23 August 20
Marc Ash | Back Online
For the second time in less than a year I was confronted with a Mandatory Evacuation Order (MEO) as wildfires in the area threatened lives, homes and businesses. The scope of the damage isn’t clear yet but it will be substantial.
When a wildfire is active in the area and an MEO has been issued the time has come to pack as much as you can into you vehicle, if you have one and prepare to get out. That’s actually not the worst scenario, the worst case is the fire arrives without warning as was the case in the 2017 Tubbs fire. Where the fire struck with such suddenness residents barely had time to get out alive. Some in fact did not.
As a result of all this I have been offline for about 36 hours. RSN Managing Editor Angela Waters did a wonderful job of keeping the fundraising drive going. Many of you responded and we are all truly grateful.
I’ll have a longer report in a few days. But now it back to work and raising a budget for RSN.
Marc Ash
Founder, Reader Supported News
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23 August 20
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NORTHERN CALIFORNIA IS ABLAZE | Dearest Readers: Northern California is ablaze. People are choking on smoke. How did these fires start? Lightning from remnants of a tropical depression in the Pacific sparked these fires. The climate crisis is here, my friends, and publisher Marc Ash is smack dab in the middle of it. RSN runs stories about climate change and its effects daily. Please give what you can. – Angela Watters, Managing Editor of Reader Supported News
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Washington Post Editorial Board | A Second Trump Term Might Injure the Democratic Experiment Beyond Recovery
Editorial Board, The Washington Post
Excerpt: "After he is nominated at a pared-down Republican convention next week, President Trump will make this argument to the American people: Things were great until China loosed the novel coronavirus on the world. If you reelect me, I will make things great again."
Seeking reelection in the midst of the worst public health crisis and sharpest economic downturn of our lifetimes, this may, realistically, be the only argument left to him. But, fittingly for a president who has spoken more than 20,000 lies during his presidency, it rests on two huge falsehoods.
One is that the nation, his presidency and, above all, Mr. Trump himself are innocent victims of covid-19. In fact, his own negligence, ignorance and malpractice turned what would have been a daunting challenge for any president into a national disaster.
The other is that there was anything to admire in his record before the virus struck. It is true that the economic growth initiated under President Barack Obama had continued, at about the same modest rate. Mr. Trump achieved this growth by ratcheting up America’s deficit and long-term debt to record levels, with a tax cut that showered benefits on the wealthy.
But beyond the low unemployment rate he gained and lost, history will record Mr. Trump’s presidency as a march of wanton, uninterrupted, tragic destruction. America’s standing in the world, loyalty to allies, commitment to democratic values, constitutional checks and balances, faith in reason and science, concern for Earth’s health, respect for public service, belief in civility and honest debate, beacon to refugees in need, aspirations to equality and diversity and basic decency — Mr. Trump torched them all.
Four years ago, after Mr. Trump was nominated in Cleveland, we did something in this space we had never done before: Even before the Democrats had nominated their candidate, we told you that we could never, under any circumstances, endorse Donald Trump for president. He was, we said, “uniquely unqualified” to be president.
“Mr. Trump’s politics of denigration and division could strain the bonds that have held a diverse nation together,” we warned. “His contempt for constitutional norms might reveal the nation’s two-century-old experiment in checks and balances to be more fragile than we knew.”
The nation has indeed spent much of the past three-plus years fretting over whether that experiment could survive Mr. Trump’s depredations. The resistance from some institutions, at some times, has been heartening. The depth of the president’s incompetence, which even we could not have imagined, may have saved the democracy from a more rapid descent.
But the trajectory has been alarming. The capitulation of the Republican Party has been nauseating. Misbehavior that many people vowed never to accept as normal has become routine.
A second term might injure the experiment beyond recovery.
And so, over the coming weeks, we will do something else we have never done before: We will publish a series of editorials on the damage this president has caused — and the danger he would pose in a second term. And we will unabashedly urge you to do your civic duty and vote: Vote early and vote safely, but vote.
“I alone can fix it,” Mr. Trump proclaimed at his convention four years ago.
How has that turned out?
