The 21-year-old Arvada man arrested in Monday’s mass shooting at a Boulder King Sooper’s was violent, short-tempered and paranoid during high school, his former classmates said Tuesday.

Ahmad Al Aliwi Alissa booking mug provided by Boulder Police Department.

Ahmad Al Aliwi Alissa is suspected of killing 10 people at the grocery store Monday when he walked in around 2:30 p.m. and began shooting, according to law enforcement. He was taken into custody about an hour later with a gunshot wound in his leg.

Alissa was hospitalized for treatment and is expected to be transported to the Boulder County Jail Tuesday to face 10 counts of first-degree murder.

He attended Arvada West High School from 2015 until he graduated in 2018, Jeffco Public Schools spokeswoman Cameron Bell confirmed Tuesday. He was on the wrestling team his junior and senior years.

“He was kind of scary to be around,” said Dayton Marvel, a teammate on the wrestling team. Alissa once had an outburst and threatened to kill people during an intra-team match, Marvel said.

“His senior year, during the wrestle-offs to see who makes varsity, he actually lost his match and quit the team and yelled out in the wrestling room that he was, like, going to kill everybody,” Marvel said. “Nobody believed him. We were just all kind of freaked out by it, but nobody did anything about it.”

He said he did not like spending time with Alissa, and Alissa was not close with anyone on the wrestling team. Another teammate, Angel Hernandez, said Alissa got into a fight in the parking lot after the match.

“(The other wrestler) was just teasing him and goes, ‘Maybe if you were a better wrestler, you would have won.’ (Alissa) just lost it. He started punching him,” Hernandez said.

Hernandez said Alissa frequently appeared to be paranoid about perceived slights against him, and Marvel said Alissa was often concerned about being targeted because of his Muslim faith.

“He would talk about him being Muslim and how if anybody tried anything, he would file a hate crime and say they were making it up,” Marvel said. “It was a crazy deal. I just know he was a pretty cool kid until something made him mad, and then whatever made him mad, he went over the edge — way too far.”

“He was always talking about (how) people were looking at him and there was no one ever where he was pointing people out,” Hernandez said. “We always thought he was messing around with us or something.”

In 2017, Alissa, then 18, attacked a classmate at Arvada West High School, according to an affidavit filed in the case. He punched the classmate in the head without warning, and when the boy fell to the ground, Alissa continued to punch him. The classmate suffered bruises and cuts to his head, according to the affidavit.

Witnesses told police they didn’t see or hear any reason for Alissa to attack the classmate. Alissa told officers that the classmate “had made fun of him and called him racial names weeks earlier,” according to the affidavit.

He was convicted of misdemeanor assault in 2018 and was sentenced to probation and 48 hours of community service, according to court records.

Despite his short temper, Hernandez said Alissa could also be friendly and “joyful.”

“The sad thing about it is that if you really were to get to know him, he was a good guy,” Hernandez said. “Whenever you went up to him, he was always so joyful and so nice. But you could tell there was a dark side in him. If he did get ticked off about something, within a split second, it was like if something takes over, like a demon. He’d just unleash all his anger.”

Another former classmate, Keaton Hyatt, said he took a weightlifting class with Alissa and never knew him to be violent. Hyatt liked Alissa’s quick wit and sharp comebacks during locker room banter.

“He was super cool and super funny,” Hyatt said. “… It was never violent jokes about people or America or anything.”

Arvada Police Detective Dave Snelling confirmed Tuesday the local department had at least two interactions with Alissa over the past several years, including a case of criminal mischief. The details of that case were not immediately available.

Snelling would not say whether local police had received any warnings or complaints about Alissa recently, however, and instead deferred the question to the FBI.

Alissa lived with his family in an Arvada subdivision on West 65th Place, a quiet neighborhood of single-family homes. Neighbors said the household appeared to be multi-generational with a large number of family members living there.

The home is owned by Ali Aliwi Alissa, who also owns a nearby restaurant. The eatery, in a strip mall that shares space with a coffee shop, UPS store, battery store and other restaurants, was closed Tuesday.

Jamie Poeling moved her business, Dream Dinners, a few doors down from the restaurant just over a year ago and said she ate there infrequently. Employees there gave Poeling a discount and she returned the favor.

Poeling said she doesn’t know everyone in the family by name, but that she never had a negative experience at the restaurant. Employees would go out of their way to offer food to a homeless woman living behind the restaurant, she said.

“I’ve been in the shop while they’ve given her food and they’re very kind,” Poeling said.

It was not immediately clear Tuesday whether any of Alissa’s family knew of his plan to attack King Soopers.

A relative told investigators Monday night that she’d seen Alissa “playing” with a gun that looked like a “machine gun” about two days prior, according to the affidavit.

“Alissa had been talking about having a bullet stuck in the gun and was playing with the gun,” the affidavit said. Others in the home became upset that he had the gun inside and took it from him, the relative told police, although she believed it had later been returned to him.

Alissa purchased a Ruger AR-556 pistol six days before the attack, according to a police affidavit released Tuesday.

He bought the gun on March 16. The weapon, which looks similar to a rifle, has a 30-round capacity, according to Ruger’s website. Witnesses to the shooting described the gunman as firing a “patrol rifle,” Boulder police have said.

On a Facebook page that appeared to belong to Alissa and has since been removed, the user posted in 2019 that he believed his former high school was hacking his cell phone. In a comment to someone who asked why the school would do that, he blamed racism.

“I believe part racism for sure,” he replied. “I believe someone spread rumors about me which are false and maybe that set it off.”

In other posts, the user expressed anti-LGBTQ sentiments and warned about perils he perceived from too much government control.

This is a developing story and will be updated as more information becomes available. 


Source Article from https://www.denverpost.com/2021/03/23/boulder-shooting-suspect-ahmad-al-aliwi-alissa/

Breed, in an orange dress to mark the occasion, held a press briefing in the city’s desolate downtown to herald the move to the second-least restrictive level in the state’s reopening plan. Two more Bay Area counties, Santa Clara and Marin, also achieved the same benchmark Tuesday, while San Mateo County moved into the orange tier earlier this month.

Relaxed restrictions will start Wednesday.

Downtown San Francisco is a shell of its former self without the daily buzz of office workers. The disappearance of the 9-to-5 employee has impacted other downtown businesses — from happy hour spots to fitness clubs — that heavily rely on the after-work crowd.

Breed, speaking outside the global headquarters of Twilio, a San Francisco tech company working remotely for the past year, said that people may soon return to the city’s abandoned skyscrapers and that long-shuttered restaurants and coffeeshops could once again see customers lining up at their doors.

“I’m tired of working from home,” Breed said. “I think most people can agree, working from home is boring.”

The Twilio offices were a symbolic backdrop, as CEO Jeff Lawson has promised to keep his company and family in the city, even as many high-profile tech titans have fled during the pandemic.

“It’s so exciting to be entering the orange tier because it’s an opportunity to start rebuilding and start coming together,” Lawson said Tuesday. “We have employees all around the world. But San Francisco is our headquarters. And San Francisco is our home.”

While employees are still encouraged to work from home, the orange tier allows San Francisco offices to reopen at up to 25% beginning Wednesday. Conference and meeting rooms must also maintain at 25% capacity.

Live updates: Real-time news from around the Bay Area

COVID-19 Map: Data on trends in the Bay Area and across California

Vaccine Tracker: The latest developments

County-by-county details: When and where can I get vaccinated?

