred NBC News to the White House. Sessions, Nielsen, Kelly and John Bolton did not respond to requests for comment. McGahn and Rood could not be reached for comment.
Before Trump ended zero tolerance by executive order on June 20, 2018, over 2,800 children had been separated from their parents. When a federal judge ordered the Trump administration to begin reuniting the families it had separated, it became clear that there was no method to track both parent and child as they moved through the system. As a result, some took months to reunite, and, in hundreds of cases, parents were deported from the U.S. without their children.
On May 4, Gary Tomasulo, who was then the senior director for border and transportation security on the National Security Council, sent an email to the deputies and lower-level staffers tasked with carrying out immigration policy, telling them that their bosses had agreed to the new zero tolerance prosecution and separation policy and that they needed to develop plans to support it.
At the time, some of the subordinates to the Cabinet secretaries who were responsible for carrying out zero tolerance had raised moral objections, according to a source familiar with the discussions.
In the email, obtained by NBC News, Tomasulo told the deputies and other subordinates that their bosses "acknowledged that there are no easy solutions, but remained committed to collectively do everything possible to develop innovative solutions that leverage the full resources, capabilities, and authorities of the U.S. government."
He went on to say, "I ask that if you are unable to participate in these meetings, the message of commitment and resolve expressed by our principals is communicated and internalized by those that represent your departments and agencies."
Two police stand at their vehicle. (photo: Guardian Liberty Voice)
Her Former Colleagues Called in a "Wellness Check." Then Police Shot Her to Death.
Natasha Lennard, The Intercept
Lennard writes: "Neurologist Eugene Tolomeo documented an appointment with his patient Sandy Guardiola that took place on October 3, 2017. 'She smiles often,' he wrote. She was in 'good spirits.'"
The killing of Sandy Guardiola at the hands of a cop illustrates the limitations of brutal, armed police responding to community needs.
Guardiola, a parole officer in upstate New York, was scheduled to start work at a new office location following a four-week medical leave after a car accident. She asked the doctor to sign paperwork allowing her to return to her job. She was, he noted, “excited about going back to work.”
When Guardiola’s two adult children spoke to her that week, they said she seemed well. To this day, they do not understand why a police officer was sent to their mother’s apartment in Canandaigua, New York, to carry out a wellness check on October 4. Neither of them had been called, although they were listed as her emergency contacts at work. All they know is that Scott Kadien of the Canandaigua Police Department entered Guardiola’s home without her permission and shot her three times while she was in her bed. She died in the hospital that afternoon.
The police shooting of a Latina woman in a small upstate New York town, with a population that is 96 percent white, did not make national news. Even local coverage was scant. A grand jury declined to charge Kadien, who claimed that Guardiola shot at him first (she legally owned a gun, owing to her job).
Amid national antiracist uprisings, however, with renewed focus on the plague of racist police killings, Guardiola’s son and daughter are pushing for their mother’s story to become known. Hers is one of all too many deaths that illustrate the risk of entrusting police forces with overseeing community wellness. And, like most every police killing, the story of Guardiola’s death is one of cop impunity, unanswered questions, and ongoing injustice.
“Everything we’ve turned up about this case has been outrage after outrage,” said Luna Droubi, an attorney representing Guardiola’s children, Andrew and Alysa Ocasio. In 2018, the family filed a federal civil rights suit against the Canandaigua police, the city, Kadien, Guardiola’s apartment complex, and her employer. The case is ongoing, with Guardiola’s children striving to correct the public record about their mother’s death. Droubi told me that even the wellness-check request call, which catalyzed the deadly course of events, was “illogical.”
The call was made by parole officers in Rochester, New York, where Guardiola had stopped working prior to her accident, having already chosen to transfer to a different location. According to her children, Guardiola said she faced discrimination in the Rochester office; she was due to start work in Binghamton, New York, following her approved medical leave.
Yet it was her former office colleagues who called 911 to request a wellness check. Guardiola did not pick up her phone or respond to knocks on her apartment door. Her children believe that she had gone to bed in the afternoon, taken a sleeping aid, and put in ear plugs, knowing that she’d have to wake up extremely early the next day to embark on her new, three-hour commute to work.
The police officer, Kadien, entered Guardiola’s apartment with a master key fob. He claims that he announced himself many times and only fired his weapon after Guardiola shot first. A bullet from Guardiola’s gun was indeed found at the scene, but in the wall far to the side of where Kadien had stood to shoot her. The trajectory of that bullet, and the nature of the bullet wounds in Guardiola’s body, her children’s legal team says, suggest that she was defensively covering her face when her weapon went off. According to a statement from the attorneys’ firm, which hired a renowned forensic pathologist to review the case, “the evidence clearly suggests that Ms. Guardiola was shot while she was reaching for her weapon and that at no time did she pose a threat to Sergeant Kadien.” As Droubi told me, “the forensics speak for themselves.”