His campaign, as our columnist Michael Gerson has noted, was based on the premises that Mr. Obama and all his predecessors had made such a botch of things that nothing could get worse — and that expertise and moral leadership were not only irrelevant, they were handicaps.
Mr. Trump has decisively refuted these premises.
By most objective measures (the stock market indices being the exception), things today are worse.
But, you say, is it fair to blame him for the coronavirus?
No. Mr. Trump did not cause the pandemic; and China, as he says, mishandled it at the start.
But every other nation in the world has had to deal with the same virus, and most of them have done so far more competently, and with more evidence of learning and improvement as they go, than the United States.
More people have died of covid-19 in the United States than in any other country. Even adjusted for population, the death rate here is almost five times worse than in Germany, and almost 100 times worse than in South Korea.
These are facts. This is reality. And the excess deaths and illness are directly attributable to Mr. Trump’s failures of leadership.
He failed to prepare the nation for a pandemic, though experts for years had warned of the possibility.
When the virus emerged, he first praised China’s handling of it, then imposed travel restrictions too slapdash to offer any protection.
For months, when he could have been preparing the nation, he insisted the virus would just go away.
When reality washed that nonsense away, he allowed government experts to guide the nation for a few weeks. But as the nation began to make some headway, Mr. Trump — more concerned with the impact on his reelection prospects than with the risk to human life — urged Americans to ignore expert advice and “liberate” their states, never mind masks or social distancing.
The result is the worst of all worlds: unneeded deaths, no possibility of real reopening and intensification of the markers of “carnage” that Mr. Trump railed against four years ago: unemployment, inequality, opioid addiction.
Perhaps most frightening: Even now, there is no plan, no learning, no strategy for testing and reopening. Under his leadership, it is all too easy to imagine that our children will still be out of school a year from now, or two, or three.
A president’s first duty is to keep the nation safe. If he has failed at home, maybe Mr. Trump has a better record overseas?
He continued a successful campaign to demolish the Islamic State, the self-styled caliphate that established itself on both sides of the Iraq-Syria border after Mr. Obama’s premature disengagement. The recently announced peace deal between Israel and the tiny United Arab Emirates is a step forward. Mr. Trump has kept the nation out of major conflict.
But neither the country nor the world are safer four years on. The nuclear programs in Iran and North Korea, which Mr. Trump said he could easily take care of, are less constrained than ever. Russia continues to illegally occupy parts of three sovereign nations, including Ukraine. The malign dictatorship in Venezuela, which Mr. Trump vowed to dislodge, remains firmly entrenched.
To the greatest challenge of our time, Mr. Trump has failed most destructively. That challenge is the rise of authoritarian powers, most notably China. Like dictatorships before them, they threaten the values upon which this nation was founded: individual dignity and liberty, the freedom to worship and speak and think. But unlike past dictatorships, they are bolstered by technologies that enable unprecedented surveillance and intrusion into what was once the private sphere.
As Franklin D. Roosevelt said 80 years ago, when democracy was similarly under threat, “There can be no ultimate peace between their philosophy of government and our philosophy of government.” If they should gain the upper hand around the world, “We should enter upon a new and terrible era in which the whole world, our hemisphere included, would be run by threats of brute force.”
Mr. Trump, in his fourth year, has branded China an enemy, mostly because he needs a pandemic scapegoat, but also because he hopes it will give him a campaign issue.
But for three years, he embraced and admired Chinese dictator Xi Jinping and made clear his indifference to China’s genocide of its Muslim Uighur population, its stifling of Hong Kong, the repression of its own people. Mr. Trump’s one concern was mercantile, and even there he failed: China’s economy is no more open to U.S. business than it was four years ago.
A president truly attuned to the Chinese threat would be investing in American universities and science; welcoming the smartest young people from around the world to study and work in the United States; and building alliances with like-minded democracies such as South Korea, Japan, Canada and Germany. In each case, the president has done the opposite.
Most of all, he would be modeling the virtues of democracy, but again he has done the reverse, admiring and embracing the methods of strongmen such as Mr. Xi. Mr. Trump denigrates a free press, makes a mockery of free markets, elevates insult over civil exchange, shows contempt for the rule of law in civilian and military courts, devalues truth, and dismisses legitimate oversight from Congress, the courts and executive branch inspectors general.
