GET YOUR KNEE OFF OUR NECKS

A teenager outside the Port Authority Bus Terminal, taking a knee on a block crowded with protesters, relished the feeling lost these last months — of being part of something.

A 23-year-old art teacher, Evan Woodard, was thrilled to see his city at the fore of a nationwide event. “I’m proud to call myself a New Yorker,” he said. “This is everyone’s city.”

People who just last month were dutifully keeping behind doors and masks have turned out by the tens of thousands in the past week to gather in the streets and shout to be heard.

The lurch between twin crises with opposing aims — isolation and assembly — has been jolting, and to many, positively liberating. People feeling penned for months, then pushed past a tipping point by images of a man’s life ending under an officer’s knee, have surged to the streets — for some, mask be damned — to be part of something.For those coming out day after day to protest, marching with friends and strangers under cheers from the open windows above feels something like normal. If sheltering at home was a reaction to a threat, this is the opposite — action.

Simonez Dega, 23, a waiter at Olive Garden at a protest near the Barclays Center in Brooklyn, welcomed the change from making music alone in his apartment to marching elbow to elbow. “It feels truly warm,” he said. “It felt like we were all bees in the hive. Now it’s like, that’s another bee, that’s another person that is here for the same reason. It’s a different energy.”

Mr. Dega added: “As a black male, I had to go out and protest.”

The demonstrations would consume the city at any time, but they arrive at a particularly anxious moment, with virus restrictions about to start easing after months of a curve-flattening quarantine.

Even as new cases ebb, New York City remains the epicenter of the coronavirus outbreak in the United States. More than 200,000 residents have contracted the virus and 21,000 have died, or are presumed to have died, of Covid-19, the disease caused by the virus.

More than 2,000 people have been arrested. The arrests continued on Thursday, with thousands of people still on the streets past the curfew, and confrontations with the police again flaring up.

Encircling of Peaceful Protesters Shows Aggressive Shift by N.Y. Police

Officers have charged and swung batons at demonstrators after curfew with seemingly little provocation. The mayor said he would review any reports of inappropriate enforcement.

NY TIMES

It was about 8:45 p.m. in Brooklyn on Wednesday, 45 minutes past the city’s curfew, when a peaceful protest march encountered a line of riot police, near Cadman Plaza.

Hundreds of demonstrators stood there for 10 minutes, chanting, arms raised, until their leaders decided to turn the group around and leave the area.

What they had not seen was that riot police had flooded the plaza behind them, engaging in a law enforcement tactic called kettling, which involves encircling protesters so that they have no way to exit from a park, city block or other public space, and then charging them and making arrests.

The kettling operations carried out by the city’s police after curfew on recent nights have become among the most unsettling symbols of the department’s use of force against peaceful protests, which has touched off a fierce backlash against Mr. Blasio and Mr. Shea.

In the past several days, New York Times journalists covering the protests have seen officers repeatedly charge at demonstrators after curfew with seemingly little provocation, shoving them onto sidewalks, striking them with batons and using other aggressive tactics.

In an interview on WNYC on Friday, the mayor said the encircling of protesters was sometimes necessary for public safety. “I don’t want to see protesters hemmed in if they don’t need to be,” he said, but he added “that sometimes there’s a legitimate problem and it’s not visible to protesters.”

Some protest organizers urge crowds to go home. Others marched on, and were arrested.

The protests that have filled New York’s streets in recent days entered their second week on Friday with thousands of people gathering at sites across the city for demonstrations, marches and vigils that continued to be overwhelmingly peaceful.

While several groups defied a citywide curfew again and risked encountering the forceful tactics the police had used the two previous nights to clear out those who did not disperse, other rallies broke up voluntarily as 8 p.m. approached amid intermittent rain.

“Everybody go home,” organizers of a group on Manhattan’s Upper West Side implored the crowd as a number of officers approached shortly before the curfew took effect. “It’s a wrap.”

In Brooklyn’s Clinton Hill neighborhood, where mass arrests were narrowly averted on Thursday night, one protester announced to the crowd, “You are nothing less to the cause if you’re not here after curfew.”In Brooklyn, a line of officers blocked hundreds of protesters at Grand Army Plaza, while dozens of patrol cars kept them from retreating. The protesters stopped and raised their arms, led in front by a line of cyclists who had been acting as a buffer.