California’s reopening: Each county’s status in color-coded tier system


But even with a green light to reopen, it’s unclear how many companies will immediately bring back employees. Many tech companies, like Salesforce and Facebook, have said their employees can work remotely until at least the summer. Others, like Twitter, have said their employees can work from home indefinitely.

As the officials spoke Tuesday at an empty Rincon Center — which would normally be flooded with office workers during lunch time — one customer sat inside of Hair Shaper, a salon just a few feet away. It had been about three hours since the salon opened, and she was their first customer of the day.

Pre-pandemic, hairstylist Holly Vo said nearly every chair would be full, and a group of people would be sitting in the waiting area. She said she is looking forward to the offices opening again.

“We have been waiting for them,” she said.

Fast, an online checkout tech company in San Francisco, said it would welcome employees back in its 9th Street offices Wednesday for the first time since November, when the city went back into a strict lockdown.

Chief Communications Officer Jason Alderman said among the company’s 56 employees, about 10 to 14 people “can’t wait to get in.” No one will be forced to go back to the office.

He said the company will have an internal sign-up sheet to control how many people can come into the office on a given day. The company has placed hand sanitizer throughout the building and removed some desks to enforce six-foot distancing. It will also require workers to wear masks.

Alderman said he was eager to go back to the office, mainly because he missed his coworkers and the creativity and collaboration of in-person work. Alderman said he even missed his commute on BART from the East Bay.

“That’s the last thing I thought I’d ever say,” he said.

Meanwhile, bars, breweries, wineries and distilleries that don’t serve food can open for outdoor table service Wednesday. Other indoor activities, like dining and shopping, may increase to 50% capacity.

Breed said the city is also in discussions with the Giants and Warriors to determine how to bring live audiences back to Oracle Park and the Chase Center, respectively.

“We’re working out the specifics in terms of the capacity and what the requirements will be for testing and those who are vaccinated,” Breed said. “Once we finalize those plans, they will be made public.”

San Francisco is being slightly more conservative than what the state allows in its reopening plan.

“We’re proceeding with caution,” Breed said. “Because we don’t want to slide backward.”

For example, while the state suggests offices and retail can reopen with modifications in the orange tier, it doesn’t specify what those capacity limits should be. But San Francisco is allowing offices to reopen at only 25% capacity and indoor retail at 50%.

Santa Clara County is going with the state guidelines, but health director Dr. Sara Cody warned Tuesday that momentum on the improving trends is slowing. “We should take a moment to celebrate and feel good,” she told the county supervisors, but she advised them, “Marry that celebratory mood with caution. We are beginning to see signs that we are stalling out.” Cody said indicator numbers are flattening at fairly high levels instead of the lower plateaus that would indicate safety. “We are just not out of the woods,” she said.

Dr. Grant Colfax, San Francisco’s health director said city COVID-19 data has been encouraging. On Tuesday, he said, 35 COVID-19 patients were in hospitals across San Francisco — the lowest number in four months. He said the city is averaging 31 new coronavirus cases a day, compared to more than 370 a day during the winter surge.

About 40% of S.F. residents over 16 have been vaccinated, officials said. At least 50% of those over 65 have been fully vaccinated; with close to 80% of them having at least received their first dose of the two-dose regimens.

“We’re ready to be done,” Colfax said. “We’re not there yet.”

Still, he warned that the city was still at the risk of a fourth surge driven by more contagious virus variants but said if numbers continue to move in the right direction, San Francisco could soon be in the yellow tier, the least restrictive.

Other counties in the state all are moving in a positive, or at least neutral direction. Lassen, Trinity and Yolo counties joined the three Bay Area counties advancing into the orange tier on Tuesday. Statewide, just eight counties remain in the most restrictive purple tier, none of them in the Bay Area.

The slight hope that downtown San Francisco may start coming back to life was welcome news for Gary Thorn, owner of Rincon Flowers, who said his business has been impacted “big time” over the past year.

Much of his money at the corner of Mission and Spear used to be made from people grabbing a bouquet for a coworker on their way to work, or for a spouse on their way home. Now, only a few people stop by each day.

But, he said, he’s confident the area — and the city as a whole — will eventually come back to life.

“There’s a lot of offices that are gone, but people are going to come back,” he said. “It’s San Francisco!”

Chronicle staff writer Chase DiFeliciantonio contributed to this report.

Trisha Thadani and Aidin Vaziri are San Francisco Chronicle staff writers. Email: tthadani@sfchronicle.com avaziri@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @TrishaThadani @MusicSF

Source Article from https://www.sfchronicle.com/politics/article/S-F-is-going-orange-sparking-downtown-hopes-16045697.php

Most people who did not get picked expressed strong views about the police and racial justice issues or appeared to be very knowledgeable about the case.

Chauvin’s attorney, Eric Nelson, used his strikes to dismiss prospective jurors who believed Chauvin was culpable in Floyd’s death and who wanted police reform. Prosecutors used their strikes against those who were very pro-police.

The jurors who were selected appeared to hold more passive and neutral opinions about many of the same topics, ascribing their views to either a lack of knowledge or personal experience.

Nearly all of the selected jurors had somewhat negative or neutral views of Chauvin, while a few mentioned Floyd’s “checkered past” and “skeletons in his closet.” Many felt favorably about Black Lives Matter as a statement but not as an organization, and most were favorable or neutral about Blue Lives Matter. All the jurors said they respected law enforcement and most disagreed with the idea of defunding the Minneapolis Police Department. Several believed that the protests after Floyd’s death negatively affected their communities in terms of the destruction of property and rioting.

Ultimately, all the jurors had to unequivocally state that despite their opinions they could — as Chauvin’s attorney described it — “become a blank slate” to serve on the jury.

These are some of the opinions of the 14 jurors who will judge one of the most significant police prosecutions in recent history.

Jurors’ impressions of Chauvin and Floyd after watching the video

All the jurors said they had either a “somewhat negative” or “neutral” impression of Chauvin based on clips of the video and news reports. Many said that their negative opinion of Chauvin was based more on the fact that a person died during the incident, and not on their personal views about him.

“I don’t think [Chauvin] had any intention of harming anyone, but somebody did die,” one juror, a Black youth sports coach in his thirties, told the court.

“Nobody wants to see somebody die, whether it was [Chauvin’s] fault or not,” said a woman in her twenties who identified as more than one race.

A single white parent in her fifties said she had sympathy for Floyd as well as the officers accused of killing him.

“No one wants to take someone’s life — if that is what happened — so that’s where the empathy comes from,” she told the court. She felt that Chauvin was innocent until proven otherwise.

Several jurors said they didn’t have all the details about what happened before or after what the video showed and didn’t trust media reports to provide the full picture.

“There are two sides to every story,” a Black grandmother in her sixties told the court.

Most of the jurors had a “neutral” opinion of Floyd, saying they didn’t know enough about him. At least four white jurors brought up allegations of drug use and domestic violence to suggest that Floyd had a “checkered past.”

One woman had a somewhat negative opinion of Floyd because his “record wasn’t clean and he abused drugs at some point,” she wrote in her questionnaire.

While Floyd didn’t deserve to die, the woman said, “I don’t believe he is completely innocent.”

A single white mom of two teenage boys wrote in her questionnaire that Floyd was “not a model citizen.”

“He may have had more skeletons in his closet than most, but he did not deserve to die,” she wrote.

Jurors’ opinions on Black Lives Matter and Blue Lives Matter

Most of the jurors had somewhat favorable views of Black Lives Matter as a statement but not as an organization. Several jurors said they supported the BLM movement within the context of the idea that all lives matter.