Last fall, Mr. Trump became the third president in history to be impeached. The House of Representatives charged him with what amounts to extortion for personal political gain: Mr. Trump held up an arms sale and a White House meeting in an effort to pressure the president of Ukraine to slander former vice president Joe Biden. The House also charged Mr. Trump with illegally refusing to cooperate with its investigation.
In February, the Senate voted to acquit the president, with Sen. Mitt Romney of Utah the lone Republican honest enough to acknowledge that the evidence was irrefutable. A few other Republicans, perhaps embarrassed by their own moral collapse, suggested that Mr. Trump would be chastened by impeachment and mend his ways.
Instead, he has been emboldened, and his behavior in the half-year since provides an indication of the lawlessness we can expect if Mr. Trump is reelected. He has swept aside U.S. attorneys who would not bend the law to his whim; fired officials throughout the government whose only offense was to do their jobs honestly or seek to hold his administration accountable; sicced unbadged troops on peaceful protesters in D.C. and Portland, Ore., for the benefit of his reelection campaign; and ignored and lied about credible reports of Russian bounties on U.S. soldiers.
He has sought to undermine confidence in democracy itself, lying about the prevalence of fraud, floating the possibility of delaying the election and even suggesting he may not accept its results.
These are high crimes and misdemeanors, as the framers of the Constitution understood the term. But this time it is up to us, the American people, to remove Mr. Trump from office.
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Antiracist campaigners in North Carolina are being stalked and even attacked by racial terrorists trying to delay the removal of post-Reconstruction Confederate monuments. (image: Daily Beast)
Racial Terrorists Are Stalking North Carolina's Black Lives Matter Activists
Kali Holloway, The Daily Beast
Excerpt: "It started with one of those gaudy memes of Donald Trump - significantly thinner than in real life, riding a tank, and surrounded by blasting guns, dollar bills and fluttering American flags."
Antiracist campaigners in North Carolina are being stalked and even attacked by racial terrorists trying to delay the removal of post-Reconstruction Confederate monuments.
As the image took over the screen of a virtual town hall hosted by a North Carolina chapter of the NAACP on June 26, attendees realized that their meeting had been “Zoombombed”—hacked by white supremacists spewing MAGA racism.
Next up was a photograph of three Ku Klux Klan members in hoods and robes, flanked by the Blood Drop Cross and the Confederate flag. An administrator managed to regain control, but the interruptions—the sounds of monkeys screeching, repeated use of the “n-word,” and lewd demands that female participants expose themselves—started up again as soon as LaTarndra Strong, the chapter’s vice president, began to speak. Eventually, Strong realized she was being drowned out by the din of misogyny and racism.
“I had been trying to stay cool, so it was really hard for me to make the call that we should not continue,” said Strong, whose 16-year-old daughter was also taking part in the meeting, and was seated right next to her. “I looked over and saw that she was bawling. Mascara’s rolling down her cheeks, she’s visibly shaken. It just got to be too much. And in that moment, it just made it acutely real for me that she, too, will have to be doing this same work. And that, despite all the work that we’ve already done in this country, white nationalists are still finding ways to terrorize our people.”
After the horrific police murder of George Floyd and the uprisings that followed, a deluge of think pieces have noted an emerging willingness among Americans—and, particularly, white Americans—to finally grapple with this country’s toxic legacy of anti-Black racism and white supremacy. But as Confederate monuments around the country are toppled by protesters or removed by legislators, neo-Confederates have responded by increasing racial terror attacks against activists.
The hate-bombing of the Northern Orange County branch of the North Carolina NAACP virtual meeting in June was just one in a series of racist attacks. During multiple protests in Hillsborough during late May and June, as white anti-racist activist Del Ward stood on local sidewalks holding a “Black Lives Matter” sign, he was pelted with plastic bottles, had guns menacingly flashed at him from cars, and was twice followed by the same man who repeatedly shouted, “Die, n— lover!” The Chapel Hill NAACP reports that in July, “in broad daylight, a car with two white male occupants pulled up” to where a local Black protester “was standing and threatened him, pointing two AR-15s.”