Other troubling details haunt the scene. Why, for example, did the officer call for police backup after the shooting, before calling for the emergency medical technicians who were on standby across the street? There was a 10-minute gap, while Guardiola was still alive yet bleeding to death, between the shots firing and the medics being summoned. Why was Guardiola put in handcuffs? “They were supposed to be there for her wellness, not to apprehend a criminal,” her 24-year-old daughter, Alysa, told me.
And why, in the immediate aftermath, did law enforcement officials lead Guardiola’s family to believe that she had effectively committed suicide-by-cop? “I had just spoken to her,” Alysa said, echoing the words of the doctor that she had been in “good spirits” and was making future plans. “We knew something was very off,” Guardiola’s son, Andrew, said of the police narrative.
The recent antiracist uprisings have given rise to crucial and long overdue challenges to the role of policing in the U.S. A vast array of roles performed by cops, to the detriment of so many lives, should be carried out by social, health care, and community workers, untangled from a system of criminal justice, surveillance, and violence. Resource redistribution is necessary for wellness; the brutal policing of Black, Indigenous, and Latinx communities is not.
“There needs to be a change in how wellness checks are done, and who does them,” Alysa said. “You see it all around the country — people having manic episodes being killed or detained.”
Within the white supremacist context of this country, where Black, Indigenous, and other people of color are framed as a threat, summoning the police for wellness checks risks sentencing to death the person whose wellness is purportedly at stake. In New York, Chicago, North Carolina, Alabama, Minneapolis, and elsewhere in recent years, people — predominantly Black people — have been shot by police called for wellness checks. The very notion that armed cops are best suited to deal with an unwell person is belied by the sheer fact that disabled individuals make up a third to a half of all people killed by law enforcement officers. Guardiola was not ill, as her doctor had attested. Had she been, it’s hard to imagine a universe in which sending an armed cop into her apartment would be a solution toward wellness.
Police killings like Guardiola’s clarify the American myth of a citizen’s protected private property. White property is inviolable. The discriminatory application of “Stand Your Ground” laws make this clear. So, too, do spectacles like that of wealthy, white supporters of President Donald Trump imperiously pointing guns at Black Lives Matter protesters from an ostentatious mansion.
Racism and property are intractably bound in a country built by people owned as property, on stolen land. Police raids, deadly so-called wellness checks, and no-knock searches, not to mention the patrolling of public housing — all examples of how the state continues to treat the property of Black, Indigenous, and other communities of color as violable. For months, Breonna Taylor’s name has been chanted at protests across the country. She was murdered in March by plainclothes officers in Louisville, Kentucky, who entered her home on a no-knock search warrant. Taylor and her partner believed there were intruders in their home, because there were.
Andrew has been attending numerous Black Lives Matter rallies and protests in recent months. While his mother was Latina, not Black, he rightly sees her death as part of an unbroken history of racist police killings. “If my mom was a white woman, I think the whole interaction in her apartment would have maybe gone differently,” he said. He told me that since his mother moved to Canandaigua just three months prior to her death, she had often told him about receiving stares from the town’s majority-white residents. Alysa said that her mother’s new office transfer was part of a longer-term plan to move downstate and away from that environment.
In certain ways, Guardiola’s children recognize that their mother’s story is unusual in a movement antagonistic to the police and the carceral system. She was, after all, a parole officer. She had previously worked as a corrections officer on Rikers Island, the infamous New York City jail, before obtaining a master’s degree in social work from Columbia University and retraining as a parole officer. She specialized in working with parolees with mental health issues, and both her kids spoke of her desire to bring her caring attitude to her work, which adds a dark irony to her death in the context of a wellness check orchestrated by that same system.
Neither of Guardiola’s children approach their advocacy for their mother from an abolitionist stance; they want to see reform and, at the very least, Alysa said, “recognition of wrongdoing” where there has been none.
“At first, I held onto the hope that since my mother was a law enforcement official, that the system that she served would serve her,” said Andrew.
Her death, and the lack of any accountability for it, make clear the response to the slogan chanted again and again by protesters at police: “Who do you protect? Who do you serve?” The answer is very few people indeed.
'Julia Salazar's 2018 race was won through a massive mobilization of canvassers.' (photo: Erik McGregor/Pacific Press/LightRocket/Getty Images)
New York's Successful Socialist Slate Shows the Left Should Think Big
Rachel Himes and Ansley Pentz, Jacobin
Excerpt: "In New York City, the Democratic Socialists of America ran a five-candidate slate for state office - and won across the board. The campaign's overwhelming success points to a model of radical electoral organizing in the wake of Bernie Sanders."