“I don’t love the Black Lives Matter organization,” said a white chemist in his twenties who was the first juror to be seated. “I do support the message that every life should matter equally. I don’t believe that the organization Black Lives Matter necessarily stands for that. I do think that the phrase and the movement stands for that.”

He said that he didn’t see Black Lives Matter and Blue Lives Matter as “mutually exclusive,” adding, “the whole point of that is all lives should matter equally and that should include police.”

One juror, a white man in his thirties, said he supported Black Lives Matter in a general context but disagreed with some of the ways the group’s members “have gone about it.”

The woman in her twenties who identified as more than one race said that she liked the idea of what Black Lives Matter was supposed to stand for but thought it had been turned into “a propaganda scheme by companies just to get you to buy their stuff.”

The white single mother in her fifties checked that she had a “somewhat unfavorable” view of Black Lives Matter in her questionnaire. When questioned about it in court, she said she wasn’t sure why she selected that, adding, “I strongly believe all lives matter.”

“Maybe I was thinking that sometimes they were taking it too far,” she said. The woman suggested that the movement started because Black people “maybe felt that they were never seen or never heard,” adding, “I don’t believe that to be true, but I don’t know because I’m not them.”

The juror also said that when people say Black Lives Matter, she perceived them as saying that others’ lives don’t matter. She said that if someone told her Black Lives Matter, “I would probably tell them that all lives matter.”

The woman did not know Blue Lives Matter was related to police officers. “I took that to mean everybody else,” she said.

A white social worker in her twenties felt neutrally toward both movements, saying, “I believe Black lives matter as much as Latinas, police etc… I don’t think one is more important than the other.”

The four Black jurors had favorable views of Black Lives Matter, while three of them also felt favorably about Blue Lives Matter.

“I am Black and my life matters,” the grandmother wrote in her questionnaire. With respect to Blue Lives Matter, she wrote, “Everyone is important and my family member is a police officer.”

When Chauvin’s attorney asked her if she agreed with the premise that all lives matter, she said yes.

A Black IT manager in his thirties who immigrated to the US 14 years ago wrote, “I believe all lives matter, but I think Black lives matter more because they are marginalized.”

He was also favorable toward Blue Lives Matter, writing, “Cops need to be safe and feel safe to protect our community.”

A Black man in his forties who also immigrated to the US was favorable to both because he believed “every life matters.”

A white woman in her forties who works in insurance wrote that while she believed “people of other races are treated unfairly,” she did not personally get involved to “support the cause” of Black Lives Matter. She had a “very favorable” opinion of Blue Lives Matter, writing in her questionnaire, “I would be terrified if our police departments were dismantled.”

Jurors’ opinions about the impact of protests in the Twin Cities after Floyd’s death

While some jurors believed there were positive aspects to the protests after Floyd’s death, especially in bringing awareness about racial justice issues, many felt that the impact was negative because of the damage to communities and local businesses.

Chauvin’s attorney, Eric Nelson, frequently mentioned “rioting” while questioning prospective jurors about the protests and asked them if they could differentiate between the two.

A white woman in her forties said the protests had a positive and negative impact on the Twin Cities area, as “some things led to rioting and some people brought awareness through protests.”

The Black grandmother said her community had been affected by the protests because “so many stores were looted and destroyed.” She said her brother was unable to get his medications delivered through the post office. The only positive impact of the protests, she said, was that people came together to help each other and their local businesses.

The Black man in IT management said that while people in his community understood why people were protesting, they were “not OK with the looting.”

The Black youth sports coach said the protests had the potential to have a positive impact but that he hadn’t seen any changes so far.

The single white mother in her fifties believed that while the protests had brought attention to “real issues,” she felt the destruction of businesses was “unnecessary.” When Chauvin’s attorney asked her if she thought the people protesting were also responsible for rioting, she said the majority weren’t, but some were.

Another white woman in her 50s said the communities in the Twin Cities area “took a beating” from the protests. She said she was scared that the “riots” would spread to her neighborhood.

Jurors’ opinions on law enforcement, the criminal justice system, and defunding the Minneapolis Police Department

Most jurors said they respected and trusted law enforcement, agreed that police made them feel safe, and disagreed with the idea of defunding the Minneapolis Police Department (MPD).

Both the Black men who immigrated to the US said they strongly disagreed with defunding the MPD.

“While I necessarily might not agree with the police action in some situations, I believe that in order for police to make my community safe they have to have the funds to do that,” one of the men said.

The other man, whose house had been previously broken into, said that if the police were defunded they wouldn’t have been able to come and help him. He believed that defunding the police was more of a political statement.

The Black sports coach said that in some instances the police didn’t make him feel safe, recalling an incident when he witnessed some officers slam a young man to the ground.

“But I also know some great guys,” he said, referring to officers he knew at his gym. He disagreed with defunding MPD because he didn’t have enough information about it to form an opinion.

The white woman in her forties who works in insurance said that defunding the MPD would “terrify” her and would not work out well.

“Just look at the riots,” she said. “I don’t think it seems to solve problems.”

A white social worker in her twenties also strongly disagreed with defunding MPD, saying, “My understanding from that overall movement is getting rid of the police in general, and I do not agree with that.”

Several jurors somewhat agreed that the police discriminated against Black people and other minorities, basing their opinions on what they saw on the media. Some felt that the media exaggerated or sensationalized such incidents. But the Black youth coach said the media couldn’t possibly cover the extent of discrimination in the system.

Both the Black grandmother and a white woman in her fifties who advocates for homeless people felt that the bias against Black people and other minorities in the criminal justice system was driven more by economic factors and not by race.

The white woman believed that police treated Black people and white people equally based on her “personal experience.”

“I’ve seen incidents where police and minorities were involved and I didn’t see them treat them any differently than anybody else,” she said.

One of the single mothers in her fifties said that as part of her advocacy work in healthcare she felt there was “an inherent systematic bias” against Black and Native communities, but added that “not all police are bad.”

A couple of the jurors felt that, if something negative happened to people who didn’t cooperate or comply with police, then the people most likely had themselves to blame.

“If you don’t comply something needs to happen to resolve the situation,” the homelessness advocate told the court.

Jurors’ opinions on use of illegal drugs

Chauvin’s defense is set to focus on Floyd’s use of drugs and preexisting medical conditions as contributing factors to his cause of death. The trial judge allowed the defense to introduce evidence from Floyd’s previous arrest in May 2019, when he ingested drugs during the incident.

During jury selection, prosecutors tried to ascertain if jurors would be biased against people who use illegal drugs. While most jurors said they wouldn’t judge a person for abusing narcotics, one juror, a white woman in her forties, had a negative view of Floyd based on his use of drugs.

She said those who struggle with addiction aren’t bad people but that she would be “cautious” about trusting them. The single white mother in her fifties said she was “anti-drug” and believed that those who use drugs “are making bad decisions.”

Source Article from https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/tasneemnashrulla/jurors-derek-chauvin-trial-george-floyd-case

The city council in Evanston, Illinois, voted 8-1 to distribute $25,000 (£18,000) each to 16 eligible black households to use for home repairs or as down payments on property.

Source Article from https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-56497294

BOSTON — Early last March, when the COVID-19 crisis still felt like a remote threat, Charlie Baker flew off with members of his family to a ski vacation in Utah.

It would be the last taste of normalcy the Republican governor would enjoy for the next year.