Randy Williams, 38, stepped forward and began to talking to some of the officers, working with other organizers to try to ease a tense situation. The group negotiated for the protesters to be able to leave peacefully, without arrests.

“This is the first protest people have not feared for their life,” Mr. Williams said. “The protest has ended for the night. We will respectfully go home now.”

But less than an hour later, the police again employed the more forceful tactics they had used on recent nights, targeting a group that had left Grand Army Plaza.

Officers appeared to surround a number of protesters on Nostrand Avenue. Videos showed officers aggressively pushing back a man who was filming them as they made arrests, then chasing him with a baton and shoving a reporter who was filming while the man was taken into custody.

On Manhattan’s Upper East Side, police blocked a march that started near Mayor Bill de Blasio’s official residence and arrested around 20 people, rushing at some and forcing them to the ground.

The night’s relative calm came on a day that started with the mayor continuing to defend the police’s actions in breaking up demonstrations, even as videos and photos showed officers employing aggressive and sometimes violent tactics to do so.

“What I saw overwhelmingly, and have continued to see, is peaceful protest being respected on both sides,” Mr. de Blasio said at a news briefing.

But with criticism of the mayor mounting — including from Jumaane Williams, the city’s public advocate, who had helped the tension in Clinton Hill on Thursday — he said for the first time that some officers would be disciplined, and suspended, for their treatment of protesters.

Late Friday, several were.

In a statement released late Friday, the commissioner, Dermot F. Shea, said that one officer had been suspended after video emerged of him pushing a woman to the ground in Brooklyn on May 29. In addition, the commissioner said, a supervisor would be transferred as a result of the incident.

An officer involved in a separate incident the next day was also suspended for pulling down a man’s face mask and then spraying the man in the face with pepper spray, the commissioner said.

Sherrilyn Ifill

✔@Sifill_LDF

This boy had his hands up when an NYPD ofcr pulled his mask down and pepper sprayed him. ⁦@NYPDShea⁩? Mayor ⁦@BilldeBlasio⁩?

97.4K

11:03 PM - May 30, 2020

Twitter Ads info and privacy

56.4K people are talking about this

The mayor also continued to defend the curfew against calls that it be abandoned. He said it would be enforced through Monday morning, when the city is scheduled to begin reopening after a lengthy shutdown prompted by the coronavirus pandemic.

Mr. de Blasio’s affirmation of the curfew came even as the Manhattan district attorney joined his counterparts in Brooklyn and the Bronx in saying he would not prosecute those who were arrested during the protests for low-level offense like unlawful assembly.

Commissioner Shea, who has condemned the killing of Mr. Floyd, apologized at a news conference on Thursday for any instances of misconduct his officers had committed.

But he also demanded that demonstrators stop insulting and attacking his officers and he warned that anti-police rhetoric could lead to continued violence against those he oversees.

“For our part in the damage to civility, for our part in racial bias, in excessive force, unacceptable behavior, unacceptable language and many other mistakes, we are human,” he said. “I am sorry. Are you?”

At his news conference, Mr. Shea ticked off ways in which he said the police had been attacked over the last week and said “anarchists” armed with dangerous weapons had tried to undermine otherwise productive protests.

Late Friday, he sought to provide evidence for his assertion, posting photos on Twitter of items he said had been seized from people who were arrested at a protest in the Bronx Thursday night.“These are not the tools of peaceful demonstrators,” he wrote. They were, he continued, “the tools of criminals bent on causing mayhem & hijacking what we all know is a worthwhile cause.”The items included handcuffs, a backpack, lighter fluid, gloves, a pocketknife, a hammer and a wrench.

District attorneys in Manhattan, Brooklyn and the Bronx will not prosecute people arrested and accused of low-level offenses in the protests.

Since last week, more than 2,000 people have been arrested in the city on charges like disorderly conduct, resisting arrest, unlawful assembly, assault on a police officer and burglary, according to the police and prosecutors.

Protesters rallied at a Brooklyn jail where a prisoner was pepper-sprayed and died this week.

There were more than 1,000 people in the Sunset Park section of Brooklyn on Friday evening at the Metropolitan Detention Center, a federal jail where, the authorities say, guards pepper-sprayed a prisoner early Wednesday. He was found unconscious and later died, officials said.

“We see you,” one person in the crowd shouted. “We hear you,” another said, as detainees pounded on the jail windows. “You are not alone,” the crowd chanted again and again.

