“We birthed a nation from nothing,” he said. “Yes, there were Native Americans, but there isn’t much Native American culture in American culture.”
The comment prompted Fawn Sharp, president of the National Congress of American Indians, to call him “an unhinged and embarrassing racist who disgraces CNN and any other media company that provides him a platform.”
“To correct the record, what European colonizers found in the Americas were thousands of complex, sophisticated, and sovereign tribal nations, each with millennia of distinct cultural, spiritual and technological development,” she wrote in a statement.
Sharp called on CNN to fire Santorum or potentially face a boycott from more than 500 tribal nations and its allies worldwide.
Santorum later said on Chris Cuomo’s CNN show that he “misspoke” in the sense that it wasn’t clear that he was speaking in the context of the founding of the United States government.
“People say I’m trying to dismiss what happened to the Native Americans,” he said. “Far from it. The way we treated Native Americans was horrific. It goes against every bone and everything I’ve ever fought for as a leader in the Congress.”
Santorum’s comments have garnered blowback before, especially his views on gay marriage and homosexuality. In 2003, he infuriated gay rights advocates by appearing to compare homosexuality to pedophilia and bestiality.
President Joe Biden will host the family of George Floyd at the White House Tuesday as his administration gears up to mark the one-year anniversary of Floyd’s death.
In her daily briefing Friday, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki declined to offer additional details of how Biden planned to mark the anniversary, the Associated Press reported.
Floyd died on May 25, 2020, after then-Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin attempted to arrest him. During the bust, Chauvin kneeled on the prone Floyd’s neck for more than nine minutes.
Though Floyd had been a drug user and suffered from a heart condition, the Hennepin County medical examiner ruled the death a homicide.
In a much-watched trial, Chauvin was convicted of second-degree murder, third-degree murder and second-degree manslaughter. He will be sentenced on June 16. The city of Minneapolis paid the Floyd family $27 million in a legal settlement.
His death sparked months of protests in Minneapolis and around the country that frequently devolved into violence and looting.
Joe Biden speaks via video link as family and guests attend the funeral service for George Floyd in 2020.David J. Phillip/Pool via AP
On Capitol Hill, Democrats have hoped to use the incident to pass sweeping federal criminal justice reforms, including a national ban on chokeholds and ending qualified immunity for police officers.
Team Biden had hoped to pass the “George Floyd Justice in Policing Act” by the one-year anniversary, something which allies now say is unlikely as the legislation is currently stalled.
MINNEAPOLIS (WCCO) — A University of St. Thomas student set to graduate Saturday was one of the two people killed in an overnight shooting in downtown Minneapolis that also injured eight others, according to the school.
The university said Charlie Johnson was a mechanical engineering major.
“Our community is shocked and saddened by the news of Charlie’s death,” UST President Julie Sullivan said in a statement. “We grieve with his family and friends and pray for their comfort. On a day he and his family should have been celebrating his graduation from our School of Engineering, we are devastated by this loss.”
Johnson was honored at Saturday’s commencement ceremonies, the school said, and a family member accepted his diploma on his behalf.
Minneapolis police say a 23-year-old Bloomington man has been booked into the Hennepin County Jail in connection with the shooting. WCCO typically does not name suspects before they are charged.
Police also said one of the two people killed was one of the suspected shooters.
Just before 2 a.m. Saturday, police say two people standing in a crowd outside a nightclub on the 300 block of 1st Avenue North in downtown Minneapolis began to argue. They pulled out guns and began to shoot.
Officers found several people laying on the ground with gunshot wounds. They found two people at the scene, dead. Ten people had been shot total.
The preliminary investigation shows that all who were shot were adults. Five were men, and five were women, though the two who died were both men. Another man is in critical condition and seven others have non-life threatening injuries.
“As we start pulling more and more video from downtown from the city cameras, from the pole cameras that are out, we’ll be able to identify who the shooters are,” said John Elder, Director of the Office of Police Information.
He added that seven homicide investigators have been called to work on the case and asked people to stay out of the downtown area.
A man, who wanted to keep his identity private, was near the Monarch Minneapolis night club when shots rang out just before 2 a.m. on Saturday.
“It’s messed up. Nobody should have their life taken like that,” said the witness. “I know for a fact it was like six guns going off at one time.”
Koron Young lives in downtown Minneapolis. He’s frustrated by the rise in crime in the city, since bars and restaurants just reopened to normal hours three weeks ago.
“I feel like when you go out you should be able to go out for a good time, you shouldn’t have to make life or death choices,” said Young. “It’s getting ridiculous and they got to do something to fix it.”
The short term safety solution is the Hennepin County Sheriff’s Office is bringing additional deputies into the downtown area at night for the remainder of the weekend. The long term solutions are already being discussed by the Minneapolis Downtown Council.
“Law enforcement is key, but law enforcement was right there and so that’s not the only thing,” said Steve Cramer, the president and CEO of Minneapolis Downtown Council.
Cramer says some of the options they’re looking into are temporarily closing bars down early again. He also says they’re considering having some Downtown Improvement District outreach ambassadors, who are those walking around downtown Minneapolis in lime green shirts, stay on the streets until bar close. Right now, they are off the streets by 11 p.m.
“That’s something that would have to be integrated with security. We don’t want to have our ambassadors in a dangerous position either, but we also want to make sure everybody that comes down to the warehouse district can be safe and enjoy themselves,” said Cramer.
The Breakfast Bar is a restaurant located across the street from the Monarch Night Club. The owner told WCCO they used to stay open until 2 a.m. during the weekend nights, but now they close at 11:30 p.m. to make sure they can get customers and employees home safe before crime picks up.
It was a violent night in the city, as a separate shooting in North Minneapolis left another person dead.
The incident happened at about 8:40 p.m. near 26th and Logan Avenue North. The original call was for a vehicle crash.
Police say responding officers found a man suffering from multiple gunshot wounds in the vehicle. He was taken to North Memorial Medical Center in critical condition, but died shortly thereafter.
A woman at the scene was suffering from a medical issue not related to gun violence. She had been the driver of the car.
Another man covered in blood reportedly drove himself to North Memorial. No one is currently in custody.
Police say there are reports of three other shootings across Minneapolis overnight, one on the 1300 block of Irving Avenue North, one on the 5100 block of Dupont Avenue North, and one on the 2600 block of Lyndale Avenue South. All three of those wounded are considered to have non-life threatening injuries.