Three days later, on March 9, 2020, Baker cut his vacation short and returned as the number of confirmed COVID-19 cases in Massachusetts shot up to the then-startling number of 41. Baker and the state that twice elected him governor were about to be tested in ways unimaginable just weeks earlier.

For Baker, the pandemic has had a kind of inverse impact on his popularity in Massachusetts, one of the hardest-hit states with a confirmed death toll approaching 17,000.

When fear was running high in the early months of the crisis and Baker was taking dramatic steps to shut down the state, the public’s confidence in him remained high — only to fall as vaccines arrived and Baker stumbled with a botched vaccination website rollout and efforts to more fully reopen businesses like restaurants even as new variants of the virus lurked.

Other governors who were hailed early on the COVID-19 crisis — including California’s Gavin Newsom and New York’s Andrew Cuomo, both Democrats — have also seen their stars dimmed as critics questioned some of their pandemic-related decisions.

As cases shot up, Baker began holding daily press conferences to unveil a dizzying series of orders meant to limit the spread of the virus. He shuttered schools, closed nonessential businesses, set curfews, issued mask mandates, delayed elective surgeries and ordered the construction of field hospitals.

Initially, Baker’s frank approach to delivering even the most unsettling news won plaudits.

Baker would later say that as governor, he’d anticipated grappling with disasters like blizzards, hurricanes, floods and even the occasional tornado — but not a pandemic that would claim thousands of lives and upend everyday life.

“I don’t know about you, but every day to me feels kind of like a month,” Baker joked during one recent press conference. “I was 27 when this all began and now I’m 64 and it just happened like that.”

Part of Baker’s appeal was as an adversary of then-President Donald Trump.

“He was the Republican that Democrats could like,” said Erin O’Brien, a political science professor at the University of Massachusetts-Boston. “He made decisions that a lot of Republicans weren’t ready to do.”

A technocrat with a background as a health care executive, Baker would ironically see his political fortunes begin to fade with the release of vaccines and the hope of an end to the pandemic.

Critics cast Baker’s plan to vaccinate the population in phases — beginning with medical workers and individuals in long-term care facilities before moving on to those 75 and older — as too cumbersome. Many other New England states have staggered vaccine availability first to at-risk populations and frontline workers before moving on to wider, older swaths of the population and eventually the general public.

They also faulted the initial lack of a single website to book vaccine appointments.

When the administration created a vaccine finder site, Baker faced new fallout when it crashed the day vaccines were made available to those 65 and older.

More recently, Baker came under pressure from teachers’ unions pressing him to bump up educators in the vaccine waiting line if he wanted to shift back to in-classroom learning. Baker largely conceded.

“This pandemic has shown the governor not to be the great manager that he convinced Massachusetts he was,” said Democratic state Sen. Sonia Chang-Diaz.

She said there are many strategies Baker hasn’t tried to reach out to minority communities — like creating mobile vaccina’tion programs to reach Black, Hispanic and other minority residents, further perpetuating racial disparities highlighted by the pandemic.

Louis Elisa, one of the founding members of the Black Boston COVID-19 Coalition, said the pandemic has been “absolute hell” for the Black community, many of whom are frontline workers.

“It was just a complete failure of communication, a total breakdown,” Elisa said. “Almost every day we were being put at risk with almost no support.”

Elisa said it took months before there was a major testing center set up in Boston’s Roxbury neighborhood, the city’s traditional center of Black life. The situation has begun to improve — the state started using an athletic complex in Roxbury as a mass vaccination center — but the administration should have hit the ground running earlier, he said.

Baker has also lost focus on working class areas like New Bedford and its immigrant community, including many from Central America who work processing fish, said Helena DaSilva-Hughes, executive director of the Immigrants’ Assistance Center. As recently as early March, New Bedford was among a handful of Massachusetts communities still considered at highest risk of coronavirus transmission, although it has since dropped off the list.

“They have been hard hit. They are living five to six people in houses so there’s no social distancing,” she said. “They are getting COVID and it seems no one is listening.”

Baker has defended his efforts to increase immunizations in minority communities. He recently said Massachusetts ranks second in the country in administering first doses to Black residents, with about 16% of Blacks receiving their first jabs.

Others have praised Baker, including Sue Joss, CEO of a neighborhood health center in Brockton, a city about 20 miles south of Boston hard hit by COVID-19. Joss said her city has reduced the number of those infected with the help of the state’s COVID-19 Command Center, which helps oversee the state’s response to the pandemic.

“The governor and his team have been absolutely amazing through all of this. They’ve been nimble. They’ve tried things. Some things haven’t worked so they’ve changed,” she said at a recent press conference.

Baker recently announced the release of $27.4 million in federal money that he said will boost vaccinations among priority populations including $10.6 million for help with vaccine access, like transportation to vaccination clinics.

Frustration with the vaccine rollout has taken a political toll on Baker.

A poll released March 15 by WCVB-TV and the University of Massachusetts-Amherst found Baker’s approval rating rose to about 78% in August but has since fallen to about 52%. Baker’s predecessor, Democrat Deval Patrick, had essentially the same favorable view among voters — 52 percent — as he began his final year in office in 2014.

Mickey Edwards — a fellow Republican and former Oklahoma congressman — said while Baker’s actions compared favorably to many other GOP governors, he still failed the leadership test.

“We would sit around and laugh at his early press conferences that amounted to saying, ‘It would be great if you wore masks,’” the Massachusetts resident and visiting professor at Princeton University said. “He should have been tougher. There should have been an endorsement of some kind of penalties and enforcement mechanisms.”

At the time, Baker said he would largely leave enforcement to local cities and towns.

Baker has yet to say if he’ll seek a third four-year term next year after the greatest test of his political life.

“On a human level, it has to be exhausting,” said O’Brien, the political science professor. “If you are in leadership as a governor, you actually have to do stuff and make tough decisions. You can’t please everyone and in a pandemic those decisions are literally life and death.”

Source Article from https://abcnews.go.com/Health/wireStory/pandemic-takes-political-toll-massachusetts-governor-76626746

Rikki Olds (Photo via Facebook)

Rikki Olds, a 25-year-old King Soopers employee, was among the 10 people killed in the Boulder grocery store on Monday, her aunt confirmed to The Denver Post.

Lori Olds said in a message to a Post reporter that she was notified around 3 a.m. Tuesday, more than 12 hours after the shooting, that her niece was dead.

“Thank you everyone for all your prayers but the Lord got a beautiful young angel yesterday at the hands of a deranged monster,” Lori Olds wrote in a public post on her Facebook page Tuesday morning.

Olds said her niece worked as a front-end manager at King Soopers at 3600 Table Mesa Drive in Boulder.

A man walked into the store Monday afternoon and began shooting, killing 10 people. Among those also killed was Boulder police Officer Eric Talley, who died after responding to the shooting.

The suspect is facing 10 counts of first-degree murder.

Rikki Olds was a King Soopers employee at least since February 2016, when she began working as a deli clerk at one of the supermarket’s stores in Louisville. At the time, she also joined the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union, Local 7, which she was a member of until December 2018, said Kyle Welsh, retail director for the union.

He said Olds also worked for a period at a King Soopers in Arvada before returning to the Louisville store. She eventually became an assistant deli manager, and then, a deli manager for the supermarket, he said.

She was not part of the union during her time at the Boulder store.

Rikki Olds’ Facebook identifies her as a Lafayette resident who attended Centaurus High School and Front Range Community College.

This is a developing story and will be updated.


