James.galbraith

In January, American citizen Evan Neumann was allegedly seen punching police officers as he berated them and used a metal barricade as a battering ram while he and a violent mob attacked the U.S. Capitol. After months on the run, this weekend Neumann resurfaced on television in Belarus announcing his quest for political asylum.

The 48-year-old former resident of Mill Valley, California, appeared on the state-controlled Belarus-1 TV network on Sunday. Neumann told a correspondent he fled the U.S. for Europe this summer after charges against him for his alleged role in the insurrection went public.

The Department of Justice filed six charges against Neumann in March but did not unseal them until July. The criminal complaint included charges of assaulting police, obstruction of law enforcement, unlawfully entering a restricted building, disorderly conduct, engaging in physical violence on restricted grounds, and violent entry on Capitol Grounds.

U.S. Assistant Attorney Brian Kelly initially asked for Neumann’s records to be kept under seal to preserve the integrity of the case. But in June, prosecutors asked a judge to unseal the documents so the public could aid law enforcement in tracking Neumann down.

On the FBI’s “lookout” list by Jan. 27, it was an anonymous tipster and reported “family friend” of Neumann’s who clued authorities into his residence in Mill Valley. An affidavit accompanying Neumann’s charges detailed how in February the FBI’s special surveillance unit watched Neumann travel from his home to the San Francisco International Airport.

FBI special agents stopped him for an interview at the airport, where Neumann admitted to flying to Washington, D.C., on Jan. 5 and back to California on Jan. 7. He stopped short, however, of answering any questions about whether he entered any federal buildings during his trip to D.C.

“Neumann admitted that he interacted with law enforcement in Washington, D.C. but declined to elaborate further or to answer if he had any physical engagement with law enforcement,” the previously sealed affidavit states.

In security footage from Jan. 6, Neumann is allegedly seen speaking directly to officers and can be heard verbally abusing them. He suggested to cops that lawmakers inside the Capitol were “gonna kill your fucking children, they are gonna rape them, they are gonna imprison them,” court records showed. 

When officers asked Neumann to back off, he allegedly responded: “No, you can’t tell me what to do, you piece of shit.”

Neumann, appearing to sport a gas mask and a “Make America Great Again” cap in the Jan. 6 footage, was also heard reportedly telling officers that the crowd would “overrun” them.

“I’m willing to die, are you?” Neumann said.

Neumann is also seen numerous times in footage, prosecutors allege, grabbing a metal barricade and using it to aggressively break up a line of officers. Prosecutors said Neumann swung his closed fist at police repeatedly, at times successfully striking them.

The Moscow Times—first to report the interview—said that during Neumann’s spot with Belarus state TV, he was described by the network correspondent as “the same type of simple American whose shops were burned by Black Lives Matter activists.”

That description is steeped in Russian propaganda that has been unleashed in recent years targeting racial and social divisions in the U.S. In 2018, according to a comprehensive report by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, since 2016 disinformation agents from the Russian firm the Internet Research Agency (IRA)—funded by Kremlin oligarch Yevgeny Prigozhin—have manipulated and infiltrated online social spaces and specifically spaces where Black Americans talk politics, elections and civil rights, or advocate for the Black Lives Matter movement.

Similar manipulations of online social media platforms unfolded ahead of the 2020 U.S. election. In an investigation by CNN, it was revealed at length how Russian troll farms were erected in places like Ghana and Nigeria and how locals were hired to agitate racial animus online.

Notably, the 2018 committee report found no single group of Americans was targeted by IRA operatives more than Black Americans.

In the minutes-long interview where the Belarus-1 chyron reads “Goodbye, America!” just below his face, Neumann claims he fled there because he was being stalked by security officials in Ukraine. He also claimed he was subjected to wild boar, snakes, and an unforgiving swamp-like crossing when he moved from Ukraine to Belarus.

In the segment, Neumann recounts how he flew from the U.S. to the European Union in March, feigning that he was on a business trip. He then took a train from Switzerland to Germany where he eventually secured a car. He then drove from Germany to Poland in short order and by mid-March, he settled in Zhytomyr, Ukraine. After staying for just four months in a rented apartment, he told Belarus-1 he fled to Belarus at night on foot. A report by ABC in July indicates Neumann sold his U.S. home in Mill Valley last April—just after charges were filed—for a substantial $1.3 million.

There is no extradition treaty between the U.S. and Belarus, meaning someone convicted of a crime in one nation does not have to be forcibly returned to another to face trial or sentencing.

A representative for the FBI did not immediately return request for comment Monday.

This is does not appear to be Neumann’s first foray into so-called political revolution. Department of Justice footage from Jan. 6 featured in Neumann’s criminal complaint highlights how he wore a scarf commemorating Ukraine’s 2004 Orange Revolution during the Jan. 6 attack. Neumann also listed himself as an attendee at the Orange Revolution in 2004 and 2005. That revolution involved a series of intense protests in response to the overturning of the rigged election of Viktor Yanukovych.

Yanukovych, notably, rose to power in part because of his backing from ally and Russian President Vladimir Putin, but also thanks to the heaps of political consulting offered to him by none other than Paul Manafort, former President Donald Trump’s onetime campaign chairman-turned-convict-turned-pardon-recipient.

An absolutely shocking story out of a middle school in Ventura, California, has me thinking back to my own days as a preteen. I attended a public school and while we were assigned debates on pre-selected issues, we weren’t really supposed to talk about the big event dominating the news at the time: invading Afghanistan. This meant (of course) that all that my classmates and I wanted to know was where our teachers stood politically. I distinctly remember essentially goading my social studies teacher into admitting, to our horror, that he backed Bush and supported invading Afghanistan (making him perhaps the least surprised of anyone who ever taught me that I ended up working at Daily Kos decades later). All of this to say: I understand teachers, like everyone, are imperfect, and I don’t necessarily think all “political” topics should be off-limits in the classroom.

But this incident out of Anacapa Middle School is so wildly inappropriate, offensive, and downright concerning, it’s not even in the same stratosphere. A history teacher at the school was recorded ranting about Hunter Biden, claiming that Biden had sex with his niece and had child pornography on his laptop. The teacher topped off the diatribe by, you guessed it, bringing up Ukraine, as reported by CBS Los Angeles. They also ranted about—you guessed it—vaccines. The teacher has not been publicly identified at the time of writing.

“People need to wake up and see the government has way too much power right now,” the teacher can be heard saying in the recording taken by a student in the classroom. The child’s parent apparently told them that if they were ever uncomfortable with what a teacher was saying, they were allowed to take out their phone and record. That’s what the student did when the incident occurred about two weeks ago, and whew, what a great thing that student did.

“Hunter Biden, for example, is doing deals with China and Ukraine where he was funneling money illegally,” the teacher says in the recording, which reportedly lasts about seven minutes. “He also had child pornography on his laptop. He was having sexual intercourse with his own niece.” Again, obviously not true, and obviously disturbingly inappropriate to say to literal children. 

Sarah Silikula, the parent of the child who recorded the teacher’s bizarre rant, said her child came home very upset and confused by the whole thing. According to Silikula, her child said: “I’m never getting vaccinated,” and declared that they’re not getting any more shots of any kind. It’s no surprise the kid is totally spooked by vaccines, given that the teacher alleged that if you have a baby in a hospital and you choose not to get vaccinated, you don’t get your baby back.