“Last night again brought tragic news. Again, our collective conscience is shocked. Lives have been lost on our Northside and downtown. And we are left to process the reality that bullets have struck innocent bystanders, people welcoming the warm weather and celebrating being together again,” said Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey.
“We can stem crime in our city, but it will take all of us coming together with a renewed commitment to preventative work and a shared resolve to stop the gun violence and bring the perpetrators to justice,” he added. Frey went on to say that he supported giving both Minneapolis Police Chief Medaria Arradondo and Office of Violence Prevention Director Sasha Cotton the resources they need to help solve the issue of gun violence in the city.
Arradondo added that the “brazen senseless acts of gun violence must stop,” and that “Minneapolis police officers will continue to rush into harms way to save lives.” He asked community leaders and residents to speak up and denounce the violence as well.
“There is no excuse for the reckless, irresponsible and criminal behavior on display early this morning at the Warehouse District,” said Steve Cramer, President of the Minneapolis Downtown Council. “In particular, we look for determined, clear-eyed leadership from City Hall to put Minneapolis back on course as a City that engenders respectful behavior so all can thrive.”
The increase in gun violence has one Minneapolis city office calling it a public health crisis, working behind the scenes to try and stop it.
The Office of Violence Prevention was created in late 2018, funding programs that offer support to victims of violence, and programs aimed at stopping violence. One of the most visible ways is through “violence interrupters.”
T.O.U.C.H Outreach was part of a city pilot program which is about to expand, made up of community members who mediate conflicts and try to stop retaliation. The city says six teams of violence interrupters are in training currently and will be on the street next month.
The Minneapolis Police Department told WCCO it will increase patrols downtown after Friday night’s shooting.
Police are asking anyone with information about the shootings to call CrimeStoppers at 1-800-222-TIPS.
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A 6-year-old boy riding in a booster seat on his way to school Friday was shot dead on a California highway in an apparent road-rage incident.
“Mommy, my tummy hurts,” Aiden Leos said moments after being shot in the stomach, his older sister Alexis Cloonan told KABC.
Aiden attended kindergarten at Calvary Chapel in Yorba Linda, according to local reports. He had just celebrated his birthday last week.
Orange, CA – May 21: A crime scene investigator photographs the scene while the California Highway Patrol secures the northbound lanes of the 55 Freeway near Chapman Avenue were a 6-year-old boy was fatally shot during apparent road rage incident Friday, May 21, 2021 in Orange, CA. The suspect fled immediately after the shooting near West Chapman Avenue as police officers and paramedics responded to the gunfire shortly after 8 a.m., authorities said. The boys mother was traveling on the northbound freeway with her child in the booster seat when the shooting occurred, CHP officials said. Witnesses reported hearing a gun shot from a white sedan right before the childs mother pulled her vehicle over to the shoulder. This was an isolated road rage incident, said CHP Officer Florentino Olivera. He said the driver of the white sedan shot into the back of the mothers Chevy Cruze sedan (shown at upper right) and then fled. (Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images) (Getty Images)
The incident took place about 8 a.m. on the northbound side of the 55 Freeway in Orange while Aiden drove with his mother in a silver Chevrolet sedan. The boy sat in his safety seat in the right rear passenger side of the vehicle.
The tragedy unfolded when the unidentified mother — who was not injured — reportedly flipped off the driver of a white sedan who had cut her off in the highway’s carpool lane. A passenger in the white car fired off an unknown number of shots, hitting Aiden, reports said.
The frantic mom “picked [Aiden] up and he was bleeding on her, she had blood on her clothes,” Cloonan told reporters. “And then he started turning blue, and that’s when the ambulance took him. And that’s the last time my mom saw him alive.”
The boy was pronounced dead at a nearby hospital. Police are searching for the suspects.
“Please help us find who did this to my little brother,” said Cloonan.
“It was an isolated road-rage incident between the mom and another driver from a white sedan,” California Highway Patrol Officer Florentino Olivera told Los Angeles news station KTLA-TV.
A GoFundMe page created to help Aiden’s mother had already generated more than $40,000 as of early Saturday.
Their model shows an especially sharp decline for China, with its population expected to fall from 1.41 billion now to about 730 million in 2100. If that happens, the population pyramid would essentially flip. Instead of a base of young workers supporting a narrower band of retirees, China would have as many 85-year-olds as 18-year-olds.
China’s rust belt, in the northeast, saw its population drop by 1.2 percent in the past decade, according to census figures released on Tuesday. In 2016, Heilongjiang Province became the first in the country to have its pension system run out of money. In Hegang, a “ghost city” in the province that has lost almost 10 percent of its population since 2010, homes cost so little that people compare them to cabbage.
Many countries are beginning to accept the need to adapt, not just resist. South Korea is pushing for universities to merge. In Japan, where adult diapers now outsell ones for babies, municipalities have been consolidated as towns age and shrink. In Sweden, some cities have shifted resources from schools to elder care. And almost everywhere, older people are being asked to keep working. Germany, which previously raised its retirement age to 67, is now considering a bump to 69.
Going further than many other nations, Germany has also worked through a program of urban contraction: Demolitions have removed around 330,000 units from the housing stock since 2002.
CNN has dropped former Republican US senator Rick Santorum as a senior political commentator after racist remarks he made about Native Americans at an event in April.
News of Santorum’s termination was first reported by HuffPost. A CNN spokesperson confirmed to the Guardian that the network has parted ways with Santorum. No further comment on the firing was provided, though an anonymous CNN executive told HuffPost that “leadership wasn’t particularly satisfied with that appearance. None of the anchors wanted to book him.”
Speaking at an event for the Young Americans Foundation, a conservative youth group, Santorum said that there was “nothing” in the US before Europeans colonizers arrived.
“We came here and created a blank slate,” he said. “We birthed a nation from nothing. I mean, there was nothing here. I mean, yes we have Native Americans, but candidly there isn’t much Native American culture in American culture.”
The comments sparked outrage among indigenous groups, including the National Congress of American Indians, which specifically called on CNN to fire Santorum over the remarks.