Source Article from https://www.denverpost.com/2021/03/23/boulder-shooting-victim-rikki-olds/

Sidney Powell, one of former President Donald Trump‘s chief operatives in his failed bid to overturn the 2020 presidential election results, is dividing her formerly devoted followers by disavowing one of their most popular conspiracy theories.

Former federal prosecutor Powell submitted a new court filing Monday suggesting “no reasonable person” would have believed her assertion that the election infrastructure company Dominion Voting Systems was involved in supposed electoral fraud in the November race, with the support of the socialist regime in Venezuela and Georgia officials.

Powell is facing a defamation lawsuit from Dominion, which says Powell knew her fraud accusations could damage the company.

In her new court filing, Powell’s attorneys said her Dominion claims were only her “opinion” on which the public could reach “their own conclusions.”

“Given the highly charged and political context of the statements, it is clear that Powell was describing the facts on which she based the lawsuits she filed in support of President Trump,” Powell’s defense lawyers wrote.

“Indeed, Plaintiffs themselves characterize the statements at issue as ‘wild accusations’ and ‘outlandish claims.’ They are repeatedly labelled ‘inherently improbable’ and even ‘impossible.’

“Such characterizations of the allegedly defamatory statements further support Defendants’ position that reasonable people would not accept such statements as fact but view them only as claims that await testing by the courts through the adversary process.”

Powell has become a hero among die-hard Trump supporters and QAnon conspiracy theorists for her continued agitation against the so-called “deep state” and supposedly stolen election. However, she has been banned by Twitter for sharing QAnon material.

Reports detailing the chaos of the post-election White House put Powell at the center of the group of extremists urging Trump to declare martial law and invalidate the election results.

But Powell’s supporters on Telegram and Gab—uncensored social media sites where the far-right has been coalescing—responded to the new filing with confusion and concern, some disavowing Powell and others defending her against assumed “deep state” pressure.

On “We The Media”—a far-right Telegram group with more than 202,000 subscribers which hosts a range of broadly anti-government, conspiracy theory content—users debated what Powell’s latest filing meant.

“This goes against everything she’s been saying,” wrote one user. “I have a real problem with this!” declared another. “This makes zero sense no matter how somebody tries to justify it,” one user said. “Why she would want to dismiss the only opportunity to show the world how they stole the election is beyond me!”

Another was more dismissive. “It’s almost like maybe she made it all up and lied to everyone,” they wrote.

Some commenters suggested Powell was under pressure from unidentified forces. “I bet she’s being severely threatened,” one said. On the Gab “Sidney Powell Support” group, one of the 2,500 members wrote: “The Deep state got to the Great Sidney Powell,” suggesting she may have even been kidnapped.

Pro-Trump conspiracy theorists have shown remarkable resilience in their beliefs despite the president’s defeated legal campaign and the failure of many outlandish predictions to come to pass.

Some users framed Powell’s filing as yet another play in her dance with the “deep state,” and urged fellow believers to stay the course. “Relax, she’s got this under control,” said one, with another writing: “She’s attempting to dismiss the bs lawsuit, it’s fine.”

Several dismissed the report simply as “fake” or a “nothing burger,” while others urged each other to “hold the line” and “keep praying.” Another confidently declared: “My guess is she’s baiting them into diving into this head first because they think she has nothing.”

A car with a flag endorsing the QAnon is pictured outside the Governor’s Mansion on November 14, 2020 in St Paul, Minnesota.
Stephen Maturen/Getty Images

Source Article from https://www.newsweek.com/sidney-powell-no-reasonable-person-election-lawsuit-admission-divides-qanon-believers-1578052

A gunman opened fire in a Colorado supermarket Monday, killing 10 people, including a police officer, authorities said. One person was taken into custody at the scene in Boulder, where police said there was no ongoing threat to the public.

Boulder Police Chief Maris Herold identified the slain officer as 51-year-old Eric Talley, who had been with the department since 2010. 

Boulder County District Attorney Michael Dougherty said Talley’s life was “cut much too short,” and said a “painstaking investigation is already underway.”

No other victims were identified.

Dougherty said the person in custody was the shooter.

CBS Denver helicopter footage captured authorities escorting a shirtless man in handcuffs who appeared to have a bleeding leg from the scene, but authorities would not confirm if that man is the person in custody. 

Witnesses described a chaotic scene as several loud bangs went off in the store. One man said he first thought someone had dropped something but by the third shot, he said, everyone started running.

“I can’t believe it’s happening in Boulder,” he told CBS Denver.

Latest Updates

Armed police officers are seen outside broken windows at King Soopers on Table Mesa Drive in Boulder on March 22, 2021.

Matthew Jonas/MediaNews Group/Boulder Daily Camera via Getty Images


Source Article from https://www.cbsnews.com/live-updates/boulder-shooting-colorado-2021-03-23/

The IRS has an update for people who are eager to receive their third federal stimulus check: More payments will land on March 24. 

The tax agency didn’t say how many payments it plans to issue on Wednesday. Last week, the IRS deposited about 90 million checks via direct deposit and mailed another 150,000 checks to people for whom it didn’t have banking information. Earlier this month, IRS and Treasury officials said they planned to send about 100 million payments within the first 10 days of distribution for the third round of stimulus payments, which were authorized under the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan. 

The latest round of checks will provide relief to millions of people who continue to struggle with income losses a year after the coronavirus pandemic shuttered the U.S. economy. Some people, including those on Social Security or disability, have expressed concern to CBS MoneyWatch that they haven’t yet received their stimulus payments, which amount to $1,400 for each eligible adult and dependent. 

The IRS said it is “working directly” with the Social Security Administration, Railroad Retirement Board and Veterans Administration to get updated information for people who receive benefits from those agencies, but it didn’t provide details on when the payments might arrive. 

The IRS and Treasury didn’t immediately return requests for comment. 

“More information about when these payments will be made will be provided on IRS.gov as soon as it becomes available,” the IRS said in a statement on Monday. 

Meanwhile, older Americans are asking lawmakers about the holdup, with some saying on social media that they felt as if their needs and concerns were being ignored. 

In its statement, the IRS said more stimulus payments began processing on Friday, but will have an official pay date of Wednesday, March 24. Some people may see the payments in their accounts earlier, appearing as provisional or pending payments. 

But a “large number” of the payments will be mailed, which means that people who don’t receive a direct deposit should keep their eyes open for a paper check or a prepaid debit card in the mail, the IRS said.

Social Security delays?

The frustration expressed by Social Security recipients about delays in getting their checks echoes the issues some experienced in the first round of checks. In that case, the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act, or CARES Act, directed $1,200 to eligible adults, including senior citizens. 

Last spring, some seniors waited a month or longer for their checks, while also struggling to get information from the IRS “Get My Payment” website about when they might receive their payments. 


What’s in the COVID-19 relief bill?

03:12

The “Get My Payment” tool is again proving frustrating for some consumers, given that it doesn’t allow most people to update their banking information or addresses. The site also doesn’t provide clear information for some people, such as in the case of the “Payment Status Not Available” message.

That can mean either that the IRS hasn’t processed an individual’s payment, or that those people aren’t eligible for checks — a wide range of potential outcomes for which the site doesn’t provide much information. It also doesn’t help people who are eager to learn when their payments might arrive. 

Source Article from https://www.cbsnews.com/news/stimulus-checks-march-24-payments-irs/

President Biden campaigned on a proposal for a massive infrastructure plan to transform the economy and on the idea that he could work with Republicans. Trying to bring the infrastructure plan into reality forces a key decision on bipartisanship.