The death on Wednesday of the prisoner, Jamel Floyd, has become another flash point amid the protests that have continued for more than a week across the United States over police brutality and institutional racism, including in the criminal-justice system.

Mr. Floyd, a 35-year-old black man who was serving a state prison sentence for burglary, had been moved to the Brooklyn jail in October, the federal Bureau of Prisons said in a statement on Wednesday

.

The guards used the pepper spray on him after he became increasingly disruptive and potentially harmful to others, the statement said. He barricaded himself in his cell and was breaking the cell-door window with a metal object, the statement said.

Mr. Floyd’s family has challenged the official account.

More police violence occurs during protests over police violence.

As protests over the death of George Floyd sweep the nation, the demonstrations have revealed powerful moments of peaceful protest and in some cases among police officers, who have been seen taking a knee in solidarity, reading the names of police brutality victims out loud or quietly crying alongside protesters.

But the protests have also revealed widespread incidents of police aggression, documented with the same tool that captured Mr. Floyd’s death under the knee of a white police officer in Minneapolis: video.

In Buffalo, two police officers were suspended without pay after a video showed them shoving a 75-year-old protester, who was hospitalized with a head injury. In Fort Lauderdale, Fla., Miami Herald reporters filmed officers who were shooting a nonviolent protester in the head with foam rubber bullets, fracturing her eye socket. Cellphone videos show New York City police officers beating unarmed protesters and sideswiping demonstrators with opened squad car doors.

Captured by bystanders and sometimes shown on live television, the episodes have occurred in cities large and small, in the heat of mass protests and in their quiet aftermath. A compilation posted on Twitter by a North Carolina lawyer included over 300 clips by Friday morning.

The episodes have emerged over nearly two weeks of largely peaceful demonstrations in at least 600 cities across America, as thousands of people filled the streets in historic protests against systemic racism and police brutality.

Authorities in the city of Las Cruces in southern New Mexico announced on Friday that a police officer would be fired and charged with involuntary manslaughter in connection with the killing of a man who fled from a traffic stop.

The man, Antonio Valenzuela, 40, died on Feb. 29. The Las Cruces Police Department said he had an open warrant because of a parole violation, and was tased twice by officers while running away after being pulled over. Officer Christopher Smelser then used a chokehold technique on Mr. Valenzuela.

The Las Cruces medical examiner’s office determined this week that Mr. Valenzuela died from the injuries caused by being asphyxiated, the department said.

The death of Mr. Valenzuela, a painter and father of four, has resonated across New Mexico, which was already grappling with some of the highest rates of fatal shootings by police officers anywhere in the United States.

Involuntary manslaughter is a fourth-degree felony. Officer Smelser is also in the process of being fired from the force, said Dan Trujillo, a police spokesman. Officer Smelser could not immediately be reached for comment Thursday, and it was unclear whether he had a lawyer. 

The message from the president is to dominate the streets with force. The message from many of their chiefs and mayors is to tolerate, connect and empathize. The message on the streets, at times, is that they are part of the problem. The message from the news media is watch what you say and do.

In St. Louis on Monday night, four officers were struck by gunfire in a shootout between gunmen at a protest and the police. In Las Vegas, an officer was put on life support after he was shot near the Circus Circus Hotel and Casino as police forces tried to disperse crowds that had hit them with bottles and rocks. In Buffalo, the driver of an S.U.V. sped through a line of law enforcement officers in riot gear, injuring two of them in an episode caught on video.

But the outrage over the death of George Floyd in police custody in Minneapolis has upended that notion, inciting social unrest and violence that has put urban and suburban police departments across the country on alert. It has been a challenge for officers, at a time when many are also confronting the coronavirus.

“These type of protests take a significant toll on an officer’s mental wellness, and they add so much stress,” said Manny Ramirez, a sergeant with the Fort Worth Police Department and the president of the police officers’ union. “This is Fort Worth, Texas, 1,000 miles away, but yet these officers have become targets for that rage.”

Sgt. Ramirez, 35, was in a command post on Sunday when protesters began hurling frozen water bottles and rocks at officers. One officer was struck on the elbow with a projectile. Another broke his leg while chasing a looter. “There’s got to be some way to ensure that going forward we can have something constructive come out of this,” he said.