“Televising someone with [Santorum’s] views on Native American genocide is fundamentally no different than putting an outright Nazi on television to justify the Holocaust,” said Fawn Sharp, the group’s president, in a statement from last month. “Any mainstream media organization should fire him or face a boycott from more than 500 Tribal Nations and our allies from across the country and worldwide.”
Following the backlash, Santorum was invited to speak to Chris Cuomo to explain his comments. Santorum said he “misspoke” and denied that he was “trying to dismiss what happened to Native Americans”.
“Far from it. The way we treated Native Americans was horrific. It goes against every bone and everything I’ve ever fought for as a leader in the Congress,” he told Cuomo.
CNN anchor Don Lemon, who follows Cuomo’s show on the network’s primetime schedule, said Santorum’s non-apology was infuriating.
“I can’t believe the first words out of his mouth weren’t ‘I’m sorry, I said something ignorant, I need to learn about the history of this country,” he said. “Did he actually think it was a good idea for him to come on television and try to whitewash the whitewash that he whitewashed?”
Jerusalem — A cease-fire between Israel and the Palestinian group Hamas was holding on Friday morning after taking effect overnight. The truce brought a much-needed reprieve after 11 days of devastating airstrikes on the Gaza Strip by Israel’s military, and the reciprocal, ceaseless barrage of rocket fire unleashed by Hamas and its allies.
The Egyptian-brokered cease-fire was still keeping the peace Friday afternoon in the Middle East, almost 12 hours after it took effect. But CBS News correspondent Imtiaz Tyab said it was a tense peace as the two sides both claimed to have achieved their objectives during the violence — and both warned that they were poised to go back on the attack if they felt betrayed.
On the streets of Gaza and other Palestinian enclaves, there was jubilation as Hamas and its supporters claimed victory. But after more than 240 Palestinians were killed and parts of the tiny Gaza Strip were reduced to piles of twisted steel and crumbled concrete, the victory was a hollow one.
Palestinians celebrate in the streets following a cease-fire between Hamas and Israel, in Gaza City, May 21, 2021.
MOHAMMED SALEM/REUTERS
After several days waiting for Israel to open the Gaza border, CBS News correspondent Holly Williams was among the first foreign journalists permitted into the tiny, densely-populated strip of land on Friday to document the devastation from Israel’s airstrikes.
She said it was remarkable, given the scale of Israel’s blistering aerial assault and the fact that more than 4,000 Hamas rockets had been fired from Gaza during the clash, to hear the sounds of normal life resuming.
Some leveled buildings in Gaza were still smoldering Friday, CBS News’ Haley Ott reports. Some people who lost their homes in the conflict are now living out of tents, and others walked down the street crying over killed family members or friends.
But on Friday, new clashes between Palestinian protesters and Israeli police highlighted the fact that long-festering issues still hadn’t been resolved. As Williams explained from inside Gaza, two groups of people still fervently believe that the same piece of land is their country, but one group is much more powerful militarily, and only that group currently has a country to call its own.
Israel’s Defense Minister Benny Gantz lauded his nation’s bombing campaign, claiming it had made “achievements unprecedented in their scale, precision and strategic significance for the struggle with terrorist organizations in Gaza.”
The exact terms of the cease-fire haven’t been made public, but Hamas claimed it had received assurances that Israeli security forces would not enter the revered al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem again, and that the looming eviction of Palestinian families from the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood in east Jerusalem by Israeli settlers wouldn’t happen.
Gantz called the claims “completely false,” and he warned that Israel’s military remained “prepared to protect Israeli civilians, and our security forces and the IDF are on the ground, across the different fronts, positioned for offense and defense. The reality on the ground will determine how we move forward.”
Embattled Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu claimed “exceptional success,” and said Israel’s military had “exacted a heavy price from Hamas. But with 12 Israelis killed by the militant group’s rockets and Hamas still undeniably standing, his claims, too, were difficult to quantify.
Hamas’ military wing, the al-Qassam Brigades, warned as it agreed to the cease-fire deal in the early hours of Friday morning that still had the capacity to “fire rockets on Israel, from north to south.”
Netanyahu said any further rocket launches from Gaza would be met with “a new level of force.”
As the Israeli and Hamas threats hung over the truce, one Israeli political analyst questioned any claims of victory.
“I don’t see anyone here who is winning those conflicts. It is a repeating [of] the same conflict after conflict,” Tal Schneider told CBS News. “I think all sides are losing.”
World leaders hailed the cease-fire, but the last major conflict between Israel and Gaza, in 2014, saw nine truce agreements crumble under renewed violence before the fighting eventually ended.
The concern on Friday was that this peace deal could prove just as fragile, and new clashes between Palestinian protesters and Israeli police outside the al-Aqsa mosque drove home the point.
More than a dozen people were reportedly injured before calm was restored at that site, but there were Palestinian protests taking shape at other frequent flash-point locations in Israel and the Palestinian territories.
Virtually all parties involved are okay with missing the deadline. Lawmakers working on the bill insist that they’re making progress and regularly engage with one another. And in conversations with the White House, activists and lawmakers have stressed that they want a substantial bill, not a quick one.
“My concern is, and I’ve communicated this to the White House, is that we come with a toothless bill to meet a hard deadline,” said Rev. Al Sharpton, president of the National Action Network. “I’d rather have a bill with teeth late than a toothless bill on time.”
Biden’s defer-to-Congress approach on police reform stands in contrast to the very active role he and the administration are playing in negotiating other legislative priorities, chief among them a massive infrastructure spending bill. Stakeholders say it reflects a larger sense that negotiations around policing and racial justice can be extremely delicate. Push too much, and Republicans may recoil. Sit back too far, and progress may prove elusive.
White House press secretary Jen Psaki said this week that Biden issued the May 25 deadline because he felt it was “important to be bold and be ambitious.” But the White House acknowledged by week’s end that negotiations are nowhere near a conclusion.
“We are not going to slow our efforts to get this done, but we can also be transparent about the fact that it’s going to take a little bit more time,” Psaki said Friday. “The president wants to sign it into law as quickly as possible.”
Civil rights groups mostly support the administration’s approach but plan to keep pressure on Congress. The White House has not said if it will set another deadline. For Sharpton, however, the president’s challenge to lawmakers last month “sent the signal that it was serious” about reform. Though he’d like to see Biden publicly pressing the case more, Sharpton also doesn’t want Biden to play into Republicans’ hands. “I’d not like this to be a Joe Biden-Mitch McConnell show,” he said.