Alex Wong/Getty Images


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Alex Wong/Getty Images

President Biden campaigned on a proposal for a massive infrastructure plan to transform the economy and on the idea that he could work with Republicans. Trying to bring the infrastructure plan into reality forces a key decision on bipartisanship.

Alex Wong/Getty Images

President Biden is continuing his victory lap this week after passing the $1.9 trillion COVID-19 relief bill, which addressed the most immediate crises Biden has faced coming into office: a pandemic still spreading and an economy still millions of jobs short of where it was a year ago.

But if the relief bill was designed to put out the fire, Biden’s next goal is to rebuild the house, with an infrastructure bill fulfilling the president’s campaign promise to “build back better.”

“The Build Back Better bill is the legacy bill,” said Bill Galston, former domestic policy adviser in the Clinton White House. “It’s the bill that will define the meaning of the Biden presidency.”

White House aides are reportedly compiling a $3 trillion plan that would include a wide range of priorities, including social programs and tax changes, though press secretary Jen Psaki said on Monday that nothing was decided: “President Biden and his team are considering a range of potential options for how to invest in working families and reform our tax code so it rewards work, not wealth.”

This is going to be an infrastructure bill that goes far beyond roads and bridges. It’s designed to be a major investment in manufacturing and the technologies of the future, including 5G, a green electric grid, universal broadband Internet access, semiconductor production and carbon-free transportation.

Galston says it’s a bill that could transform the country: “A country that has not invested in itself for a very long time. A country that is on the verge of losing its technological and economic superiority to the rising power at the other side of the Pacific.”

That means China. Outcompeting Beijing is something that both parties agree on, and it’s at the heart of Biden’s sales pitch for the Build Back Better agenda.

“If we don’t get moving, they are going to eat our lunch,” Biden said at a bipartisan meeting of senators in the Oval Office last month, the day after he spoke with Chinese President Xi Jinping.

But Biden has a number of decisions to make about how to get that plan moving, such as how and whether to pay for what will be a multitrillion-dollar investment, what pieces of the plan should be introduced first and whether it’s possible to get Republican votes, something Biden failed to do on the pandemic relief bill.

“The big question is whether the strategy for passing the COVID-19 bill is a template or whether it’s an exception,” Galston said.

To pass the COVID-19 relief bill, the White House came up with its plan – a $1.9 trillion package. Then the Republicans came back with a much smaller offer at $681 billion. There were a few bipartisan discussions, but the gap was too big to bridge, so in the end the bill passed with no Republican support at all.

To pass Build Back Better, the White House is trying a different approach, inviting Republicans in on the ground floor to craft the legislation. There have already been bipartisan meetings at the White House and in the Senate. In the House, Speaker Nancy Pelosi has instructed her Democratic committee chairs to work with their Republican counterparts to develop infrastructure legislation.

That would be kind of old-fashioned, but there’s no one more enamored of old-fashioned bipartisan buy-in than Joe Biden. That was clear after one of those bipartisan infrastructure meetings at the White House last month.

“It’s the best meeting I think we’ve had so far,” the president said. “It was like the old days — people are actually on the same page,” he added.

President Biden and Vice President Harris meet with a bipartisan group of senators to discuss infrastructure on Feb. 11

Doug Mills/The New York Times/Bloomberg via Getty Images


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President Biden and Vice President Harris meet with a bipartisan group of senators to discuss infrastructure on Feb. 11

Doug Mills/The New York Times/Bloomberg via Getty Images

The latest thinking among Democrats is that there are pieces of an infrastructure agenda that could be broken off and passed as smaller individual bills with GOP votes, including things like universal broadband and anything that confronts China through investments in manufacturing or intellectual property protection.

But Republicans are skeptical after Biden decided to go it alone with Democratic votes only on the coronavirus relief bill.

“The notion is we could get together there because Republicans and Democrats both believe our infrastructure needs help. It’s crumbling. It will help the economy if done right,” said Ohio Republican Sen. Rob Portman on Fox News. “My concern is once again they’re going to ignore the Republicans as they did this time around.”

Democrats hear that and think Republicans will do what they did to President Obama — refuse to compromise, then attack the president for failing to get them to compromise. Republicans do not have a lot of political incentives to compromise with Biden, and it’s possible that the relationship between the two parties on Capitol Hill is just too broken for bipartisanship. Especially after Jan. 6, when a majority of Republicans voted to overturn the 2020 election, neither side thinks the other is acting in good faith.

In the White House, bipartisanship is seen as something to strive for — it’s part of Biden’s political DNA. But in the end, as long as voters see that Biden tried hard to work across the aisle, achieving bipartisan success is not seen as a political necessity.

“The only thing that bipartisanship really buys you is some protection against the inevitable screw-ups,” said Elaine Kamarck, a former Clinton White House aide and author of Why Presidents Fail. “The process of implementation, particularly on big big projects like this, there are hiccups in it. Obviously, if it’s bipartisan you weather those hiccups better than you do if you’ve only passed it with one party. In the end, it doesn’t really matter that much as long as it gets implemented.”

In other words, the process isn’t as important to voters as the product. Whether it’s vaccines, school openings or infrastructure jobs, the idea is that voters just want Biden to deliver.

But that might be a misread of the politics, according to Galston, who thinks getting Republican votes is a political necessity for Biden because of his promises in the campaign: “That he could work harder than his predecessors did to restore the ability of the two parties, not only to talk to each other civilly, but also to work together.”

Galston thinks that promise really mattered to swing voters in the suburbs who made the difference between victory and defeat for Biden. In other words, those voters took the president’s promise of bipartisanship seriously and literally.

Biden was asked about his prediction that Republicans would see the light after the election during an interview with ABC News last week.

“They haven’t had that epiphany you said you were going to see in the campaign,” said anchor George Stephanopoulos.

“No, no, well I’ve only been here six weeks, pal, OK? Gimme a break,” Biden said before going on to talk about how popular the relief bill was with ordinary Republicans, if not GOP members of Congress.

Then Biden revealed how important those voters are to him, eventually landing on a declaration: “I won those Republican voters in suburbia.”

The president won’t be on the ballot in 2022, but his agenda will be. Democrats need to do better with those Republican voters in suburbia if they are to hang on to their tiny majorities in both houses of Congress. How Biden goes about passing his next big proposal may determine whether his party wins them or not.

Source Article from https://www.npr.org/2021/03/23/980086070/building-a-big-infrastructure-plan-biden-starts-with-a-bridge-to-republicans

Pro-Trump attorney Sidney Powell asked a federal court to dismiss a roughly $1.3 billion defamation suit filed against her by Dominion Voting Systems, arguing that her claims the company’s voting machines rigged the election for Joe Biden represented her opinion, not statements of fact.

Dominion’s suit, filed in January, said those claims were false and that Ms. Powell’s accusations have damaged its reputation and business. A group of federal and state officials have said there is no evidence that any voting system changed or deleted votes in the 2020 general election.

Among other claims, Ms. Powell accused Dominion of fraudulently deleting or changing votes and said the company’s software was created in Venezuela to rig elections.

In its Monday motion, Ms. Powell’s legal team argued that “reasonable people would not accept such statements as fact but view them only as claims that await testing by the courts through the adversary process.”

The motion further argued that Ms. Powell’s claims were political speech and are therefore protected by the First Amendment.

Source Article from https://www.wsj.com/articles/pro-trump-lawyer-sidney-powell-seeks-to-dismiss-defamation-suit-over-election-claims-11616468931

Washington — A legal showdown between the Biden administration and Republican attorneys general over billions of dollars in aid to state and local governments is looming as the federal government prepares to implement the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan signed into law this month.