According to Silikula, her child then asked her a question that likely made her stomach drop: “Did you know Trump’s still president?” Yikes.

According to the outlet, the school district has condemned the teacher’s comments. Students in the class have been assigned to another teacher. The teacher involved in the incident is still employed at the school, and the district told the outlet it will apply its “progressive” discipline policy to handle the situation.

Far-right “constitutionalists” have been around for decades now, particularly in rural America, where they have a history of recruiting vulnerable marks into their grift, which convinces the gullible that they can declare themselves “sovereign” people free from obligation or oversight from the federal or state government. They have left a long trail of human and community wreckage in their wake, from Jordan, Montana, to the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge.

But along with everything else associated with the self-styled “Patriot Movement” in recent years, it has been spreading widely and insinuating itself more deeply within communities, especially as they increasingly elect “constitutional” sheriffs and other public officials. The city fathers in the small northern California town of Oroville this week, however, went even further: They declared Oroville its own “constitutional republic” independent of federal and state governments.

The resolution, which was approved Tuesday by the Oroville City Council by a 6-1 vote, declares the town a “Constitutional Republic City,” a designation it says enables the city to declare state and federal government orders it considers “unconstitutional” null and void. The move is largely in response to COVID-19-related restrictions and vaccine mandates, particularly those imposed by California Gov. Gavin Newsom.

“I proposed it after 18 months of increasingly intrusive executive mandates and what I felt to be excessive overreach by our government,” said Vice Mayor Scott Thomson, the resolution’s main sponsor. “After the failed recall in California, our state governor seems to [be] on a rampage and the mandates are getting more intrusive. Now he’s going after our kids and schools.”

Local residents who supported the resolution turned out in large numbers. “We hope that becoming a constitutional republic city is the best step to regain and preserve our inalienable rights protected by the U.S. Constitution. What will be left if we do not have it? If we do not have bodily autonomy?” said one speaker who was moved to tears. “What else do they want me to let them do to my children? Where does it stop?”

The resolution’s advocates on the council offered a hodgepodge of rationalizations for the resolution’s language. A “democracy is run by people and republic is run by the laws of constitution,” Mayor Chuck Reynolds told the local Enterprise-Record newspaper.

“Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts,” Reynolds said. “A constitutional republic makes America a successful nation. Rights are by the people, for the people.”

“Constitutionalist” ideology preaches that the federal government is heavily constrained by the text of the Constitution, limited almost entirely to a national defense. Otherwise, they believe, the document prohibits federal land ownership, the ability to enforce civil rights, environmental, education, and other federal statutes. None of these ideological tenets have any basis in reality, especially not in settled law; like most far-right belief systems, it’s built on conspiracy theories and disinformation.

The Oroville region, located in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada, has been a hotbed of COVID denialism. In 2020, Oroville refused to enforce state prohibitions on indoor dining. This fall, Butte County chose not to recommend a mask mandate, even as COVID cases were surging at the local medical center. The county has a vaccination rate of about 48%.

Thomson told KRCR-TV in an email that "this has to do with the large amount of mandates that are affecting every aspect of our lives and our kids' lives. The American culture and way of life is being challenged at its very core and perverted by radicalized politicians who have forgotten that, as a republic, the power belongs to the people. Our founders understood the dangers of those who would like to have more control over the people, and thus they set up our country with a firm foundation that separated the powers, by forming a Republic, and protected our God-given rights, in the founding documents in the US Constitution. America is already a Constitutional Republic, however, I put this declaration out for the agenda as a reminder and a statement that we the people in Oroville are not amicable to the tyranny of power-hungry politicians."

“I assure you folks that great thought was put into every bit of this,” Reynolds said. “Nobody willy-nilly threw something to grandstand.”

However, even one of the council members who supported the resolution noted that it had “no teeth” and was simply a “political statement.” One member of the council noted that the city receives millions of dollar in federal support, and wondered: “Will Oroville be able to stand alone and sustain itself?”

Oroville’s city attorney, Scott Huber, quickly assured her: "I am quite certain that this would not result in any loss of funding for the city. In the event that it could in the future you could revise this and do what you will but this is not going to put it jeopardy any state or federal funding."

Lisa Pruitt, a rural law expert at the University of California-Davis, told The Guardian that the empty gesture does not grant Oroville more power or the ability to ignore state law.

“It seems to make the people of Oroville feel better that their city council has made this gesture but as a practical matter it doesn’t make any difference,” Pruitt said.

This, in fact, is the problem with all “constitutionalist” interpretations of the law: They are fabrications—legalistic fantasies that have no basis in the operative U.S. codes, and have never been upheld or otherwise vindicated by any court in the country.

“A municipality cannot unilaterally declare itself not subject to the laws of the state of California,” Pruitt said. “Whatever they mean by constitutional republic you can’t say hocus pocus and make it happen.”

“Constitutionalists,” however, have been waving their magic wands uselessly in the air since they first started organizing as part of the far-right Patriot Movement of the 1990s. Drawing on ideas first proposed by the rabidly racist Posse Comitatus movement of the 1970s, outfits like the Montana Freemen created a legal conflict that culminated in an 81-day armed standoff in 1996.

This ideology also engendered the “Sovereign Citizen” movement, whose adherents, as the ADL explains, refer to themselves variously as “freemen” and “constitutionalists,” and strive constantly to separate themselves from the “illegitimate” government. Many renounce their U.S. citizenship, which they believe enslaves them to a “corporate entity.”

Over the years, “constitutionalists” have engaged in a number of armed conflicts with various authorities, particularly federal officials. In 2014, “constitutionalist” rancher Cliven Bundy engaged in armed standoff in Nevada over his grazing rights; then, in 2016, his sons led the armed takeover of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in southern Oregon.

Among the main venues for spreading “constitutionalist” ideas in recent years have been Patriot organizations like the Oath Keepers and “Three Percent” militias. Both groups were heavily involved in the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection.

However, “constitutionalists” also have been worming their way into positions of local authority through their successful recruitment of law enforcement officers, primarily through the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association, which also was heavily involved in the two Bundy standoffs. These extremists are good at creating an appearance of establishment normalcy, but inevitably, both their bigotry and their seditionist politics eventually manifest themselves.

Robinhoood was hacked last week by someone who socially engineered a customer service representative to gain access to the email addresses of more than 5 million customers, the full names of 2 million other customers, and other data from a much smaller group of customers, the company said in a blog post published Monday. The hacker then allegedly attempted to extort the company. Motherboard reports: "The unauthorized party socially engineered a customer support employee by phone and obtained access to certain customer support systems," Robinhood wrote in the blog post. "At this time, we understand that the unauthorized party obtained a list of email addresses for approximately five million people, and full names for a different group of approximately two million people." "We also believe that for a more limited number of people -- approximately 310 in total -- additional personal information, including name, date of birth, and zip code, was exposed, with a subset of approximately 10 customers having more extensive account details revealed," it added. "We are in the process of making appropriate disclosures to affected people." Robinhood wrote that "the attack has been contained and we believe that no Social Security numbers, bank account numbers, or debit card numbers were exposed and that there has been no financial loss to any customers as a result of the incident.â

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Beloved by moodboard aficionados and wedding planners alike, the platform is hated by rank-and-file web surfers. It's not that it doesn't have its purpose; it's just that it intrudes on the search experience of pretty much everyone who doesn't want to use it. From a report: More than 28,000 Chrome users have installed Unpinterested!, an extension to remove Pinterest from Google search results, while countless others trade tips on how to craft search queries to exclude the photo-sharing website. The problem? Pinterest makes it obnoxiously difficult to view any image hosted on its platform without signing up for an account. And it's managed to achieve an extremely strong presence on many popular image searches. This state of affairs creates friction in the image-grabbing process, which has been fine-tuned over the last 20 years to become as frictionless as possible. And it's all seemingly for the goal of boosting Pinterest user numbers. Pinterest, it should be noted, doesn't cost anything to sign up for. But as the old internet maxim goes, "If you're not paying for it, you are the product.'" Meanwhile, people who do use the service complain that the resolution of Pinterest images is often low.