Most social justice advocates are giving the Biden administration and Democrats space to make good on their campaign promise to pass a bill that could substantially overhaul policing in the country. They want action as more and more videos are released showing Black people killed by police but aren’t looking for speed over results. As negotiations continue amongst a small group of House and Senate lawmakers, civil rights organizers are making clear that a watered down bill is not an option.
“Presidents say a lot of things in their joint addresses and their state of the unions,” said Maurice Mitchell, national director of the progressive Working Families Party and a leader in the Movement for Black Lives coalition. But, Mitchell added the “proof” will ultimately be in what Biden and Democrats “behind closed doors are willing to spend political capital on.”
When Biden took office “there was a great fanfare” about Black women being the backbone of the Democratic Party “and the fact that the black community agenda would not be ignored” but taken “seriously,” said Mitchell. “Well, they need to demonstrate that.”
Current talks among congressional negotiators have been held up over key provisions, including one in the House-passed bill that would end qualified immunity, a judicial doctrine that shields police officers from being sued by victims and their families for alleged civil rights violations. Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.) proposed a workaround: allow people to sue police departments rather than officers. But most civil rights groups have yet to take a position on Scott’s counter offer, saying they want to see specific language.
There’s a “three-legged stool of accountability measures” — qualified immunity, a national registry of police misconduct and changing the intent standard to prosecute police officers — that civil rights groups absolutely want in any final bill, said Lisa Cylar Barrett, policy director for NAACP Legal Defense Fund.
Black Lives Matter activists largely believe the House bill, which is named after Floyd, doesn’t go far enough. But the one part of the bill that most advocates agreed on was ending or reforming qualified immunity. Mitchell said the continued hold up around the qualified immunity reform language — which is staunchly opposed by police unions — “demonstrates why it’s so important for Joe Biden and elected Democrats not to let up.”
Despite recent comments from House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn that he’d support a final bill that excluded changes to the qualified immunity protections for officers, many Democrats don’t want to give up on changing that doctrine — fearing that this is their one chance at substantive reform.
In a letter sent Friday, 10 progressive House members urged House and Senate leadership to ensure the final bill eliminates qualified immunity.
“We are concerned by recent discussions that the provision ending qualified immunity for local, state, and federal law enforcement may be removed in order to strike a bipartisan deal in the Senate,” wrote the lawmakers, led by Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.) and Cori Bush (D-Mo.). “Given that police violence, as a weapon of structural racism, continues to have devastating and deadly consequences for Black and brown lives across our country, we strongly urge you to not only maintain but strengthen the provision eliminating qualified immunity as negotiations in the Senate continue.”
Though Congress is taking the lead on crafting the bill, White House director of public engagement, Cedric Richmond, Domestic Policy Council head Susan Rice, and director of legislative affairs, Louisa Terrell have hosted talks with staffers and lawmakers. Top Hill negotiators have provided little details on how much progress they’ve made, but one key difference compared to the Trump-era, they say, is that there are now regular conversations.
Rep. Karen Bass (D-Calif.), one of the chief negotiators, told reporters this week that “the most important thing is that we have a bill that hits the president’s desk, not the date that it does.”
When asked about White House involvement, Scott said, “I’ve never found it helpful to negotiate with anybody other than those that have votes.”
The White House has held a couple bigger events this week following new guidance that fully vaccinated individuals don’t need to wear masks or social distance. One such event was the signing of the Hate Crimes Act on Thursday.
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The White House has held a couple bigger events this week following new guidance that fully vaccinated individuals don’t need to wear masks or social distance. One such event was the signing of the Hate Crimes Act on Thursday.
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What a difference a vaccine makes (that, and CDC guidance saying vaccinated people can safely do just about anything mask-free). At the Biden White House, which remained a COVID-cautious bubble longer than many corners of the country, it’s like 2019 all over again, with large and largely mask-free events in the East Room both Thursday and Friday.
Critics, including some health care professionals, worry broadly that without requiring proof of protection, the swing in guidance could disincentivize vaccinations. Others worry children who are too young to be vaccinated could be left exposed if people who aren’t vaccinated ditch their masks as well.
In the highly vaccinated bubble of the White House, though, the administration is embracing the guidance change.
President Biden honored Army Col. Ralph Puckett with the Medal of Honor at the White House on Friday.
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President Biden honored Army Col. Ralph Puckett with the Medal of Honor at the White House on Friday.
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At a Medal of Honor ceremony for Korean War veteran Col. Ralph Puckett Jr., about 60 people were in the room. The 94-year-old Puckett stood without his walker as President Biden put the medal around his neck and moved in close to whisper in his ear.
Biden, who before the pandemic lingered on handshakes and was known as a close-talker, has seemingly returned to form, embracing mask-free freedom.
“Get the family up here, all of you, including the grandkids,” Biden said, as more than a dozen family members piled on stage for a photo around a seated Puckett. Biden and South Korean President Moon Jae-in got down on one knee on either side of him as Biden directed family members to make sure everyone was visible in the shot.
South Korea’s President Moon Jae-in and President Biden pose with Col. Ralph Puckett and his family during a Medal of honor ceremony at the White House on Friday.
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The scene was similar on Thursday, when 68 people were on-hand for a bill signing. Cabinet secretaries, senior aides and members of Congress milled about before the event, most without masks, putting arms around each other, laughing. It was a perfectly normal scene straight out of non-pandemic times and a stark contrast from the early days of the Biden administration.
Guests mingle before President Biden arrives to a signing ceremony for the COVID-19 Hate Crimes Act in the East Room of the White House on Thursday.
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For the first 113 days or so, at the Biden White House, lecterns were wiped down between speakers, social distancing and double masking were the norm. They were so serious about avoiding large gatherings, staff would count how many people were in the room for a meeting, and often they’d gather via Zoom from neighboring offices. This continued even as the vast majority of staff got vaccinated.
It all changed, rather suddenly, when the CDC announced last week that fully vaccinated people could eschew their masks. White House aides were told via email shortly after the announcement that they were no longer required to wear masks in the office. The mood was celebratory, with newly visible smiles all around.
Since then, a White House that had been criticized for being slow to model the benefits of fully vaccinated life moved fast to embrace it.