“I’ve gone home once in the last four days,” said a Los Angeles officer watching the crowd months after having the coronavirus. “My girlfriend had to drop off clothes so I could change. It’s been hell, for everybody. Monsters and Red Bull, that’s the only thing that’s keeping me up.”

In Austin, Texas, a 20-year-old African-American protester was in critical condition after he was shot in the head with a beanbag round fired by a police officer on Sunday. A protester standing next to the man had thrown objects at the police, and in response an officer struck the victim instead. Others hit by similar police-fired rounds include a woman giving medical assistance and a pregnant African-American woman.

In many ways, the police response to what is happening on the streets illustrates a kind of post-Ferguson era of policing. Officers — not only chiefs but even the rank and file — have embraced the demonstrations and aligned themselves so much with protesters that they march alongside them. In some parts of the country, chiefs have become more politically outspoken and more emotional than they have been in decades.

The N.F.L. commissioner said the league should have listened to black players’ concerns earlier.

After President Trump renewed criticism of N.F.L. players protesting during the national anthem, Commissioner Roger Goodell delivered his strongest support yet for their right to demonstrate to fight racism and police brutality.

In a swift response to a video montage that featured star players asking the league to address systemic racism, Goodell said he apologized for not listening to the concerns of African-American players earlier and said he supported the players’ right to protest peacefully.

During the 2016 season, Colin Kaepernick started the movement within the league when he knelt to call attention to racial injustice and violence by police, but no team has offered him a contract since then.

Goodell’s comments were diametrically opposed to the president, who spoke out to defend New Orleans Saints quarterback Drew Brees, who said this week that it was disrespectful to kneel during the pregame playing of “The Star-Spangled Banner.”

Brees apologized on Thursday after immediate backlash. But the president said on Twitter that Brees should not have backtracked and that people should stand when the anthem is played. On Friday night, Brees directed an Instagram post to the president.

“We can no longer use the flag to turn people away or distract them from the real issues that face our black communities,” Brees said. “We did this back in 2017, and regretfully I brought it back with my comments this week.”

More than any other major sports league, the N.F.L. has wrestled in recent years with the issue of race, the lack of African-Americans and other people of color in positions of power in the league and the rights of players to protest social issues on the field. While three-quarters of the league’s players are African-American, nearly every team owner is white and several of the most prominent owners are strong supporters of the president.

May jobs report: US economy unexpectedly adds 2.5 million payrolls, unemployment rate falls to 13.3%

YAHOO

The May jobs report showed an unexpected rise in non-farm payrolls across the economy and a drop in the unemployment rate from April, averting what economists expected would be a rise in the jobless rate to the highest level since the Great Depression amid the coronavirus pandemic.

The Labor Department released the May jobs report Friday at 8:30 a.m. ET. Here were the main results from the report, compared to Bloomberg consensus data:

• Change in non-farm payrolls: +2.509 million vs. -7.5 million expected and -20.687 million in April
•  
• Unemployment rate: 13.3% vs. 19.0% expected and 14.7% in April
•  
• Average hourly earnings month on month: -1.0% vs. +1.0% expected and +4.7% in April
•  
• Average hourly earnings year on year: +6.7% vs. +8.5% expected and +8.0% in April

The Labor Department’s surveys captured the period including the 12th of the month, meaning the May report included the very early stages of reopening in some parts of the U.S. amid the coronavirus outbreak. But the rise in non-farm payrolls still exceeded all economist expectations, with no economists included in Bloomberg’s survey having predicted a rise in jobs during the month of May. Stocks rallied strongly following the report. 

“Total nonfarm payroll employment increased by 2.5 million in May, reflecting a limited resumption of economic activity that had been curtailed due to the coronavirus pandemic and efforts to contain it,” the BLS said in its statement Friday.

The private services sector recovered 2.425 million payrolls in May after shedding 17.351 million in April. Leisure and hospitality – far and away the hardest-hit industry group in April, with more than 7.5 million jobs lost – saw the largest rebound, with 1.24 million positions added in May.

Education and health services industries added 424,000 payrolls in May after shedding 2.59 million in April. Retail trade, wholesale trade, financial activities, and professional and business services also added jobs for the month.

Within the services sector, only the transportation and warehousing, utilities, and information industries extended job losses from April.

The goods-producing sector also added jobs, with these rising 669,000 after declining by 2.373 million in April. Manufacturing payrolls rose by 225,000, recovering some of the 1.324 million payrolls lost during the prior month.