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Tonight 70 countries around the world set their clocks back an hour — including most of the United States, Canada, the EU and the UK. Yet "The practice has drawn complaints about its disruptive effects on sleep and schedules," reports UPI, adding that "The American Academy of Medicine has called for an end to Daylight Saving Time, citing growing research that shows its deleterious effects on health and safety." [U.S.] Lawmakers are also increasingly wondering whether Daylight Saving Time is a good idea. At least 350 bills and resolutions have been introduced in every state taking aim at Daylight Saving Time since 2015, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. Over the last four years, 19 states have passed similar legislation providing year-round daylight saving time if Congress allowed such changes. Members of Congress have introduced legislation making changes to Daylight Saving Time, to no avail. U.S. Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, (Democrat — Rhode Island), said in a video posted to Twitter on Friday that the upcoming switchover was one of his least favorite times of the year since it means darker afternoons. He touted his Sunshine Protection Act that would make Daylight Saving Time permanent. "We can do a lot better for daylight for everyone who is up in the afternoon," he said. Also supporting that change is Florida Republican Senator Marco Rubio. "We're about to once again do this annual craziness of changing the clock, falling back, springing forward," Newsweek quotes him as saying. "Let's go to permanent daylight saving time. The overwhelming majority of members of Congress approve and support it. Let's get it done. Let's get it passed so that we never have to do this stupid change again." But currently in America it's the Department of Transportation which is in charge of the practice, reports USA Today, and the Department believes that the practice saves energy, prevents traffic accidents and curbs crime. So, as the Washington Post reports, "It's that time of the year again. We change the clocks back and we whine about it."

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A new religion case forces the Supreme Court to confront the legacy of one of its cruelest decisions.

Dunn v. Ray (2019) is the kind of Supreme Court decision that a comic book supervillain might write. Widely denounced, even by prominent conservatives, when it was handed down, Ray held that a Muslim inmate in Alabama could be executed without his imam present — even though the state permitted Christian inmates to have a spiritual adviser present during their execution.

As Justice Elena Kagan wrote in dissent, one of the Constitution’s “clearest command[s]” is that “one religious denomination cannot be officially preferred over another.” But that’s exactly what the Court permitted in Ray.

After witnessing the bipartisan backlash to this decision — the conservative National Review’s David French labeled it a “grave violation of the First Amendment” — the Court eventually started to slink away from it. In Murphy v. Collier (2019), decided only a few months after Ray, the Court temporarily blocked the execution of a Buddhist inmate in Texas — unless that state “permits Murphy’s Buddhist spiritual adviser or another Buddhist reverend of the State’s choosing to accompany Murphy in the execution chamber during the execution.”

Most recently, in Dunn v. Smith (2021) the Court seemed to suggest that all people who are being executed, regardless of their faith, must be allowed to have a spiritual adviser present. Although there was no majority opinion in Smith, even some of the dissenting justices conceded that they’d been beaten. “It seems apparent that States that want to avoid months or years of litigation delays,” Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote in a brief dissenting opinion, “should figure out a way to allow spiritual advisers into the execution room.”

And yet, while the Court’s treatment of Domineque Ray, the inmate in Ray, appears to be discredited, the Court has yet to tie up several loose ends left over from that decision, including questions about which procedural barriers can be erected between death row inmates and their spiritual advisers, and questions about what such advisers may do to comfort a dying prisoner.

These issues are front and center in Ramirez v. Collier, which will be argued before the justices on Tuesday. Texas permits John Ramirez, the death row inmate at the center of this case, to have his pastor present during his execution. But the state neither permits the pastor to lay hands on Ramirez nor to audibly pray over him.

The fundamental question in Ramirez, in other words, is whether a death row inmate is allowed to actually receive spiritual comfort during his execution — or whether Ramirez’s pastor must simply stand there, doing little to ease a dying man’s final moments.

Ramirez wants this to be a case about religious liberty. Texas wants it to be a case about process.

Federal judges have a ghoulish duty. Whenever an execution draws nigh, judges are inundated with motions from capital defense lawyers trying to save their client’s life — or at least to ensure that the execution is performed as humanely as possible.

Because the Supreme Court is the nation’s court of last resort, many of these disputes eventually reach the justices. And so the justices must contend with a steady stream of emergency death penalty cases, often with only a few hours to review them.

The burden of spending years deciding who lives and who dies weighs differently on different justices. Some proclaim, as Justice Harry Blackmun did a few months before his retirement in 1994, that they “no longer shall tinker with the machinery of death.” Blackmun — and more recently, Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer — concluded, after decades of hearing last-minute capital appeals, that the death penalty is unconstitutional.

“Factual, legal, and moral error gives us a system that we know must wrongly kill some defendants,” Blackmun wrote.

In Ray, five conservative justices took the polar opposite approach. They attempted to quell the tidal wave of emergency death penalty motions by cutting off many inmates’ ability to file them in the first place. Domineque Ray’s error, these justices claimed, was that he waited too long to bring a lawsuit insisting that his imam be present at his execution.

It was a singularly unpersuasive claim — so unpersuasive that many observers accused the Court of offering a pretextual excuse to deny relief to a Muslim. Ray had filed his lawsuit just five days after a prison warden formally denied Ray’s request to have his imam comfort him during his execution. The Court’s explanation for its decision was quite literally unbelievable.

No doubt with the Court’s decision in Ray in mind, Texas spends the lion’s share of its brief in Ramirez accusing Ramirez of making minor procedural errors that supposedly doom his case. The brief spends an entire subsection, for example, arguing that Ramirez should lose because, when he filed a grievance asking to have his pastor present at his execution, he didn’t specifically state that the pastor should be allowed to speak.

Indeed, Texas spends only about a dozen pages of a 62-page brief arguing that its policy of forbidding a death row inmate’s spiritual adviser from speaking or touching the inmate can be justified under federal civil rights law.

The specific law at issue in this case is the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act. It forbids prisons from imposing a “substantial burden” on an inmate’s faith, unless that burden is “in furtherance of a compelling governmental interest” and the prison uses “the least restrictive means of furthering that compelling governmental interest.”

That should be a difficult burden for Texas to carry in this case. Among other things, as Ramirez’s lawyers argue in his brief, until fairly recently, Texas permitted pastors to touch and speak to death row inmates while they were being executed. It even quotes from a book, authored by a former Texas criminal justice official, that recount past executions where chaplains placed their hands on the dying man’s knee. So it’s tough for Texas to argue that its current policy uses the “least restrictive” method of executing inmates, when it used to have a less restrictive policy.