“I can confirm we are a warm and fuzzy crew and we like to hug around here, but we were waiting for that to be allowed by CDC guidelines, which we certainly abide by,” press secretary Jen Psaki said at Friday’s press briefing.
Vaccinated members of the press corps also dropped their masks in televised briefings. Psaki said Friday that “having more events with more people” and “welcoming back a full briefing room very soon” would all be part of returning to a new normal as an increasing share of the population gets vaccinated and COVID case numbers fall.
The maskless images from the White House were jarring for some Americans watching from home (and commenting on social media). CDC Director Rochelle Walensky acknowledged that the transition will take time during a press briefing on Friday.
“When we released our guidelines … and the science said it was safe to do so, we also acknowledge that not everybody is going to feel like it’s time to rip off their masks,” she said.
Asked how the White House is tracking vaccinations among those who attend events at the White House or press briefings, Psaki said, “That’s not the role we’re going to play.” She said the guidance from the CDC was about how people can protect themselves, and vaccinated people are protected from COVID-19, no mask needed.
“The real question is how will people who are not yet vaccinated protect themselves?” Psaki said.
MINNEAPOLIS (WCCO) — Minneapolis police are investigating after two people died and eight others were injured in a downtown Minneapolis shooting early Saturday morning.
Just before 2 a.m. Saturday, police say two people standing in a crowd outside a nightclub on the 300 block of 1st Avenue North in downtown Minneapolis began to argue. They pulled out guns and began to shoot.
Officers found several people laying on the ground with gunshot wounds. They found two people at the scene, dead. Ten people had been shot total.
The preliminary investigation shows that all who were shot were adults. Five were men, and five were women, though the two who died were both men. Another man is in critical condition and seven others have non-life threatening injuries.
“As we start pulling more and more video from downtown from the city cameras, from the pole cameras that are out, we’ll be able to identify who the shooters are,” said John Elder, Director of the Office of Police Information.
It was a violent night in the city, as a separate shooting in North Minneapolis left another person dead.
The incident happened at about 8:45 p.m. near 26th and Logan Avenue North. The original call was for a vehicle crash.
Police say responding officers found a man suffering from a gunshot wound in the vehicle there. He was taken to North Memorial Medical Center in critical condition. Another man with gunshot wounds reportedly drove himself to North Memorial.
Just before 10 p.m., police say one person died as a result of injuries sustained in the incident.
Police say another woman involved in the crash suffered a seizure at the scene. No one is currently in custody.
Police say there are reports of three other shootings across Minneapolis overnight, one on the 1300 block of Irving Avenue North, one on the 5100 block of Dupont Avenue North, and one on the 2600 block of Lyndale Avenue South. All three of those wounded are considered to have non-life threatening injuries.
Police are asking anyone with information to call CrimeStoppers at 1-800-222-TIPS.
The increase in gun violence has one Minneapolis city office calling it a public health crisis, working behind the scenes to try and stop it.
The Office of Violence Prevention was created in late 2018, funding programs that offer support to victims of violence, and programs aimed at stopping violence. One of the most visible ways is through “violence interrupters.”
T.O.U.C.H Outreach was part of a city pilot program which is about to expand, made up of community members who mediate conflicts and try to stop retaliation. The city says six teams of violence interrupters are in training currently and will be on the street next month.
Then-U.S. Ambassador to the Philippines Sung Kim is seen in 2017. President Biden has tapped him to be U.S. special envoy for North Korean issues.
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Then-U.S. Ambassador to the Philippines Sung Kim is seen in 2017. President Biden has tapped him to be U.S. special envoy for North Korean issues.
Noel Celis/AFP via Getty Images
Career diplomat Sung Kim will serve as the U.S. special envoy to North Korea, President Biden announced on Friday.
The president delivered the news alongside South Korean President Moon Jae-in, who spent the day in Washington, D.C., engaging in bilateral talks with Biden.
Kim, who until recently was U.S. ambassador to Indonesia, previously served as special envoy to multilateral six-party talks with North Korea during the Obama years.
Biden said Kim’s “deep policy expertise” would help drive efforts to engage diplomatically with North Korea and help “reduce tensions as we move toward our ultimate goal of denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula.”
Moon, in his remarks, said Kim’s appointment showed the Biden administration’s “firm commitment of the U.S. to explore diplomacy” with North Korea.
Earlier, Biden said both nations were “deeply concerned” about North Korea, and that the U.S. consulted “closely” with Moon’s team while reviewing its North Korea policy.
Moon’s visit to the White House marks just the second visit of a head of state to the White House during Biden’s presidency and the first bilateral meeting of the Biden era without masking in effect; that rule was imposed because of the coronavirus pandemic.
Biden met last month with Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga in a meeting dictated by protocols made necessary by social distancing.
George Floyd’s murder felt like everything was the same and nothing was the same, said Miski Noor, an activist in Minneapolis, where Floyd was killed by a white police officer a year ago on 25 May.
“How many times have we seen Black death go viral?” asked Noor, the co-founder of Black Visions, which advocates for abolition, an approach to public safety that does not involve the police.
Noor, who helped found the group in 2017, knows that to abolish policing you also must confront systemic racism and the weight of history. And Noor also knows as the child of Somali immigrants, that the issues are global.
The high-profile murder of Floyd, who was pinned under the knee of a police officer for nine minutes and 29 seconds, captured the parallels between police violence against Black people across the globe, and evoked the deaths of Adama Traoré in France and Mark Duggan in the UK before him, even though the circumstances of the deaths differ. And the execution reflected a common history of violence against Black people, from slavery to colonialism, that united protesters in a renewed global movement against the legacy of empire and its enduring racist symbols.
Since his death, those public images have rapidly come down – from the toppling of a statue honoring the slave trader Edward Colston in Bristol, England, to the official removal of the Confederate leader Jefferson Davis’s statue from the Kentucky state capitol.
A statue of Edward Colston is pushed into the River Avon. Photograph: Giulia Spadafora/Getty Images
More statues honoring the Confederacy, the band of southern states that fought against the US government in the civil war, have been taken down in the past year than in the previous four years, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC). Since Floyd’s death, nearly 170 statues, street names and other tributes to the Confederacy have been removed or renamed in the US, SPLC data shows. More than 2,100 tributes to the Confederacy remain in public places; over 700 are monuments.