At a Black Lives Matter demonstration in the same town on July 3, a Black 19-year-old—the sole African American protester in attendance—was singled out by a white racist named Bart Mathison Moody, who punched the teen in the face while shouting expletives. A Chapel Hill Indian restaurant owned by a well-known local social justice activist noted on its Facebook page that staff had arrived on the morning of July 23 to find “a pile of ashes under the gas meter and a vivid trail of burnt gas or oil out to the street.” And a virtual Board of Commissioners meeting about the removal of a Confederate monument in the town of Sylva had to be canceled “after it was hijacked by other participants who spouted racial slurs and bigoted comments.”
At least 20 Confederate monuments have been removed across North Carolina in the months since Floyd’s killing, but activists told me the precipitous escalation in white supremacist violence of the last few months actually began three years ago with a slow, but persistent drip of racist incidents. Two days after the 2017 killing of Heather Heyer by neo-Nazis in Charlottesville, the Orange County School Board voted to ban Confederate flags under the terms of the district’s dress code. The decision was a win for the local chapter of the Hate-Free Schools Coalition, founded by NAACP vice president Strong.
Over the next year, inflamed by that vote and the felling of Confederate statues by anti-racist protesters in both Durham and Chapel Hill, the towns were the sites of multiple marches by members of neo-Confederate groups including the Virginia Flaggers, the Sons of Confederate Veterans and Heirs To The Confederacy, some of whom have shown up openly carrying guns. “I am willing to die for what I believe,” wrote Lance Spivey, co-founder of Heirs to the Confederacy in a March 2019 blog post, “I am more so ready to kill for it.”
The tipping point seems to have come after the August 2018 vote by the Chatham County Board of Commissioners to remove a courthouse Confederate statue in the town of Pittsboro. In the months that followed, neo-Confederates—including armed members of the Ku Klux Klan—began rallying every Saturday at the monument site. Though the statue came down last November, Confederates have continued to show up in town to protest its removal. A local outlet reported in June that during a confrontation with counterprotesters, neo-Confederates began “using their flags—some of which were attached to hockey sticks—as weapons,” bloodying the face of at least one anti-racist activist.
But some activists question whether police, as well as some elected officials, are taking these threats seriously—and which side they support in the struggle between anti-racists and neo-Confederates.
“I don’t think police really understand that I am targeted and that something could happen to me,” Strong said. “When we hold protests, I feel like the police come to our events [and are] suspicious of us—not wanting to protect us.”
A local newspaper published an editorial that echoed that sentiment in March 2018, after cops seemed to use kid gloves in handling armed defenders of a Confederate statue on UNC-Chapel Hill campus. The article noted that local “law enforcement approaches to policing antiracists seem to assume the worst intentions,” though the same officers “assume good intentions and make wide allowances” for neo-Confederates. No KKK members were arrested in August 2019 when members who openly carried guns protested—without a permit—at the Hillsborough courthouse, despite seemingly violating a North Carolina law prohibiting “going armed to the terror of the public.” Antiracists were moved to put out a message stating that “demonstrations by armed white supremacists… are only possible due to protection offered to these white supremacists by local law,” and suggested that local activists “expose the continued complicity of local law enforcement” with armed hate group members.
After a silent protest against a local Confederate monument in Graham County in June, police chief Jeffrey Prichard "inadvertently"—his words—shared a Facebook post attacking the Black Lives Matter movement. Graham City Council member Jennifer Talley also took to social media to note that while the march had been “peaceful,” the protesters had included “several people from ANTIFA” who “bait people and (are) very well trained in starting a riot.” On July 2, the North Carolina ACLU sued the city of Graham, including Officer Prichard and Alamance County Sheriff Terry Johnson, for violating the first-amendment rights of would-be Confederate monument demonstrators by denying protest permits. A federal judge ruled in the ACLU’s favor earlier in August.
Del Ward, the activist who was repeatedly on the receiving end of threats from racists in recent months, described how, during one protest that took place across the street from the Hillsborough Courthouse, a white man got out of his illegally stopped car at an intersection and threatened to “knock my teeth down my throat.” Ward said an officer who witnessed the entire exchange “just smiled and shrugged” as the man ranted.