To the extent that Texas even tries to defend its current policy, much of its defense rests on unlikely scenarios that could only occur if Texas’s own death chamber is run by rank incompetents. Texas argues, for example, that Ramirez’s pastor must not be allowed to touch him “in the event the inmate escaped his restraints, smuggled in a weapon, or otherwise became a threat in the chamber.” The fear is that “a spiritual adviser standing close enough to touch the inmate would be in harm’s way or in a position to assist the inmate.”

Texas, in other words, offers only a weak defense of its actual policy. It rests most of its argument on a hope that a majority of the justices will repeat their performance in Ray and rely on a procedural reason to deny Ramirez the relief he seeks.

So how is this case likely to come out?

The case for pessimism, if you are Ramirez’s lawyers, is fairly straightforward. In Smith, only the three liberals, plus conservative Justice Amy Coney Barrett, took a clear position in favor of religious freedom on death row. Roberts, Thomas, and Kavanaugh all dissented. That means that either Justice Samuel Alito or Justice Neil Gorsuch (or maybe both) silently voted in favor of the inmate in Smith.

But Alito and Gorsuch are both die-hard supporters of the death penalty. If you are a capital defense attorney and you are counting on their vote, you’re normally in trouble.

That said, there are also a few reasons for Ramirez’s lawyers to be optimistic that they can secure five votes.

One notable difference between Ramirez and Ray is that Ray arose on the Court’s shadow docket, a mix of emergency motions and other expedited requests that are typically decided in short order without full briefing or oral argument. Ramirez, by contrast, will be heard on the Court’s regular docket and will receive an oral argument.

That distinction matters because the Supreme Court ordinarily reserves full briefing and argument for cases that have either divided lower court judges or that involve unusually important questions of federal law. It’s unlikely that the Court would have agreed to hear Ramirez’s case if it thought that the correct answer turned on a minor procedural error that is unique to just this one case.

Although Smith did not produce a majority opinion, four justices — including Barrett — joined an opinion by Kagan that lays out a possible path forward in Ramirez. Kagan argued that states with restrictive policies governing spiritual advisers can simply adopt the practices used in other states. “In the last year, the Federal Government has conducted more than 10 executions attended by the prisoner’s clergy of choice,” Kagan noted — the implication being that states could copy the federal government’s procedures and do the same.

A state that fears a particular member of the clergy may present a security risk “can do a background check on the minister; it can interview him and his associates [and] it can seek a penalty-backed pledge that he will obey all rules,” Kagan wrote. But it can’t root its policy in speculative fears that a pastor may help an inmate stage a daring escape in the middle of their execution.

So while the outcome of this lawsuit is not entirely certain, Ramirez has good reason to hope that, in his final moments, he will receive spiritual comfort.

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How far will white parents go to fight against educators teaching race and racism in America—or as people of color and anyone with a shred of common sense calls it, American history?  

A Facebook ad paid for by (this is not a joke) the Most Racist Colleges and Universities group—one which claims they work to “stop university support for terrorists”—lashes out at a Black Stanford University professor, Hakeem Jefferson, for “promoting his view in a series of social media posts that ‘Whiteness’ is largely responsible for opposition to school mask mandates.” 

Jefferson, a Stanford assistant professor of political science, is being called a “racist” in the ad, and threatened and harassed by the group, its followers, and other users who encounter the ad. And Facebook, true to form, is doing nothing to stop it.

Jefferson is meeting with his dean Friday and says the meeting was scheduled months ago—after he was harassed last time.

As Bree Newsom Bass—activist, filmmaker, and heroine who bravely removed the Confederate flag from the South Carolina statehouse in the aftermath of the Charleston church shooting in 2015—wisely tweeted in response to the outrage of white parents about CRT: 

Groups such as Moms for Liberty, a group started in that bastion of caucasity, Florida, has grown to 60,000 nationwide, according to CBS News. The group’s mission is "dedicated to fighting for the survival of America by unifying, educating, and empowering parents to defend their parental rights at all levels of government."

What they’re really doing is showing up at school board meetings with the false pretense of fighting against critical race theory (CRT), which isn’t even taught in K-12 schools. And the end result? A Republican governor in Virginia in Glenn Youngkin, and a disturbing wave of book banning. 

"Grade two, module three, has five or six books. One of them is Martin Luther King and the March on Washington, which of course that should be taught. But how should it be taught? What should we focus on when we teach it?" Robin Steenman, founder of Moms for Liberty asks CBS.

"There's one specific example in this book ... there's a very famous photograph of firemen spraying children that were engaged in a protest in, I believe it was Birmingham. It's a terrible photo, they're doing harm to children, Black children, they're blasted by fire hoses. And it shows that to these second-grade children,” Steenman continues. “Most kids up to that point have idolized the policemen, the firemen."

"I don't want them to see racism yet—to engage, to learn racism. They can teach history, but let's not teach racism," Steenman said.

Let’s unpack Steenman’s statement: “They can teach history, but let’s not teach racism.” 

It’s so easy for white people to dismiss teaching racism, but the lessons for children of color come fast and young. Do they get a choice about when they can learn about racism? 

Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey recently declared on Twitter that she has “permanently BANNED Critical Race Theory in Alabama.” 

Ivey, like so many in the GOP, has followed in the clumsy and bloodstained footsteps of two-time impeached and one-term former President Donald Trump who weaponized CRT, lumping it ridiculously into diversity and inclusion training, and even excluding federal contracts that offer diversity and inclusion training.

Virginia Beach at-large school board member Victoria Manning—aka book-banning Karen, aka non-reading pro-censorship Karen—is going after American literature she clearly doesn’t understand.

Daily Beast reports that Manning, founder of the “Wokeness Checker” website, along with co-board member Laura Hughes, sent an email to Virginia Beach City Public Schools Superintendent Aaron Spence to demand that four books be removed from circulation or used in the classroom “due to their pornographic nature.”

“It has been brought to my attention by some parents that there are some disturbing books in our district that are available to students,” Manning wrote on Oct. 5. “I would like to ask that you pull these books from shelves and also block any electronic access by students to getting these books IMMEDIATELY.”

First on Manning’s list is author and Nobel Laureate in Literature Toni Morrison’s debut novel, The Bluest Eye, alongside Jonathan Evison’s Lawn Boy, A Lesson Before Dying by Ernest Gaines, and the memoir comic Gender Queer by Maia Kobabe.

Manning has not even read The Bluest Eye—“just reading a few of the pages gives me utter disgust,” she said according to The Virginia-Pilot.

Sharon Roberson, president and CEO of the YWCA of Nashville and Middle Tennessee, wrote a letter on behalf of the Tennessee Department of Education, decrying a law put into place in July in Tennessee, banning CRT and teaching any “lessons that suggest anyone, based on their race or sex, is ‘inherently privileged, racist, sexist, or oppressive, whether consciously or subconsciously,’” as well as any curriculum that makes people feel ‘discomfort, guilt, anguish, or distress solely because of the individual's race or sex.’"

Robertson understands a key principle in education: If we don’t teach our history, we are destined to repeat it. 

"I was actually born in Germany, from a military family, and very proud of that. In Germany, they teach about Hitler because they want people to understand this was a very difficult aspect, a horrible part of their history, but you need to understand that because if you love your country you want your country to be the best that it could be, so they teach those things. Some people don't like it, but it doesn't make Germans not like Germany, It makes them proud that their country has overcome that and become the country it is today,” Robertson tells CBS News.  