This reclaiming of public history isn’t new, but Floyd’s death was the latest catalyst, said historian Robin DG Kelley. “There has been a continuous reckoning around public history and race,” said Kelley, Gary B Nash endowed chair in UShistory at the University of California, Los Angeles. “And it wasn’t his death but the presence of 26 million [protesters] and the fear it generated that compelled institutions to act.”
Demands to remove monuments, change names and decolonize history were a part of the US culture wars of the 1990s, which included defending ethnic studies at universities. More recently, the Rhodes Must Fall campaign, the successful 2015 student movement in South Africa to remove a statue of Victorian imperialist Cecil Rhodes from the University of Cape Town, has inspired similar action in the UK and other countries.
Noor, who uses the pronoun “they”, said they were taught a whitewashed version of US history through the perspective of white, cisgendered men, while growing up in Rochester, Minnesota.
“To sell so many untruths, so many lies as factual, you have to actually erase. You have to omit whole lived histories,” said Noor, who delved deeply into African and African American history for the first time while attending the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities.
Historian Nell Irvin Painter, who addresses Confederate iconography in an ink, graphite and collage series called From Slavery to Freedom, said many people weren’t ready to reckon with the symbols until Floyd’s death.
A man lifts his son to dunk a basketball at the Robert E Lee statue in Richmond, Virginia. Artwork, graffiti and memorials call out racial equity and take a stand for social injustice. Photograph: Patrick Smith/Getty Images
“When the big public got ready around 2020, all this came to the fore,” said Painter, author of The History of White People. “[Floyd’s] murder was so egregious that you just couldn’t pretend it didn’t happen. Like with civil rights, there’s a long history that most people hadn’t known about … that could only be seen by lots of people at the right historical time.”
That was also true in the UK.
In what historians describe as an “unprecedented” public reckoning with the British empire, an estimated 39 names – including streets, buildings and schools – and 30 statues, plaques and other memorials have been or are undergoing changes or removal since last summer’s Black Lives Matter protests in the UK.
“The death of George Floyd sparked an exploration for me on how this country deals with racism. It was a big awakening,” said Tyrek Morris, a university student in Manchester.
Morris, who organized his first protest following Floyd’s death, said wherever he turned, he saw placards with an enduring slogan: “The UK is not innocent.”
The message reverberated deeply within him and started him on a journey where he interrogated what he was taught and, more importantly, what he wasn’t. At these Black Lives Matter protests, Morris heard from the family of Mark Duggan, whose death at the hands of the police sparked the 2011 London riots; of Shukri Abdi and Christopher Kapessa, two children who drowned, but whose families say authorities failed to take their cases seriously; of the crimes of the British empire and a frank assessment of Britain’s role in the slave trade.
‘The death of George Floyd sparked an exploration for me on how this country deals with racism. It was a big awakening,’ said Tyrek Morris, a university student in Manchester. Photograph: Suki Dhanda/The Guardian
An estimated 15,000 people marched with Morris, who organised with the group All Black Lives UK (ABLUK), in Manchester on 6 June, one of 160 protests that weekend. ABLUK also organized a gathering of 10,000 demonstrators in Bristol, where they toppled a statue of the 17th-century slave trader Colston. Xahra Saleem, a writer who runs a small jewellery business, clearly remembers the moment the Colston statue was taken down. She was one of the organisers of the protest and was walking ahead of the march. She passed the statue and joked to a friend: “Wouldn’t it be crazy if it fell down at some point?” Then it did. “It was like we manifested it,” she said.
A decades-long campaign by the local community to get the statue removed had been ignored by the local authority. But once the statue fell, everything changed.
“Schools changed their names and roads’ names changed. Everything happened so quickly. Sometimes all it takes is a little bit of a push,” Saleem said.
In France, the only country that outlawed slavery and later reinstated it, outrage over Floyd’s death quickly revived a tense debate about the weight of colonial history and the country’s slave-trading past. Starting in French Caribbean islands, statues were pulled down or defaced by protesters. In Martinique, a long-simmering controversy over white figures on plinths boiled over: statues of the white politician Victor Schœlcher, who facilitated the decree to abolish slavery, were targeted amid calls for more visibility for the rebellions by enslaved people, which led to abolition.
“George Floyd’s death opened up a lot of debate on race in France – around questions of white privilege, police violence and racism in the police as well as France’s colonial past,” said Rokhaya Diallo, a writer, broadcaster and anti-racism campaigner.
“But there was also a lot of resistance and denial of the problem, particularly in TV studio debates,” Diallo said. “There will always be some denial, but what has changed is that we can no longer ignore the issue. The lid can’t be put back on, particularly for young people today.”
France was the first country to officially recogniseslavery as a “crime against humanity” – enshrined in a 2001 law which set out to improve the teaching of slavery and the colonial era. But historians have raised concerns that teaching in French schools is still too little.
“The Napoleon commemorations in France this May showed that this is still a debate,” Diallo said of the bicentennial observance of the emperor’s death.
Though he has promised to be “uncompromising in the face of racism, antisemitism and discrimination”, President Emmanuel Macron has insisted that France would not take down statues of controversial, colonial-era figures.
The response to Floyd’s death “already had an international dimension”, historian Kelley said. “It wasn’t simply sympathy for another African American victim. It was recognition that this kind of violence was happening all over the world.”
People raise their fists in front of riot policemen during a protest at the Champ de Mars, with the Eiffel Tower in background, in Paris in June 2020. Photograph: Geoffroy van der Hasselt/AFP/Getty Images
Floyd’s case was eerily like that of Adama Traoré, a 24-year-old Black man, who died after being stopped by gendarmes outside Paris in 2016. Pinned to the ground, he told officers: “I can’t breathe,” just as Floyd did. Investigating judges are examining conflicting medical reports in his case.
Assa Traoré said her brother initially ran from police because he didn’t have his identity card with him, an extension of life there. A Black or North African man in France is 20 times more likely to be stopped for an identity check than a white man, research shows. And those controls can end in violence or death.
Black people enslaved by he French had to carry official documents, according to Traoré, who said the need for documentation “links back to everything that is unsaid about colonial history and its consequences … As long as the French police doesn’t confront its past and say there is racism in the police, we won’t get anywhere, it’s a struggle that will never end.