“It just proves our point,” he said of the threats. “It’s troubling to me that a man can get out of his car and threaten to beat the shit out of me in front of a cop. And the cop, who’s seen me there for countless days, chooses to do nothing because of who the victim is. They know who I am and they’ve made targeted attacks. They want us to shut up and they want us to stop protesting and get off the street. But I’m not done by any means—this only adds fuel to the fire.”
There is, of course, a kind of grim symmetry between the whitelash to Black civil rights gains—when Confederate monuments were erected during the post-Reconstruction era—and the campaign of terror now being undertaken by North Carolina’s white supremacists to forestall the removal of those same statues. Strong said that the legwork white racists are putting into intimidating activists like her only reinforces how consequential and necessary the work they do is.
“For a very long time there was what I call ‘the arrangement of race,’ which requires that people stay in their place, and cements systemic racism,” Strong said. “And I think that white nationalists are understanding that the reality that they live in is slipping away. So the covers that they hid behind are coming down. But I’m very focused on not allowing my work to shift based on what they do. I probably don’t give as much attention to the risk that I’m taking, doing this work [as I should]. This is terrorism and we do have to take it seriously. But we have our eyes on the prize.”
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Stormy Daniels. (photo: CNN/Getty Images)
Judge Orders Donald Trump to Pay Stormy Daniels $44,000 in Legal Fees
Tom Lutz, Guardian UK
Lutz writes: "A California judge has ordered Donald Trump to pay the adult film actor and director Stormy Daniels $44,100, to cover legal fees in the battle over her non-disclosure agreement (NDA) with the president."
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Sandy Guardiola. (photo: Andrew Ocasio/Guardian UK)
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.
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'Although the rule isn't new, both postal workers and election officials in multiple states say it's news to them.' (photo: VICE)
USPS Is Telling Mail Carriers They Can't Sign as Witnesses for Voters
Cameron Joseph, VICE
Joseph writes: "As more and more states have leaned on mail voting this year, some voters have been encouraged to ask their mail carrier to witness their ballots in states that require a second signature."
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Relatives of a social leader attend her wake in Puerto Tejada, Colombia in 2019. (photo: EFE)
Violence Across Colombia Leaves 17 Dead
Reuters
Excerpt: "Three attacks in the last 24 hours have left at least 17 dead across Colombia in regions contested by drug traffickers, criminal groups and dissidents of the demobilized FARC guerrillas, officials and local media reported on Saturday."
Separate attacks each reported leaving six people dead took place in the Colombian provinces of Narino and Cauca, while a further five people were also reported killed in Arauca province.
“We don’t know if the dead form part of an organization or if they are family members,” General Nairo Martinez, commander of the Army’s Hercules Task Force, told local Caracol Radio in reference to the killings in Narino.
President Ivan Duque lamented the deaths in a message via his Twitter account.
“We are pained by the deaths caused by the violence driven by drug trafficking and terrorism,” he said.
The attacks were also condemned by Human Rights Watch Americas director Jose Miguel Vivanco.
“The security situation is deteriorating noticeably,” Vivanco said via Twitter.
Eight people were shot dead by an unidentified armed group in a contested drug trafficking area in Narino province a week ago.
Another five people were killed in an attack in a neighborhood in the east of the city of Cali on Aug. 11.
Drug trafficking fuels Colombia’s decades-long internal conflict, which has killed more than 260,000 and displaced millions.
The leftist guerrilla group the National Liberation Army, former members of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) rebels who reject a 2016 peace deal, criminal groups composed of former right-wing paramilitaries and drugs gangs are all involved in trafficking.
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The LNU Lightning Complex fire is now the second largest in California's history. (photo: Noah Berger/AP)
California Wildfires Among Largest in History as State Braces for More Dry Lightning
Maanvi Singh and Oliver Milman, Guardian UK
Excerpt: "The blazes were sparked by an unusual barrage of lightning and stoked by a searing, persistent heatwave last week. Although cooler, more humid weather overnight helped firefighters make ground, 'we are not out of the woods,' said Cal fire unit chief Shana Jones on Saturday. 'Upcoming predicted weather is not in our favor.'"
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his week’s Democratic National Convention roused more fuzzy feelings than a Hallmark movie. 
nly one day after he was 