In a shock to absolutely no one, Richard Spencer serving as his own lawyer has proven pretty terrible for, well, Richard Spencer. The glass-jawed Nazi known for barely being able to take a punch (among other undesirable traits) was forced to represent himself in a civil lawsuit after his real lawyer dropped Spencer for failing to pay up and adhere to his legal advice.

Spencer has spent a full week pretending he has any grasp of the law as one of 25 defendants who had a hand in the deadly 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville. Surprisingly, he is just one of two overconfident white dudes representing themselves in this case, the other being Christopher “Crying Nazi” Cantwell.

Cantwell’s had his fair share of bafflingly stupid moments, including losing his own witness list and preparing for trial by watching Tucker Carlson, but Spencer’s idiocy outshone him on Thursday. Over the course of a full day in the witness stand, Spencer was endlessly smacked down by his own words as attorney Michael Bloch pulled up transcripts and audio clips pushing back against the many denials Spencer offered for his own behavior.

Unicorn Riot’s live tweets of Thursday’s proceedings provide an incredible account of Spencer getting in his own way. His role as a witness absolutely undermined his own ability to successfully make a case for himself as his own lawyer.

The Sines vs. Kessler civil lawsuit was brought forth on behalf of nine Charlottesville residents who were injured during the “Unite the Right” rally and surrounding events. They’re hoping to receive compensatory and statutory damages from the defendants, whom they allege conspired to incite violence. Spencer certainly helped make the plaintiffs’ case today. Spencer spent hours perjuring himself in an effort to distance himself from his conduct before, during, and after the rally.

Bloch, who represents the plaintiffs, pulled up frequent instances in which Spencer either outright called for violence or agreed with someone else who did. James Kolenich, the white nationalist attorney representing many of the folks named as defendants, later took the time to throw Spencer under the bus on behalf of his clients during cross-examination. The lawyer pushed a theory that Spencer attempted to take over an alt-right organization in the run-up to the rally and played more of an active role in the “Unite the Right” event than he let on. As if that weren’t enough, Kolenich also brought up an instance in which Spencer’s credit card was declined for a $4 purchase.

Proceedings concluded with Cantwell just beginning to cross-examine Spencer, which Cantwell will continue doing on Friday. The trial initially began on Oct. 25 and is calendared for four weeks, according to the civil rights nonprofit Integrity First for America. Spencer likely won’t earn any accolades for being an amateur lawyer, a la Ted Bundy, but he certainly found one hell of a way to become the alt-right’s new favorite scapegoat.

After more than two weeks of proceedings, a jury was seated on Wednesday in the trial of three white men accused of hunting down and murdering Ahmaud Arbery after they saw him jogging on property under construction in South Georgia. Only one juror out of 12 is Black, The New York Times reported of the case centering former Georgia cop and prosecutorial investigator Gregory McMichael, his son Travis, and local resident William "Roddie" Bryan.

“This court has found that there appears to be intentional discrimination on the panel," Glynn County Superior Court Judge Timothy Walmsley said, "but that doesn't mean the court has the authority to reseat simply because we have this prima facie case." And even though Walmsley admitted that “quite a few African American jurors were excused through peremptory strikes executed by the defense,” he ultimately decided to allow the imbalance, parting ways with a special prosecutor who challenged the removal of eight Black people from the potential jury pool.

Linda Dunikoski, of the Cobb County District Attorney’s Office, cited a U.S. Supreme Court ruling that makes it illegal to remove potential jurors exclusively based on race, the Times reported. “African American jurors made up one-quarter of the jury panel, but the actual jury that was selected has only one African American male on it,” Dunikoski said during court.

In a case already mired in injustice, Walmsley said the defense had applied a “legitimate, nondiscriminatory, clear, reasonably specific, and related reason” to strike each Black juror. The judge said the court doesn't have the authority to "reseat, simply, again, because there’s this prima facie case.”

Defense attorneys have said that they struck 13 white potential jurors from the case for the same reasons they other potential Black jurors: a strong bias about the case. "We are stuck between a rock and a hard place, given the fact that the majority of the African American jurors that came in here were struck for cause immediately because of their strong opinions," Laura Hogue, Gregory McMichael's attorney, said.

Jason Sheffield, Travis McMichael's attorney, added: "Never before have we had a case where so many people have entered into the courtroom for jury selection already having an opinion about the guilt of the men charged."

Not without reason.

It took a full 74 days after Arbery’s death on Feb. 23, 2020, for an arrest to be made. Former Glynn County District Attorney Jackie Johnson has been charged with obstruction and violating her oath of office in her handling of Arbery’s case following his death. The McMichaels weren't arrested until May 7, 2020, and Bryan, who recorded the moments leading up to Arbery's death, was arrested on May 21, 2020.

Gregory and Travis McMichael accused Arbery of trying to burglarize a house—where he stopped and peeked through the window—during a jog in coastal Georgia’s Satilla Shores community. On a 911 call, Travis can be heard describing Arbery as “a Black male, red shirt, white shorts.” Travis told a dispatcher he was sitting across the street in his red Ford F-150 “watching the house” and he didn’t know if Arbery was armed “but he was acting like he was.” The home, owned by Larry English, was under construction and occasionally attracted curious pedestrians, according to surveillance video released to the media. Only Arbery was shot and killed for doing so, and he was unarmed at the time of his death, Arbery’s family attorney Lee Merritt has maintained.

Merritt told The New York Times jury selection in the case has been “the strangest jury selection process” he’s ever seen. “We understand there are some unique circumstances,” the attorney said. “There’s very few people who wouldn’t have heard about this case. Most have developed an opinion about the case. So I understand that the attorneys, in general, will have some questions that we’re not used to.” Merritt, however, added that some of the defense’s questioning was “badgering.”

CK Hoffler, chief executive officer of the Atlanta-based CK Hoffler Firm, told journalist Mehdi Hasan those observing the trial have commented about biased questioning during jury selection. Their observations reported that Black potential jurors were asked “more probing” questions than other prospective jurors, and that some may have been stricken for cause in error. “So those could be appealable issues, but the bottom line is there’s one African American on the jury,” Hoffler, who isn’t involved in the case, said. “And out of the thousand people that were initially called to potentially serve for this jury, (...) it is quite a travesty, I think, that only one African American was selected, given the demographics of that community.”

Brunswick, the city in which Satilla Shores is located, has a population that is about 55% Black and 40% white. 

Scott Hechinger, a Brooklyn public defender, tweeted that Black jurors in the case could be released if they answered truthfully that they believed the Confederate flag was a racist symbol. "Unbelievable the question was even allowed to be asked,” the attorney, who isn’t involved in the case, said in the tweet. “Unbelievable that this was considered a ‘race-neutral’ reason to strike."

Through their attorneys, the McMichaels have sought to ban from the trial a photo of a vanity plate with a Confederate emblem that was on Travis McMichael's truck when Arbery was killed. The McMichaels claimed in their motion filed Sept. 30 that the state’s goal is to "draw the conclusion the Mr. Arbery saw the vanity plate, that he interpreted its meaning, and that he feared the occupants in the truck because of this vanity plate, which is why he ran away from the truck." The McMichaels also claimed through their attorneys that the state intends to "create the inference that Travis McMichael placed the vanity plate on his truck in order to telegraph some reprehensible motive, bias, or prejudice, which is not true."