Twenty-one attorneys general have issued a veiled legal threat to the Treasury Department — while Ohio’s attorney general has already turned to the courts — over strings attached to the $350 billion for state and local governments reeling from the economic fallout of the coronavirus pandemic.

Under the sweeping package, the money given to states cannot be used for pension funds or to “directly or indirectly” offset tax cuts. Now, the Republican attorneys general are taking aim at the stipulation that money not be spent on tax cuts and warning that the condition unconstitutionally hamstrings their efforts to reduce taxes, even if the tax cuts had been planned before the passage of the American Rescue Plan.

The 21 state officials sent the Treasury Department a letter last week seeking clarification on the provision, which they said could be interpreted as the federal government attempting to strip states of their authority to implement tax policy.

“This language could be read to deny states the ability to cut taxes in any manner whatsoever — even if they would have provided such tax relief with or without the prospect of COVID-19 relief funds,” the officials wrote to Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, warning that as written, the provision amounts to “an unprecedented and unconstitutional intrusion on the separate sovereignty of the states.”

The letter lists more than a dozen tax cuts or credits under consideration by states that could put their coronavirus aid at risk. Without assurance by Tuesday that the package does not bar states from generally providing tax relief, the attorneys general said “we will take appropriate additional action to ensure that our states have the clarity and assurance necessary to provide for our citizens’ welfare through enacting and implementing sensible tax policies, including tax relief.”

Separate from the missive from the 21 attorneys general, Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost is asking a federal court in the state to block enforcement of the condition, arguing the “coercive offer of federal funds” is unconstitutional because Congress exceeded its authority when it passed the mandate.

Because money is fungible, Yost told the court in a request for a preliminary injunction, “any money that a state receives through the act will necessarily offset, either directly or indirectly, every tax reduction that the state might pursue.”

“The tax mandate thus gives the states a choice: they can have either the badly needed federal funds or their sovereign authority to set state tax policy. But they cannot have both,” he said. “In our current economic crisis, that is no choice at all. It is a metaphorical ‘gun to the head.'”

Yost is so far the lone attorney general asking the courts to intervene, but Ilya Somin, a law professor at George Mason University, expects others to follow either by joining Ohio’s lawsuit or filing their own unless the Biden administration says it doesn’t plan to enforce the provision.

For states challenging the tax provision in the COVID-19 relief package, Somin said a strong argument they have is the lack of clarity about what states must do to receive their share of the money.

The Supreme Court has said conditions attached to the receipt of federal dollars must be established unambiguously and cannot be coercive, and the high court further clarified whether a condition is coercive in its 2012 decision invalidating provisions of the Affordable Care Act that required states to expand their Medicaid programs or risk losing federal Medicaid funding.

“The strongest issue that Republican states have is that it just isn’t very clear what the provision means,” he told CBS News. “It’s not clear whether if you lower taxes at all in any way you forfeit all the money the act would give you or just the amount that you lose through tax cuts. It’s also not clear what it means by ‘directly or indirectly’ using the funds to make up for lost revenue due to tax cuts.”

Ohio’s case, he said, has teeth for much of the same reasons the Trump administration lost legal battles over efforts to withhold federal money from sanctuary cities that refused to cooperate immigration authorities.

In the instances involving the prior administration, Somin said Congress never clearly authorized the imposition of conditions on state and local governments that received the money the Trump administration was attempting to pull.

“Under Obama administrations, Republican states used the federalism argument to attack Obama’s policies. Under Trump, it was blue states and cities that did it, and now we’re coming back the other way,” Somin said. “It’s a common phenomenon, but it shows federalism can protect states of different types of political persuasions.”

“The irony,” he continued, “is that if this thing fails, it could fail on some of the same bases as the Trump effort to coerce sanctuary cities.”

Somin said he is not aware of a similar provision in a law of the same scale as the sweeping coronavirus relief package.

At the heart of the Republicans’ challenge to the prohibition is that you “can’t have Uncle Sam telling the good folks in Louisiana or Texas how to run their tax systems,” Kenneth Manning, a political science professor at the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth, told CBS News.

“States need the cash,” he said of the assistance in the rescue plan. “There are plenty of crumbling schools and beleaguered unemployment systems and the list is endless of what the needs are at the state level. I don’t see big tax cuts resulting from this.”

President Biden scored a major legislative victory when Congress narrowly passed his $1.9 trillion relief package, and he and his administration’s top officials have embarked on a nationwide tour to tout its benefits. Still, more details are expected from the Treasury Department about implementation of the stimulus package. 

Under the law, states are poised to receive their federal assistance within 60 days of submitting documentation to the federal government.

Source Article from https://www.cbsnews.com/news/american-rescue-plan-legal-battles-republicans-state-provisions/

    Source Article from https://www.cnn.com/2021/03/23/us/boulder-colorado-shooting-tuesday/index.html

    BEIJING — Rising pressure from major global powers is giving the Chinese government more opportunities to show off its new approach to international affairs.

    In the first coordinated action by Western nations since U.S. President Joe Biden took office, the U.S., EU, U.K. and Canada imposed sanctions on Chinese officials on Monday. The countries cited human rights abuses in the Xinjiang region of China — accusations Beijing has repeatedly denied.

    China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs quickly responded with its own broad list of sanctions on EU entities and individuals. These people and their families will not be able to enter mainland China, Hong Kong or Macao, and associated companies and institutions will be restricted from doing business with China, according to the ministry.

    The level of detail regarding consequences as laid out in these sanctions and ones announced just as Biden was being sworn in is different from more vague sanctions in the past, pointed out Nick Turner, a Hong Kong-based of counsel with law firm Steptoe & Johnson. His topic coverage includes economic sanctions.

    “It demonstrates the natural course of evolution for a major power,” Turner said. “We could frame this in terms of only reactions to the West, but … I think this is a natural course of development.”

    China has grown into the world’s second-largest economy in the last two decades. Its leader President Xi Jinping has abolished term limits and pushed for greater control domestically, while allowing the development of a more aggressively-toned diplomatic voice. In July, the foreign ministry also established the Xi Jinping Thought on Diplomacy research center in Beijing.

    And during an annual parliamentary meeting earlier this month, China announced it will advance legislation in foreign affairs, including countermeasures for sanctions.

    Robert Daly, director of the Kissinger Institute on China and the United States, said that in retaliation to the latest sanctions, Beijing could announce similar restrictions on individuals from Canada, U.K. and the U.S.

    “You’ll notice that under Xi Jinping it’s become a signature diplomatic move that China will mirror and amplify whatever is done to it, in the way of sanctions,” Daly said on CNBC’s “Street Signs Asia” Tuesday.

    — CNBC’s Yen Nee Lee contributed to this report.

    Source Article from https://www.cnbc.com/2021/03/23/chinas-sanctions-on-eu-preview-how-beijing-will-respond-to-pressure.html

    The Chicago suburb of Evanston, Illinois, is about to become the first U.S. city to make reparation money available to Black residents. Part of a growing movement that has picked up speed in the wake of police killings of Black Americans including George Floyd last year, the decision by Evanston officials could also lay the groundwork for other municipalities and states considering reparations. 

    “It doesn’t mean every city will do it exactly like Evanston has done, but there’s a blueprint there,” Ron Daniels, who oversees the National African American Reparations Commission, or NAARC, told CBS MoneyWatch.