“So yes,” Traoré said, “statues and street names are a start in a country facing up to the violence of its past.”
For Bree Newsome Bass, who in 2015 removed the Confederate flag flying at the South Carolina statehouse, the whole story of America is in question, similar to the debates in France and the UK.
Assa Traoré, a French activist and leader of the Committee for Justice and Truth for Adama, said the need for documentation ‘links back to everything that is unsaid about colonial history and its consequences’. Photograph: Magali Delporte/The Guardian
“We tend to think of ourselves as having broken free of colonialism, but what is lost is the history of genocide of the indigenous Americans. I’ve really come into recognizing what that means in terms of how we think of America, as this new nation as opposed to what it is, which is really a colony,” said Newsome Bass, a film-maker and activist. “It began as a slave colony, and even though we broke off from Britain, the United States evolved into its own white settler colonial state.”
Since Floyd’s death, there is a new roll call of Black people in the US who have died at the hands of police, a painful reminder of what hasn’t changed when the statues came down. While Derek Chauvin was convicted of killing Floyd, names like Rayshard Brooks and Daunte Wright join a growing list of lives lost, linked to steady demands for institutional change and greater accountability.
Kelley said events of the past year illustrate how easy it is to topple a statue or change the name of a building, and how difficult it is to topple an empire, dismantle racial capitalism and patriarchy, and replace prisons and jails with “non-carceral, caring forms for public safety”.
The situation also creates a quandary, Kelley said. What do we make of universities that change building names but have huge real estate holdings in neighboring low-income communities or endowments with investments in private prisons or occupied Palestine? What do we make of Barclays Bank removing the name of enslaver Andrew Buchanan from its new Glasgow property, and yet it has its own sordid history with trading the enslaved?
“[Removing symbols] makes us feel good, but it ironically has the effect of personalising and individualising racism,” Kelley said. “Some of the most important British abolitionists, for example, came from the ranks of industrial capitalists. Do they stay or fall?”
In the UK, campaigners also fear that changes such as removing statues are cosmetic. Robert Beckford, a professor of Black theology at the Queen’s Foundation, said: “Presenting a more balanced view of the history is necessary, but I’m worried that removing the symbols, removing of a plaque is viewed as equivalent to anti-racist, institutional change.”
For Morris, the work has only just begun. He points to the British government’s controversial report on race, which claimed to not find evidence of institutional racism in the UK in the areas it studied, as a sign of how far the UK must go to confront its past and present. He believes the answer to that is more protests.
Saleem, who organised the Colston protest, agrees. “We’re planning to make it a summer of anti-racist movements, activities and protests.”
The work continues in Minneapolis, too. This summer, Black Visions plans to gather residents to answer the question: “What will keep us safe?” The goal is to have a mandate and collective definition of safety that is driven by Minneapolis residents and includes alternatives to current approaches to public safety.
A coalition called Yes 4 Minneapolis submitted a petition to change the city charter, which requires the city to rely on police for public safety. The petition calls for a November ballot question to allow residents to replace police with a public safety department.
Protesters gather near a memorial in honor of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Minnesota, in June. Photograph: Chandan Khanna/AFP/Getty Images
“I want to see more of my people and my ancestors reflected in the world that I live in,” said Noor. “But how about we just build that world instead of just changing the street signs in this one?
“It’s Black folks continuing to fight for the basic right … to live so we can thrive. George Floyd is a part of that story.”
As the Biden administration’s infrastructure negotiations with Senate Republicans picked up with a $1.7 trillion counteroffer on Friday, some congressional Democrats are getting antsy.
“We move as quickly as we can on going big, we move as quickly as we can on negotiations,” Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH) told Vox on Wednesday. “At some point, if they won’t go where we believe the country needs to go and where the country seems to want to go, then we take off.”
President Biden issued his opening bid last month — the $2.25 trillion American Jobs Plan —and the GOP responded with a $568 billion infrastructure counteroffer a few weeks ago. (Separately, the White House also introduced a $1.8 trillion American Families Plan, focusing on child care and education.)
The new $1.7 trillion White House counteroffer settles for the $65 billion Republicans floated for broadband funding, and pares back the amount of funding for roads and bridges from Biden’s initial proposal of $159 billion to $120 billion in new investment. It also cuts research and development from a proposed package, vowing to put it in other congressional bills going forward. But the president’s counter keeps funding for clean energy, removing lead pipes from America’s drinking water systems, and boosting long-term care workers.
“We recognize that still leaves us far apart,” a White House memo to Republicans obtained by Vox reads. “However, in service of trying to advance these negotiations, the President has asked us to respond with changes to his American Jobs Plan, in hopes that these changes will spur further bipartisan cooperation and progress.”
For their part, Republicans don’t seem all that happy. A statement released by a spokesperson for Senate Republicans Friday said, “based on today’s meeting, the groups seem further apart after two meetings with White House staff than they were after one meeting with President Biden.”
Democrats on the Hill say they support the White House actively talking to Republicans. But some are also anxious that negotiating with Republicans just won’t meet the needs of the moment — whether it’s on climate change or jobs.
“I don’t think it’s our job to pass something just so that we can say, ‘Well, that piece over there is bipartisan,’ and wait for the pat on the back,” moderate Sen. Bob Casey (D-PA) told reporters recently. “I think people want us to get big things done.”
Democrats’ other option is budget reconciliation, a mechanism that would allow them to pass a massive budget bill with just 51 votes rather than the required 60 — mostly likely on party lines. This is what Democrats did for Biden’s $1.9 trillion Covid-19 relief package, and they have at least one more opportunity to do it again before the 2022 midterms.
The Biden administration is caught between two promises: working with Republicans on Capitol Hill, and vowing to pass an ambitious economic agenda that reroutes the American economy toward clean energy and passes billions to make child care and long-term care more affordable.
Some progressive climate groups are arguing that a bipartisan deal could significantly hurt the president’s climate agenda.They argue Biden needs to invest heavily in electric charging stations, and to pass a clean electricity standard to get to his goal of 100 percent clean electricity by 2035. Biden’s counteroffer largely leaves his environmental provisions intact but would forgo a $180 billion investment into research and development — money that could be key for the Energy Department’s development of new technology to combat climate change.