Prosecutors responded in a motion that “the State will present the facts of this case, and one of those facts is that Travis McMichael purchased a new truck sometime after January 1, 2020, and put this vanity plate on it.”

They additionally wrote:

“The vanity plate was on the truck at the time of the homicide. The jury may interpret that evidence in any way they deem appropriate and the State may make reasonable inferences, in closing argument, drawn from the evidence.”

Arbery's mother Wanda Cooper-Jones said in an interview with ABC News the jury's makeup is "very, very discouraging. (...) I have my concerns about getting a guilty verdict," she said.

Opening statements in the case are set to begin Friday. 

RELATED: Travis McMichael is actively trying to keep his Confederate vanity plate out of his murder trial

RELATED: It took Ahmaud Arbery's mother's push for justice to bring charges against her son's alleged killers

RELATED: 'Cheap and blatant': Accused murderers of Ahmaud Arbery try to make sure jury knows about probation

RELATED: Murder trial in Ahmaud Arbery case is not about Arbery's past, judge rules in vital decision

While the judge presiding over the case of vigilante and little buddy of white supremacists Kyle Rittenhouse should be focused on the trial, he appears to be more interested in what CNN’s Jeffery Toobin has to say. 

Let’s get to the important thing here: Rittenhouse is a teenage wanna-be cop who drove himself from his home in Antioch, Illinois, to Kenosha, Wisconsin, with an AR-15-style .223 rifle in his car, wearing a backward baseball cap and harboring an intention to act as citizen police.

Videos from the night of the shooting show that several protesters attempted to disarm Rittenhouse, who fatally shot Joseph Rosenbaum, 36, then Anthony Huber, 26, and seconds later Gaige Grosskreutz, 27, who was wounded.

]During a sidebar Wednesday, Judge Bruce Schroeder told the prosecution and defense he was concerned about the characterization of the trial by the media—particularly Toobin. 

“There are people on the media, on reputable sites, that are saying things that are totally bizarre,” the judge said Wednesday.

It’s presumed that Schroeder is referring to the media’s outrage and confusion over his ruling that the prosecution could not use the word “victim” in describing the three men Rittenhouse shot on the night of a protest in Kenosha, Wisconsin. The judge also ruled the defense could use the words “arsonists,” “looters,” or “rioters.” 

“It is a very weird ... ruling,” Toobin said. “What’s very weird is allowing this extremely pejorative, assuming the conclusion, words of ‘rioters’ and ‘looters,’ which all in all should help Rittenhouse’s defense a great deal.”

He added, “And, remember, it is not the -- it is not the victims who are on trial here, it is Rittenhouse. So you can see why a lot of people are upset about this preliminary ruling, and we’ll see if the judge revisits it as the trial progresses.” 

Whether or not the word “victim” can be used varies from “from courtroom to courtroom at the judge’s discretion,” University of Wisconsin Law School Professor Keith Findley told CBS. But, Schroeder wasn’t happy about Toobin’s coverage of his decision, and instead of focusing on the task at hand and helping the jury do their jobs and hear testimony, Schoeder instead spent his time bashing the media. 

The judge erupted after prosecutors tried to play a video for the jury. The video was recorded by someone from The Rundown Live, who narrated the events the night of the Rittenhouse shooting. Rittenhouse’s attorney, Mark Richards, the same man who claimed self-defense for his client because one of the victims had a skateboard that could be used to decapitate someone and that Rittenhouse’s gun charge should be thrown out because he had a hunting license, objected to the narration of the video. 

Schroeder agreed with Richards and framed the issue as a violation of the U.S. Constitution’s confrontation clause. Then he went on a rampage about CNN’s Toobin. 

“This was on CNN, Jeffrey Toobin and another attorney there, and a comment was made that the ruling was incomprehensible, and I think they obviously are not familiar with this rule,” the judge said.

“I’m going to comment about the media again because there was a gentleman on TV night before last who said this is the most divisive case in the country to date. So anything that undermines public confidence in what happens here is very important.”

“It’s important for this town,” Schroeder said, “it’s important for this country, to have people have confidence in the result of this trial, whatever it is. And I don’t care what it is.”

Schroeder went on to defend his ruling by bringing the bible into the issue, discussing St. Paul and the Romans. Not sure how any of these bizarre rantings are connected to this trial, but I’m sure the defense attornies are thrilled by the distraction and diversions. 

You can hear the arguments in Rittenhouse’s trial in the video below. 

If they only have a year to really govern, what are they going to do with the time they have left?

Glenn Youngkin's victory in Virginia points to some very unsettling conclusions.

Glenn Youngkin’s campaign said his stance was a private matter, but it troubles those who have considered the issue settled.

Glenn Youngkin’s campaign said his stance was a private matter, but it troubles those who have considered the issue settled.

Originally published by The 19th

For most Americans, the question of whether or not LGBTQ+ couples should be allowed to marry has long been settled. Or at least it was. 

But in Virginia, Glenn Youngkin, the Republican nominee for governor, says he’s personally against same-sex marriage. He’s running against former Gov. Terry McAuliffe, a Democrat, in a race that’s being watched for what it says about Americans’ views of the Biden administration. For LGBTQ+ advocates, it’s also about whether Virginians will pick a candidate who is against marriage equality, a striking stance for a mainstream candidate of either major party. 

Late last month, Youngkin told the Associated Press in an interview that he feels “called to love everyone” but, when asked if that expressed support for same-sex marriage, said, “No.” He said it was “legally acceptable” in the state and he would support the law.

LGBTQ+ rights organization the Human Rights Campaign blasted Youngkin as out of touch with mainstream America.

“His relentless anti-equality messaging as he closes out his campaign is proof that fundamental fairness and equality are at stake in this election, Joni Madison, the group’s interim president, said in a statement. 

McAuliffe rushed to highlight his own history of backing LGBTQ+ rights in Virginia, noting  on Twitter  that he was “proud to be the first Southern governor to officiate a same-sex wedding.”

In a statement to The 19th, the Youngkin campaign further clarified the candidate’s stance as a private matter and pointed to other, more inclusive stances he had taken during the campaign. 

“As Glenn said, gay marriage is the law in Virginia and he will support the law as governor,” the campaign said. “Glenn spoke up when pride flags were destroyed because he believes in respecting everyone and protecting everyone.”

Still, Youngkin’s public opposition to marriage equality troubles those who have considered the issue settled. According to Gallup, support for queer marriage rights in the United States is at an all-time high at 70 percent. A majority of Republicans also now support marriage equality.  

Virginians have also shown strong support for LGBTQ+ residents in recent years. According to the Public Religion Research Institute, 60 percent of Virginians backed marriage equality as of 2017. That same year, the state elected the county’s first out transgender representative, Danica Roem. This year, the legislature voted overwhelmingly to wipe its unenforceable marriage ban from the books. 

This year however, transgender people have weathered a year of unprecedented political attacks nationwide. Ten anti-trans bills have been signed into law this year in other states. The Equality Act, federal legislation that would grant nondiscrimination protections to LGBTQ+ people nationwide and a key Biden agenda item, has stalled short of votes in the Senate. 

A year ago, while declining to hear a case, Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito on the Supreme Court indicated that marriage equality should be overturned, a move that sent shockwaves through the queer legal community as the court prepared to confirm another conservative justice, Amy Coney Barrett. Equality rights organizations fiercely opposed her confirmation because of her past ties to a  far-right anti-LGBTQ+ organization, the Alliance Defending Freedom. 