Government payrolls, however, extended declines, with these falling by 585,000 after a drop of 963,000 in April.

The broad-based gains in payroll employment “indicates that the process of rehiring began sooner than the jobless claims figures suggested,” said Michael Pearce, senior U.S. economist for Capital Economics. “With more states moving to loosen their lockdowns in the coming weeks, particularly in the populous Northeast, employment looks set to continue rebounding in June and beyond, although we still think it will be a long time before the labor market is anywhere near back to its pre-virus state.”

Friday’s jobs report also included an unexpected improvement in the unemployment rate to 13.3%, after hitting the highest level in BLS monthly survey history in April at 14.7%. Most economists expected the jobless rate would climb further to nearly 20% in May, reflecting those still unemployed amid ongoing virus-related business disruptions. The monthly unemployment rate was estimated to have peaked at about 25% during the Great Depression in 1933.

Coronavirus cases are climbing again in the South and the West. Will crowded protests spark bigger outbreaks?

YAHOO
For months Americans were cooped up at home, doing their part to slow the spread of the coronavirus. But in recent days tens of thousands of them have filled the streets in at least 380 cities and towns across all 50 states to protest police brutality and systemic racism — threats they believe are even more dangerous to people of color than COVID-19.

They are marching shoulder-to-shoulder for hours on end. They are chanting, shouting and singing, often without masks. Meanwhile, police officers are spraying them with cough-inducing tear gas, herding them into tight corners and loading the hundreds they arrest into buses, vans and holding cells.

The question now is whether this apparent recipe for COVID-19 disaster will spark a resurgence right when the United States seemed to be getting its epidemic under control.
Experts and epidemiologists say that we won’t know the answer for weeks. After infection, symptoms can take up to 14 days to present; testing positive or requiring hospitalization can take even longer. Today’s data is a window into the past.
Yet today’s data, it turns out, is worrisome enough.

While the country has shifted its attention from the pathogen to the protests, and while COVID-19 infections have continued to decline in some of America’s hardest-hit cities, cases have been climbing elsewhere — especially in the South and the West, and most of all in states that moved to reopen early.

More than a month has passed since the first wave of reopenings — enough time to start to gauge the impact of looser restrictions, increased interaction and more relaxed attitudes toward social distancing.

The fact that infections already appear to be increasing in places that have taken these relatively tentative steps back toward normalcy suggests that the coronavirus may start to spread even more rapidly and widely as a result of the tinderbox-like conditions at today’s mass protests.

Last Wednesday this column singled out South Carolina as an example of one of the 17 or so states where coronavirus is on the rise. It’s worth checking back in to see how the situation has evolved since then.

At the time, the Palmetto State had just posted the country’s biggest increase in new COVID-19 cases: 42.4 percent, according to the Reuters coronavirus database, which measures and compares the total number of new cases each week.

For the week ending Sunday, May 31, South Carolina saw an additional 37.9 percent jump in new cases — the fourth-highest in the nation and the state’s highest weekly total since the pandemic began.

And while South Carolina has conducted more testing in recent weeks, testing alone does not account for the uptick in COVID-19 infections there. In fact, the state conducted more tests per day between May 12 and May 19 than it did between May 27 and June 2 — 150 more, on average — yet it found 663 more new cases during the latter week than the former.

Meanwhile, the percentage of positive COVID-19 tests in South Carolina has more than doubled over the last two weeks, rising from about 3 percent to 7 percent, according to the state’s Department of Health and Environmental Control. Hospitalizations have increased as well, remaining above 400 for three straight days. And the state’s Rt — an epidemiological statistic that represents transmissibility, or the number of people a sick person infects at a particular point in an epidemic — is now estimated to be 1.08. An Rt below 1.0 indicates that each person infects, on average, less than one other person; an Rt above 1.0 indicates that an outbreak is growing.

A rally on Wednesday at Cesar Chavez Park in Laveen, Ariz. (Ross D. Franklin/AP)

South Carolina is not alone in this. Last week Arizona experienced a bigger increase in COVID-19 infections (49.8 percent) than any other state, according to Reuters. On Monday, the state recorded more than 1,000 COVID-19 hospitalizations for the first time. The next day, health authorities there reported 1,127 new cases, the highest daily number since the outbreak began.