“If you spend money on roads without making major investments in either mileage standards or deployment of EVs or investing in putting in new standards to ensure clean electricity by 2030 or 2035, you’ll be going backward on climate,” said Jamal Raad, co-founder of the climate group Evergreen Action and a former top staffer for Washington Gov. Jay Inslee.
Still, as much as some Democrats worry that negotiating with Republicans wastes valuable time, some of Biden’s closest allies on Capitol Hill say it is simply part of a process that could make moderate Democrats accept reconciliation, if and when that happens.
“When the president announced a big and bold proposal, the American Jobs Plan, several Democrats promptly said, ‘I will not vote for this — for reconciliation, a Democrat-only bill — unless there is a serious and determined effort first for bipartisanship,’” Sen. Chris Coons (D-DE) told Vox. “It seems to me the issue isn’t the White House not going bold; the issue is one of order and timing.”
Bipartisan negotiations on infrastructure are ongoing
The main Republican negotiator is Sen. Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia. Capito is the ranking Republican member on the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, which has purview over five-year reauthorization bills for surface and water infrastructure.
Capito and other Republicans who are ranking members on key committees had a nearly two-hour meeting with Biden at the White House earlier this month. The senators have also had subsequent conversations with members of Biden’s Cabinet and senior staff including White House counselor Steve Ricchetti, director of legislative affairs Louisa Terrell, National Economic Council Director Brian Deese, Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo, and Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg.
While the main difference between Republicans and Democrats is over proposed corporate tax hikes to pay for the projects, there are other areas of disagreement. In staff-level negotiations between Senate Democrats and Republicans on the five-year surface transportation bill, Republicans have been pushing back on climate resilience provisions, a Democratic Senate staffer told Vox. Democrats see infrastructure as a key way to make progress on cutting down on fossil fuel emissions in the transportation sector — investing in 500,000 electric vehicle charging stations across the nation’s roadways to encourage more people to switch to cleaner cars.
“I’m wary of anything that has Capito’s fingerprints,” said Raad, the co-founder of Evergreen Action. “It would not just hurt our ability to hit our NDC [the US target to limit its carbon emissions], it would take us backward.”
Sen. Brown says he thinks the Biden administration should be trying to find common ground with Republicans at least to prove they tried. But Brown clearly believes that shouldn’t entail significant concessions, especially on climate.
“I assume they’ll obstruct on climate,” he told Vox. “We’ll try to come to bipartisan agreement; I don’t expect it [to happen]. We move forward in a big way.”
Negotiations take time — and that’s a risk
Biden has said he wants to see significant progress on bipartisan talks by Memorial Day, and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has outlined July 4 as when she’d like to see an infrastructure bill get a vote in Congress, but that date could also be pushed if necessary.
It’s possible that Democrats were padding extra time with those initial deadlines, expecting negotiations would move it back. Still, a razor-thin majority in the House and Senate makes the risk of taking additional time a high-stakes strategy. When they will introduce the first draft of a bill is still unclear.
“I can’t give you a specific answer because I don’t know the answer,” House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer told Vox, adding that appropriations work in the House will begin in earnest in July. “We’re going to have some time available to do the work of the Jobs Plan and the Families Plan in that time frame if, in fact, we can get agreement. And, if we can’t get agreement, work with the administration on how we’ll move forward.”
House Budget Committee Chair John Yarmuth (D-KY), who will be overseeing the budget reconciliation process in the House if Democrats do indeed pursue budget reconciliation as an option to pass their infrastructure bill, told reporters, “I think they want to give a reasonable chance for there to be a bipartisan bill. I think probably, sooner rather than later there will be a decision.”
Even if Democrats do decide to do reconciliation rather than move a bipartisan bill through regular order, there’s still a lot to be decided, including whether they’ll move one massive bill containing both the American Jobs Plan and Biden’s American Families Plan that deals with affordable child care and education, or split them into separate bills.
“I think it would be difficult to do two. I know there’s this idea about just doing physical infrastructure in one smaller bipartisan bill, but I don’t like that idea,” said Casey, who is shepherding the American Families Plan portion of Biden’s package through the Senate and wants to see both planks of Biden’s economic package passed through reconciliation.
The next week will be pivotal for Biden’s big shot on the economy. But the clock is ticking.
In a media phone call, state health and human services secretary Dr. Mark Ghaly detailed which health guidelines will be lifted and which ones will remain in place.
“The big message today is, we’re at a place with this pandemic where those requirements of the past are no longer needed for the foreseeable future,” Ghaly explained to reporters. “We will be watching closely to determine if, and when, we need other public health protections to come back into place.”
Come June 15, the color-coded tier system will go away. Masking will be in line with CDC face-covering guidelines. California will no longer require social distancing and businesses will also be able to open at full capacity.
“When we saw the targeted date of June 15 we had our fingers crossed hoping that we’d make it to that,” said Mike Testa, Visit Sacramento president & CEO. “To find out today that that date is now set in stone is great.”
State health leaders said California arrived here based on a few key metrics: low COVID-19 case rates/a low statewide positivity rate, increasing vaccinations and a minimal threat of the state’s health care system being overwhelmed at this stage in the pandemic.
Ghaly said indoor event venues will be required by the state to ask attendees for vaccine or negative COVID-19 test result verification at events with more than 5,000 people. The state will recommend vendors for outdoor “mega” events (10,000 or more people) have a system to verify vaccination status/negative COVID-19 test.
The Sacramento area business community is ready for events, as we knew them pre-pandemic, to resume.
Visit Sacramento said consumer research shows people are more than willing to follow some guidelines if it means events can resume.
“I think all of us are just ready to have events and are willing to jump through those hoops to make those things happen,” Testa said. “We’re hearing from the consumer as well, ‘I’ll do whatever it takes. I’ll wear a mask. I’ll show you my vaccination card as long as I can get into the event.'”
Visit Sacramento said reopening officially happening June 15 comes at a good time with numerous outdoor and indoor events planned for the region in the weeks and months ahead.
“The idea of going somewhere and experiencing something outdoors… listening to live music… drinking a beer straight from the restaurant, I think that appeals to a lot of people,” Testa said.
When it comes to travel, Ghaly said when the state reopens, its travel recommendations will track with CDC guidance.
There won’t be quarantine and isolation requirements for travel within the country, but for different parts of the world with severe outbreaks, there will likely be restrictions on those travelers coming into the country, Ghaly said.
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