Youngkin’s stance against LGBTQ+ unions has sent up red flags for queer political organizers who fear they are losing ground on the swift progress gained since the Supreme Court declared marriage equality the law of the land in 2015. 

Lucas Acosta, a senior spokesperson for Democratic National Committee and longtime queer rights activist, said he anticipated backlash after 2020 presidential election and in response to the Biden administration backing LGBTQ+ rights early on. 

“What does surprise me is the fact that even now, some Virginia voters still consider Glenn Youngkin a moderate,” he said. “Solely based on this position alone, he cannot call himself a moderate, and I think that that is on us in the campaign in these closing days, to really drive home for voters across the state.” 

Polling shows a tight race in Virginia, which Biden won by 10 points last year. All 100 seats in the state House of Delegates are also up for grabs, and Democrats are defending a 55-45 majority there.

photo CC License Flickr Glenn Youngkin for Governor

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Donald Trump has been handing out what pass as endorsements for candidates running in upcoming elections, and the only criteria seems to be absolute fealty to any and all things MAGA. Since Donald Trump only represents Donald Trump and his policies consist of protecting and gathering more power for Donald Trump, the delusional nature of courting a Trump endorsement is frightening. Pennsylvania, meanwhile, has been a true focal point of a lot of truly dubious Jan. 6 insurrectionism and Big Lie activities.

Sean Parnell, an Army veteran, is running in the GOP primary for Pennsylvania’s U.S. Senate seat, and has received the Donald Trump faux-golden ticket endorsement that so many extremists covet. Along with other GOP candidates like former professional football player Herschel Walker (who has also received the Trump nod) and former disgraced Missouri Gov. Eric Greitens (who hasn’t yet received it), Parnell seems to share a history of violence against the women in his life. Like, real dark and scary violence.

On Monday, the MAGA candidate’s estranged wife Laurie Parnell took the stand to testify under oath in the couple’s custody hearings. Warning: graphic details of domestic abuse to follow

The Philadelphia Inquirer reports that Laurie Parnell gave very emotional testimony detailing the verbal and physical abuse she endured at the hands of Sean Parnell during their marriage. This includes accusations that he would frequently call her a “whore,” and a “piece of shit,” and had once left her alone on the side of the road after the two argued about her pregnancy—that Sean wanted her to abort. “He tried to choke me out on a couch and I literally had to bite him” she testified. “He was strangling me.” Parnell has denied all of his estranged wife’s allegations. 

Parnell has been in a very contentious divorce and custody dispute with his estranged wife. The details of this divorce include very serious allegations of severe abuse on the part of Parnell toward his wife. Protective orders have been filed against Parnell, and he has tried to silence his wife with his own set of protective orders. However, a judge did not find that there was grounds for the kind of “sweeping gag order” Sean Parnell was hoping for in order to keep this story quiet during his campaign.

Receiving an endorsement from Trump means that you either believe in a make-believe universe where Donald Trump has always received all of the votes and really is the current president, and only mysterious deep state characters who are communists, Muslims, and/or woke corporations, are stopping this from happening. Conversely, you are so cynical and sociopathic that you believe this is your best bet to climb up a the ladder of wealth and power. Those are the two poles within which you will find any and all Donald Trump endorsements.

Over the weekend, thousands of people walked across the Brooklyn Bridge “in support of” police, firefighters, and other municipal employees who oppose the city’s vaccine mandate. That protest was one of several that came with dire predictions about the consequences of the mandate. The New York Post (link purposely omitted) has been whining for weeks that the vaccine mandate will mean “fewer cops and more crime,” warning that fire stations might be closed, and providing ominous predictions that “People will die in this city” because of vaccine mandates.

And as The Washington Post notes, the heads of five major unions warned that “10,000 unvaccinated police officers” could be pulled off the streets come November 1. It’s November 2. So how did things actually go?

So far, the number of NYPD placed on unpaid leave is … 34. Of that, fewer than a dozen are uniformed officers. The rest are civilian staff.

There’s a reason that, when Hammurabi wanted to keep people from cutting down trees in Babylon, he didn’t offer a poem—he made a law that came with consequences. There’s a reason stop lights are not a suggestion. And there’s a reason any child entering a Florida elementary school is required to have vaccinations against seven different diseases, including four or five doses of vaccines against some of those diseases.

It’s because mandates work. Recommendations, opinions, and proposals are all fine, but to ensure alignment with the public good, no matter how obvious, it takes a mandate. One that carries consequences.

There are still union officials out there waving their hands and predicting dire consequences. As New York’s ABC 7 reports, Oren Barzilay, president of the NYC EMS union, is a vaccine skeptic who is was on hand at the bridge protest to provide some genuinely alarming statements.

“All our members were exposed to this disease, and we developed our natural immunity,” said Barzilay. “If we have the natural antibodies in our body, is it necessary to really inject something else into our body?”

That’s alarming not because of Barzilay’s claims that half of EMS workers in the city might walk off the job, but because it’s so profoundly ignorant—and because ABC ran that comment, and the comments of other vaccine skeptics, without bothering to provide a single word of correction.

The ABC 7 article is completely typical of how this situation is being presented to the public: 

• There are absolutely no comments from workers or vaccinated officials or from anyone who favors the mandate.
• There are non-factual claims about “natural immunity” or how the vaccine doesn’t work, none of which are countered by providing any facts or statistics.
• There is an extended quote from a Republican candidate for mayor using this moment as a political lever, but no opposing comment.
• Everything—everything—in the article is written to heighten the idea that this is a crisis about to topple the city.

As NPR reported last week, vaccine mandates are proving effective over and over. After warnings that airline workers would walk off the job, leaving travelers stranded, 99.5% of United employees were vaccinated before that company’s deadline.

Elsewhere, other employers also report success with mandates. Tyson Foods, New York City schools, major hospital systems in Maine and the NBA are among those with vaccination rates topping 90%.

The month before that, the Washington Post showed that when Massachusetts State Police issued a mandate, only one (1) state trooper actually quit rather than take a jab. In North Carolina, 375 hospital workers (out of 35,000) were suspended after refusing to be vaccinated. But then, 200 of those came back and took their vaccine. That’s another 99.5% vaccination rate.

Mask mandates work, as well. As Nature reported in May, countries, states, and communities with mandates had higher compliance in using masks, and much better results when it came to cases of COVID-19. Mask mandates directly contributed to dropping community spread by 70% within days in closely monitored German cities. Where mask-wearing was voluntary, results were much less dramatic. Mask mandates—enforced mask mandates—are key to how China pushed back the first wave of disease in that country and has avoided another surge, even against the much more contagious delta variant.

One study showed that a national mandate for wearing masks on the job could have had amazing results in the United States—including a 47% reduction in deaths.

When something is absolutely necessary for public protection, it takes a mandate. And the kind of numbers that these mandates are generating, numbers of 90% and above, are exactly the level of vaccination that’s needed to actually bring COVID-19 under control and halt community spread in most areas.