“We are seeing some indicators that cases in Maricopa County are starting to rise beyond the increase from additional testing,” public health officials in the state’s hardest-hit region said Tuesday. “We will watch to see if this represents a trend or an anomaly.”

In Virginia, cases were up 42.8 percent week-over-week. In Alabama they were up 39.9 percent. In Kentucky they were up 28.3 percent. In Utah they were up 21.8 percent. In Texas they were up 18.2 percent. States that also saw double-digit increases included Mississippi, Arkansas, Wisconsin and North Carolina — which was scheduled to host the Republican National Convention in August, until President Trump balked at Gov. Roy Cooper’s insistence on measures to prevent it from seeding a new coronavirus outbreak. Even Washington (up 9 percent) and California (up 28.9 percent) — two early-to-lockdown states that were among the first to bend the curve — saw weekly infections rise.
More up-to-the-minute data from Johns Hopkins — which averages new daily cases over the last five days — hints at additional states that may soon join this list,

including Tennessee, Alaska, Montana and Missouri, where shirtless, maskless, spring-break-style revelers were filmed packing into a pool at the Lake of the Ozarks over Memorial Day weekend.

Revelers celebrate Memorial Day weekend at Osage Beach of the Lake of the Ozarks in Missouri. (Lawler50/Twitter via Reuters)

Perhaps this is the inevitable cost of living with the coronavirus: the unavoidable, even acceptable trade-off for leaving home, for returning to work, for aspiring to some semblance of normalcy. For now, the increase in infections across the South and West is modest. It seems manageable. Rural South Carolina is not New York City. It never will be. Hospitals have not been overrun. Treatment has improved. Nearly all of these states have the ICU beds they need. Death rates — admittedly a lagging indicator — are still going down.

But if infections start to climb in as many as 20 states when people simply start to return to normal, then what will happen after they gather in conditions that could be far more conducive to the spread of COVID-19?

We’ll know more in a few weeks.

Why Georgia’s reopening hasn’t led to a surge in coronavirus cases (so far)

VOX

Georgia’s experience could teach us a lot about Covid-19 and its spread.

By German Lopez@germanrlopezgerman.lopez@vox.com  Jun 4, 2020, 3:00pm EDT

Georgia was the first state to start reopening its economy after shutting down due to the coronavirus pandemic. When the shelter-in-place order expired on April 30, a lot of experts and much of the public worried about the worst: a sustained spike in Covid-19 cases that would overwhelm emergency rooms and lead to a surge in deaths.

Yet more than a month later, the worst hasn’t arrived

Even as the state has increased its testing capacity, boosting its ability to pick up new coronavirus cases, the total of daily new cases has remained relatively flat, despite some ups and downs. The state isn’t getting significantly better — dozens of Covid-19 deaths are still reported each day in Georgia — but it doesn’t seem to be getting much worse either.

It’s possible this data doesn’t tell the full story — maybe the state is underreporting or even manipulating the data to look better, which Georgia has already been caught doing at times.

But if that were the case, coronavirus would still show up in hospitals — by way of sick patients. Based on data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention taken from hospitals, that doesn’t seem to be happening either: With about 6 percent of inpatient beds occupied by Covid-19 patients, Georgia is, again, not doing great. But it’s not in the 10 worst states nationally, with several states that started to reopen later ahead.

I turned to experts with one question: Why isn’t Georgia, at least so far, experiencing the worst-case scenario that some expected?

There’s also the real possibility of data manipulation. Georgia has not proven itself to be above this. Until recently, it was including a type of test into its test count that experts say shouldn’t be included. It has also, for example, published a chart that switched dates in a way that, deliberately or not, made the state’s data look more favorable.

“It is very difficult to sort out where we are in Georgia,” Melanie Thompson, a principal investigator at the AIDS Research Consortium of Atlanta, told me. “We have some confusing issues with our data and the way they are reported by the state of Georgia on their website.”

Aside from that, experts said other factors could play a role. Maybe people are staying home even though the shelter-in-place order is over. Perhaps masks and other practices people have adopted as a result of the pandemic, like washing our hands more thoroughly, are playing a big role in driving down transmission even as people go out more. It’s possible the warmer weather could help — or there could be some other factor we don’t know about, even just luck, that could play a driving role.

1) It’s too early

It’s been a month since Georgia’s shelter-in-place order. In theory, that gives enough time for the virus to spread and incubate in people.