    The Evanston City Council voted 8-1 Monday night to start with an expenditure of $400,000 to give 16 eligible Black households $25,000 each to be spent on home repairs or down payments on property. Funded by a new tax on legalized marijuana, the council previously committed $10 million over 10 years to repairing the ongoing harm that systemic racism has caused Evanston’s Black residents, with the housing initiative its first step. About 16% of Evanston residents are Black.

    National advocacy groups that advised Evanston on its action expressed optimism that other cities and states would follow suit, leading to further pressure for national legislation. 

    Robin Rue Simmons, a lawmaker in Evanston, Illinois, is leading the effort to begin offering financial reparations to local Black residents.

    Robin Rue Simmons


    “We’re very excited to see the first national direct benefit from some of the harms we’ve had to experience from the past,” Kamm Howard, co-chair of the National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America, or N’COBRA, told CBS MoneyWatch “The more local initiatives occur, the more impetus there is on the federal government to act.”

    NAARC’s Daniels agreed: “This is no longer a fringe issue. It gets at the critical issue of addressing and redressing the systematic racism that is one of the original sins of this nation.” 

    The effort in Evanston was led by Robin Rue Simmons, an alderwoman who will join the commission when her term ends.

    Ongoing mortgage discrimination in Evanston and other parts of the country justify tackling years of abusive housing practices in any reparations program, according to Howard. “We brought in experts to look at current conditions to justify a housing initiative as a first initiative,” he said of his group’s work in the suburb just north of Chicago. 

    One 2019 analysis by researchers at the University of California at Berkeley found that Black and Latino mortgage applicants were charged higher interest — an average of nearly 0.08% — and heavier refinance fees when compared with white borrowers.

    “Paternalistic” approach?

    Evanston’s plan came up short in the eyes of some local residents and one council member. Alderwoman Cicely Fleming voted against the resolution, arguing that it is a housing program masquerading as reparations. She cast the only negative vote.

    “True reparations should respect Black people’s autonomy and allow them to determine how repair will be managed, including cash payments as an option. They are being denied that in this proposal, which gives money directly to the banks or contractors on their behalf,” the alderwoman stated in a news release. “If we’re doing reparations, let’s do reparations right.”

    In a phone interview with CBS MoneyWatch, Fleming also said many in Evanston’s Black community objected to this “paternalistic model of we know what’s best for you.” She said she hoped city officials would give Black residents more say on how reparations are handled moving forward, while also giving fund recipients more autonomy on how they use the money.

    Sebastian Nalls, who organized a group called “Evanston Rejects Racist Reparations,” expressed similar sentiments to CBS Chicago, saying, “What this plan is, is not reparations.”

    The group supports reparations, but says there are too many limits on outlays. “Residents are unable to use their funds for anything other than housing,” Nalls said.

    But local realtor said Vanessa Johnson-McCoy told the station, “Housing is the just the first step, and there will be other parts of this initiative.”

    “I say it’s definitely a start, and I say yes, we have to begin somewhere,” Johnson-McCoy said.  

    A federal measure that would establish a commission to study and develop reparations has about 170 co-sponsors in the House of Representatives, and advocates are hopeful the White House would take executive action if the Senate fails to pass the bill.

    Around the U.S., cities including Asheville, North Carolina; Amherst, Massachusetts; Burlington, Vermont; Chicago; and Providence, Rhode Island, have started reparation efforts, although none yet allocate funding to Black residents.

    Source Article from https://www.cbsnews.com/news/evanston-illinois-approves-plan-reparations-some-black-residents/

    A progressive news organization has suggested that CNN recently broadcast a “staged” migrant crossing of the U.S.-Mexico border. 

    The American Prospect scrutinized a report that aired March 12 on “Outfront with Erin Burnett,” in which CNN correspondent Ed Lavandera witnessed the dramatic crossing from a motorboat near Hidalgo, Texas. 

    “The Rio Grande Valley has been ground zero for the latest surge in migration and here you see the operation unfolding right in front of us,” Lavandera told viewers. “After the first raft crosses, the magnitude of this moment reveals itself. Dozens of migrants emerge and walk down to the river’s edge. You can see that this is a serious operation.”

    As the Prospect pointed out, the smuggler guiding the boat of migrants across the river in the CNN report “wears fatigues and a black ski mask.”

    CNN ANCHOR ASKS ‘IF WE’VE LEARNED MUCH AS A COUNTRY’ SINCE FDR’S INTERNMENT CAMPS FOLLOWING GEORGIA SHOOTINGS

    “Smugglers typically attempt to blend in with the migrants, to avoid more severe punishment should they be caught,” The American Prospect writing fellow Marcia Brown observed. “Smugglers also don’t normally provide face masks and life vests, nor ferry six boatloads of people across in broad daylight. Migrants also don’t typically line up single file along the shore to cross.”

    Former Border Control agent Jenn Budd told the publication that seeing the smuggler’s face mask told her that he “knew he would be filmed and he didn’t want to be set up.”

    The article also cited Marianna Treviño Wright, the executive director of the National Butterfly Center and a vocal migrant advocate, who alleged that her organization makes trips down the river “at least four times a week” and “never sees any kind of trafficking operation like this.”

    CHRIS CUOMO BLASTED AFTER TELLING CNN VIEWERS HE CANNOT COVER BROTHER ANDREW’S HARASSMENT SCANDALS

    “We [alerted] our contact @CNN that this was a set up on Thursday, March 11, BEFORE they aired the piece. They chose sensationalism over truth and integrity,” the center alleged on Monday while sharing The American Prospect’s report on Twitter. 

    Wright confirmed a March 18 report by The Guardian that the area of the river where CNN’s reporting took place “can only be accessed by U.S. Customs and Border Protection.” 

    “They either duped Ed Lavandera into doing this or he’s so desperate for ratings he went along with it,” Wright told The American Prospect.

    Brown then highlighted a video that surfaced online before CNN’s report aired showed a similar scene, pointing out: “The boat in this video and the boat in the CNN footage have the same markings, and the same ski-masked, fatigues-wearing man who appears to be steering the boat.” 

    In a piece published on Medium, Budd noted an exchange heard in the video between two men speaking English. One of the men asks: “Do you ever hook those guys up?” with the other responding: “Yeah, they’re … grade A …”

    “As a former agent, what I hear is these men possibly talking about paying this smuggler off to gather a bunch of unsuspecting migrants and have them cross in a particular place in order to get this shot,” Budd wrote. “Whether or not CNN knew this was a set up or not, I cannot say. I can say that the slips in that area to put boats into the river are all controlled by CBP and Border Patrol. It is my understanding that this area is also full of sensors, cameras, sirens and Border Patrol many boats. This is not surprising as it is only a mile from the port of entry and Border Patrol is most heavily deployed around the ports. I can also say that I do not believe this could have been done without Border Patrol approval.” 

    CNN did not immediately respond to Fox News’ request for comment, but a spokesperson denied Budd’s claim last week that the network shared a “fake” report. 

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    “CNN did not participate in any type of coordinated effort to shoot a staged scene of migrants crossing the river nor have we found any credible evidence that suggests our team was unknowingly part of a set-up by Border Patrol or anyone else,” CNN’s head of strategic communications Matt Dornic tweeted on March 18. 

    Dornic also insisted that the videos that were shared were “not from the same day.” 

    Fox News has also reached out to Budd and U.S. Customs and Border Protection for comment. 

    Source Article from https://www.foxnews.com/media/cnn-aired-staged-border-crossing-american-prospect