"Virtually all compilers -- programs that transform human-readable source code into computer-executable machine code -- are vulnerable to an insidious attack in which an adversary can introduce targeted vulnerabilities into any software without being detected," warns cybersecurity expert Brian Krebs in a new report. An anonymous reader shares an excerpt: Researchers with the University of Cambridge discovered a bug that affects most computer code compilers and many software development environments. At issue is a component of the digital text encoding standard Unicode, which allows computers to exchange information regardless of the language used. Unicode currently defines more than 143,000 characters across 154 different language scripts (in addition to many non-script character sets, such as emojis). Specifically, the weakness involves Unicode's bi-directional or "Bidi" algorithm, which handles displaying text that includes mixed scripts with different display orders, such as Arabic -- which is read right to left -- and English (left to right). But computer systems need to have a deterministic way of resolving conflicting directionality in text. Enter the "Bidi override," which can be used to make left-to-right text read right-to-left, and vice versa. "In some scenarios, the default ordering set by the Bidi Algorithm may not be sufficient," the Cambridge researchers wrote. "For these cases, Bidi override control characters enable switching the display ordering of groups of characters." Bidi overrides enable even single-script characters to be displayed in an order different from their logical encoding. As the researchers point out, this fact has previously been exploited to disguise the file extensions of malware disseminated via email. Here's the problem: Most programming languages let you put these Bidi overrides in comments and strings. This is bad because most programming languages allow comments within which all text -- including control characters -- is ignored by compilers and interpreters. Also, it's bad because most programming languages allow string literals that may contain arbitrary characters, including control characters. "So you can use them in source code that appears innocuous to a human reviewer [that] can actually do something nasty," said Ross Anderson, a professor of computer security at Cambridge and co-author of the research. "That's bad news for projects like Linux and Webkit that accept contributions from random people, subject them to manual review, then incorporate them into critical code. This vulnerability is, as far as I know, the first one to affect almost everything." The research paper, which dubbed the vulnerability "Trojan Source," notes that while both comments and strings will have syntax-specific semantics indicating their start and end, these bounds are not respected by Bidi overrides. [...] Anderson said such an attack could be challenging for a human code reviewer to detect, as the rendered source code looks perfectly acceptable. "If the change in logic is subtle enough to go undetected in subsequent testing, an adversary could introduce targeted vulnerabilities without being detected," he said. Equally concerning is that Bidi override characters persist through the copy-and-paste functions on most modern browsers, editors, and operating systems.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Ahead of a key city council vote on a $28.5 million water pact with Google, the city of The Dalles filed suit in state court Friday in an effort to keep the tech giant's water use a secret. The Oregonian/OregonLive reports: The city is seeking to overturn a ruling earlier this month from Wasco County's district attorney, who found Google's water use is a public record and ordered The Dalles to provide that information to The Oregonian/OregonLive. The city sued the news organization Friday, asking a judge to intervene. Google is contemplating two new server farms on the site of a former aluminum smelter in The Dalles, where it already has an enormous campus of data centers on its property along the Columbia River. Google says it needs more water to cool its data centers, but neither the company nor the city will say how much more -- only that The Dalles can't meet Google's needs without expanding its water system. The deal calls for Google to pay for the upgrade. Even so, the proposed water pact has attracted scrutiny and skepticism in The Dalles, a riverfront city of about 15,000 approximately 80 miles east of Portland. Residents and nearby farmers are concerned about the city's water long-term water supply amid an ongoing drought. They complain they don't know enough about Google's actual water use. The city is now going to court to keep that information under wraps, arguing it's a Google "trade secret" exempt from disclosure under Oregon law. Regardless of how the city's suit plays out, the litigation won't be resolved before the city council votes on Google's water deal on the evening of Nov. 8. That means the public won't have access to that information, though city council members do. This new agreement "could boost property tax collections by several million dollars a year but still figure to save Google tens of millions of dollars over the 15-year life of the tax breaks," the report notes. "It doesn't appear Google can proceed without more water, however."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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A New York Times investigation found that in five years police officers killed more than 400 people who weren't in possession of a gun or knife and weren't suspected of a violent crime, yet only five of the officers have been convicted in connection with the killings. The more likely outcome was a lawsuit, which played out with local governments (i.e. taxpayers) paying at least $125 million in 40 wrongful death suits, the Times reported. Journalists David Kirkpatrick, Steve Eder, Kim Barker, and Julie Tate wrote in the piece that Black drivers were overrepresented in the number of deaths when compared to the population, and they were stopped over minor infractions like red light violations or driving with broken taillights. “In case after case, officers said they had feared for their lives,” the reporting team wrote. “And in case after case, prosecutors declared the killings of unarmed motorists legally justifiable.

“But The Times reviewed video and audio recordings, prosecutor statements and court documents, finding patterns of questionable police conduct that went beyond recent high-profile deaths of unarmed drivers. Evidence often contradicted the accounts of law enforcement officers.” 

Some 24 cases involving the officers are pending, while only five officers have actually been convicted in relation to killings, the Times reported. Derek Chauvin, who was convicted of murdering George Floyd when the white Minneapolis cop kneeled on the Black father's neck for more than nine minutes, was one of two officers sentenced to considerable time in prison. One cop got away with only probation, the Times reported. Another served seven months in prison, and cases involving the other two officers are still playing out in court, one of whom will have his appeal considered by the Texas Supreme Court, the Times reported.

The latter case is that of former North Texas police officer Roy Oliver, who was sentenced to 15 years in prison after being convicted of shooting and killing 15-year-old Jordan Edwards, The Texas Tribune reported. The teen was riding in a car that was driving away from officers, who had been called to a house party to investigate alleged underage drinking on April 29, 2017, Texas Monthly reported.

While Oliver was prosecuted, that was not a common outcome in the cases The New York Times investigated. In more than 150 statements from prosecutors tasked with holding officers accountable for the deaths, many of them blamed the drivers. “Prosecutors and courts give more leeway to officers’ decisions to use force at vehicle stops, as a result of the exaggerated concern about the potential for officers getting hurt,” Michael Gennaco, a police consultant and former Justice Department prosecutor, told the Times. “Officers would likely kill fewer drivers if there were deterrence.”

The Philadelphia City Council and Mayor Jim Kenney seem to have taken steps in the right direction along those lines by passing the Driving Equality Bill, which is aimed at banning officers from pulling over drivers for low-level vehicle infractions and instead allowing officers to mail citations. Kenney told The Hill he signed the bill into law on Wednesday and his administration intends to implement it and accompanying legislation through executive action. The companion legislation requires officers to keep and make public data on traffic stops at least monthly.

“This is something that is historic that could put us in a position where we’re addressing an issue that has been plaguing Black communities,” the Driving Equality bill’s author Isaiah Thomas told The Philadelphia Inquirer. “Philadelphia is leading the nation when it comes to this particular issue.”

The U.S. Supreme Court began allowing officers to use minor traffic infractions as a means to investigate unrelated crimes in 1996, but the end result of that allowance has been cops disproportionately stopping Black and Latino drivers "despite those drivers being no more likely to be found to be carrying anything illegal," the newspaper reported of studies.

“A person of color’s first exchange with a police officer shouldn’t be during a discriminatory traffic stop,” Thomas said in a June news release. “By working closely with the Philadelphia Police Department, we were able to identify traffic stops that do nothing to keep people safer and remove the negative interaction.

“I believe this Philadelphia legislation can set a precedent for other cities, not only through the policy itself but through the collaborative process.”

RELATED: Cops lie. Look no further than initial press release following George Floyd's death as proof

Who's to blame for the challenges in funding Biden's agenda? The centrists, that's who.

Politicians used to give subtle messages to one audience while concealing them from everyone else. No more.