But life doesn’t always work like theory, and there are several reasons new coronavirus cases could take longer than two weeks — maybe even months — to start going up after a government ends its shelter-in-place order.

People have to go out more. They have to get infected, and, typically, symptoms have to show. They have to get tested for the virus. That sample then has to be processed before it’s reported as a completed test. That test has to be reported to Georgia’s government. The state then has to report the test results.

And even if cases do start to pick up at any particular point, a full outbreak can take time to get going. Daily reported cases in Georgia initially sat below 100 for much of March before quickly shooting up to the hundreds through late March and early April.

2) There might be some data manipulation

At the least, one can say that the Georgia Department of Public Health has had some major glitches with its coronavirus data reporting. At the worst, there could be some manipulation going on.

As Willoughby Mariano and J. Scott Trubey reported for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the state in May posted a chart that seemed to show that “new confirmed cases in the counties with the most infections had dropped every single day for the past two weeks.” Upon closer inspection, the chart was extremely misleading — displaying two Sundays in one week and putting data from May 2 before data for April 26. It seemed like an attempt to create a downward slope where there wasn’t one.

Georgia officials later apologized for the original version of the chart.

But this wasn’t the first or last time that Georgia got caught making a mess of its data. Mariano and Trubey noted in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, “This unforced error — at least the third in as many weeks — is confounding observers who have noted sloppiness in case counts, death counts and other measures that are fundamental to tracking a disease outbreak.”

More recently, Georgia was caught including the wrong kind of test in its test count.

According to experts, the main test for the daily counts should be diagnostic tests. Those gauge whether a person has the virus in their system and is, therefore, sick right at the moment of the test. Antibody tests check if someone ever developed antibodies to the virus to see if they had ever been sick in the past. Since diagnostic tests give a more recent gauge of the level of infection, they’re seen as much more reliable for evaluating the current state of the Covid-19 outbreak in a state.

3) People are staying home anyway

Before governments told people to stay home, many people were staying home anyway.

Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp didn’t issue a shelter-in-place order until April 2 — making the state among the last to shut down. But OpenTable data indicates that dine-in seating fell by more than 90 percent by the end of March compared to the previous year. A mix of individual behavioral changes, local and other state government actions, federal advisories, and other factors led people to stay home, shelter-in-place order or not.

Similarly, after Georgia’s shelter-in-place order expired, dining in has remained suppressed: As of June 4, it’s down more than 75 percent compared to the year before. That’s more people out than several weeks prior, when dining in was down by 80 to 90 percent, but it’s still a lot of empty restaurant seats.

Data from Google, which tracks people’s movement through their Google accounts, tells a similar story: Georgians are starting to trickle out more, but they’re still going out less than they were before. As of May 29, retail and recreation outings are down 16 percent compared to a baseline based on activity before the coronavirus. Transit stations are down 38 percent. Workplaces are down 36 percent, and grocery stores and pharmacies are down 4 percent. Meanwhile, residential places — meaning, where people stay home — are up 13 percent.

Only parks, which have a relatively low risk of transmission, are up 44 percent.

Again, this is slowly changing; people are trickling out more, bit by bit. The past week of protests over police brutality have led to a lot of people showing up in large gatherings, including in Atlanta. This speaks to why it’s too early to judge Georgia’s experience: Things could change as more people get out more.

4) Masks, good hygiene, and other behavioral changes may make a difference

Besides staying at home, other behavioral changes could be putting a dent in Covid-19 spread as well. Compared to just several months ago, Americans are more likely to wash their hands, avoid touching their faces, wear a mask, and keep at least 6 feet from each other. They’re also probably less likely to go out when they do feel sick.

We don’t know how much all of these things are helping, but experts suspect that these practices are reducing how much transmission happens when people do go out.

Consider masks. Just a few months ago, the idea that many Americans would go out with one was unthinkable. Today, polls show that the great majority of Americans are wearing masks sometimes if not always when they go out.

The research on masks isn’t great, but there’s some suggestive evidence: As long as people actually wear the masks and use them properly, studies indicate that they have some effect in reducing disease transmission overall. Some experts hypothesize — and preliminary research suggests — that masks have played a significant role in containing Covid-19 outbreaks in several Asian countries where their use is widespread, like South Korea and Japan.