READ MORE
Activists in Santiago, Chile, hold a protest in solidarity with the people who were shot in their eyes. (photo: Federico Rotter/NurPhoto/PA Images)
Chile: Authorities Arrest Police Who Left a Young Protester Blind
teleSUR
Excerpt: "Chile's Prosecutor's Office Friday reported the arrest of the policeman who fired rubber pellets at Gustavo Gatica and left him blind in October 2019, when thousands of Chileans took to the streets to protest against the economic policy of President Sebastian Piñera."
READ MORE
Firefighters make a stand in the backyard of a home in front of the advancing CZU Lightning Complex fire in Boulder Creek, California. (photo: Marcio José Sánchez/AP)
California Wildfires: States Send Help as Wine Country and Bay Area Burn
Associated Press
Excerpt: "Firefighters and aircraft from 10 states began arriving in California on Friday to help weary crews battling some of the largest blazes in state history, as weekend weather threatened to renew the advance of flames that have killed six and incinerated hundreds of homes."
Some 560 wildfires were burning throughout the state but many were small and remote. The bulk of damage was from three clusters of blazes ravaging forest and rural areas in the wine country and San Francisco Bay Area.
Those complexes, consisting of dozens of fires, exploded in size on Friday. Together, they had scorched 991 square miles and destroyed more than 500 homes and other buildings, fire officials said. At least 100,000 people were under evacuation orders.
Two Bay Area clusters, the LNU Lightning Complex and the SCU Lightning Complex, became respectively the second- and third-largest wildfires in recent state history by size, according to Cal Fire records.
The third blaze, the CZU Lightning Complex, is in San Mateo and Santa Cruz counties.
The fires were sparked by lightning. Cooler, more humid weather overnight helped firefighters make ground against the fires but the National Weather Service issued a fire weather watch from Sunday morning into Tuesday for the entire Bay Area and central coast. Forecasters said there was a chance of thunderstorms bringing more lightning and erratic gusts.
More than 12,000 personnel were fighting fires around the state, aided by fleets of helicopters and fixed-wing aircraft. By Friday, the state’s fire agency, Cal Fire, had called out 96% of available fire engines. Reinforcements began to arrive.
The number of personnel assigned to the LNU complex, in the heart of wine country north of San Francisco, more than doubled from 580 to more than 1,400 and nearly 200 fire engines were on the scene, fire officials said.
“I’m happy to see the jumps that we’ve had today,” said Sean Kavanaugh, Cal Fire incident commander.
That could help crews make further progress against the fire, which was just 15% contained. Most evacuations for the town of Vacaville were lifted. The fire threat there was reduced after reaching the edges of town.
“I feel like we’re up on our feet, standing straight and actually moving a little bit forward,” Kavanaugh said.
However, the number of large fires was “staggering” and had put “tremendous strain” on firefighting resources throughout the western states, he said. Nevada and Arizona, for example, have battled sizable blazes this week as a heat wave swept the west.
Governor Gavin Newsom said 10 states were sending personnel and equipment. The governor also said he was reaching out to Canada and Australia.
“We have more people but it’s not enough,” Newsom said.
In the Santa Cruz mountains south of San Francisco, about 1,000 firefighters were battling a fire 10 times the size they typically would cover, said Dan Olsen, a Cal Fire spokesman.
With resources tight, homes in remote places burned unattended. Cal Fire chief Mark Brunton pleaded with residents to quit battling fires on their own, saying that just causes more problems for the professionals.
“We had last night three separate rescues that pulled our vital, very few resources away,” he said.
But Peter Koleckai credits a neighbor, not firefighters, with saving his home in a rural area where dozens of homes were reduced to smoldering ruins.
“We were here at about three o’clock in the morning and the fire department just left. They just left,” he said.
Koleckai said he ran to a firefighter and told him a brush fire was erupting next to a house.
“They never went up there and it engulfed the whole house, took the house out,” he said.
A neighbor with a high pressure hose, firefighting equipment and a generator saved his home, Koleckai said.
Cal Fire battalion chief Mike Smith said typically a wildfire of the size burning through the region would have 10 or even 20 times as many firefighters.
“We are doing absolutely everything we can,” he said.
The death toll has reached at least six. Three bodies were found on Thursday in a burned home in Napa county, said Henry Wofford, a sheriff’s spokesman.
A man died in neighboring Solano county, and a Pacific Gas & Electric utility worker was found dead in a vehicle in the Vacaville area. Also on Wednesday, a helicopter pilot died in a crash while dropping water on a blaze in Fresno county.
Smoke and ash billowing from the fires has fouled the air throughout the San Francisco Bay Area and along California’s scenic central coast.
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