Experts say they wouldn’t be surprised if masks play a bigger role than previously expected. As we’ve learned more about the coronavirus, we’ve gotten more and more evidence that it spreads through respiratory droplets. A mask quite literally stops those respiratory droplets.

nd that’s only one of the things people have changed. From no longer shaking hands to appreciating the power of soap more, we have done a lot to make sure this virus doesn’t spread as easily as it did when we first learned of it.

This applies not just to individuals but to institutions too — workplaces, restaurants, public services, and so on. “Companies are also increasingly taking responsibility for making sure their workforce stays safe,” MacDonald said.

George Floyd’s memorial gives way to a 10th night of protests. UPDATES

Hundreds gather for George Floyd memorial in Minneapolis

After 10 tumultuous days across the United States, hundreds of people gathered at a private memorial service Thursday afternoon in Minneapolis for George Floyd, whose death in police custody has sparked widespread protests against police violence and systemic racism.

The Rev. Al Sharpton, president of the civil rights organization National Action Network, took the stand at the service to call Floyd’s death emblematic of the oppression black Americans have faced since the nation’s founding.

“George Floyd’s story has been the story of black folks,” Sharpton said. “What happened to Floyd happens every day in this country — in education, in health services and in every area of American life. It’s time for us to stand up in George’s name and say, ’Get your knee off our necks.’ ”

 

Mourners of all races — African American, white, Latino, Asian and Native American — gathered to show support for Floyd’s family. The ceremony in Minneapolis kicks off a four-day “celebration of life” touching all of the places Floyd called home. Additional services are planned in North Carolina and Houston over the coming days.

A somber and defiant memorial for George Floyd in Minneapolis gave way to a 10th night of protests on Thursday as thousands of demonstrators again poured into the nation’s streets, crowding outside City Hall in Seattle and marching across the Brooklyn Bridge.

The tone at many protests on Thursday was largely mournful, after more than a week of crowds burning with grief and anger over the death of Mr. Floyd and other black Americans whose deaths have spurred calls for criminal justice reform.

 

Fueling the anguish on Thursday, an investigator in the death of Ahmaud Arbery, a black man who was fatally shot while being chased by three white neighbors in suburban Georgia, said that one of the suspects had used a racial slur after the shooting.

The developments came as officials from Louisville, Ky., to Seattle have been lifting nightly curfews, after protests there had become largely peaceful in recent days.

• New York: Crowds gathered Thursday outside Gracie Mansion, the Upper East Side mayoral residence, and snarled traffic on the Brooklyn Bridge, ahead of a nightly curfew that will remain in effect until June 8. [Follow our live coverage of the protests in New York.]
•  
• Nashville: The Black Lives Matter movement held a protest at the Bicentennial Mall. Demonstrators marched to the National Museum of African American Music, which is scheduled to open later this year. The procession made its way to the state capitol.
•  
• Boston: In Jamaica Plain, a silent vigil was held on Thursday afternoon to protest racial injustice. The city’s mayor, Marty Walsh, led a moment of silence for 8 minutes and 46 seconds, which was how long the Minneapolis police order charged in the killing of George Floyd kept his knee on Mr. Floyd’s neck.
•  
• Washington: Mayor Muriel Bowser said there would be no curfew on Thursday night, despite President Trump encouraging shows of force from the military and law enforcement to crack down on protesters,
•  
• Santa Monica, Calif.: In Los Angeles County, a nightly curfew that had been widely criticized was lifted on Thursday. The decision came after more than 3,000 people had been arrested in the nation’s second-largest city since the protests began last week. Most of the arrests were for curfew violations, with offenders issued citations and released. There were demonstrations in several places in the county, including Santa Monica.
•  
• Salt Lake City: A man who pointed a bow and arrow at demonstrators and brandished a knife during a protest last week was charged with two felony weapons counts and one count of aggravated assault, the county’s district attorney said. The man, Brandon McCormick, drove his car into the crowd and said, “Yes, I’m American. All lives matter,” a video of the altercation showed. The crowd beat him up and set his car ablaze.

• In his most extensive comments on the civil unrest gripping the country, Attorney General William P. Barr defended law enforcement’s aggressive, militaristic response to protests while acknowledging the “long-standing” concerns with police that were exposed by the death of Floyd.

• President Trump’s former chief of staff John F. Kelly defended former defense secretary Jim Mattis on Thursday over Mattis’s criticism of the president’s handling of nationwide protests. Kelly also dismissed Trump’s assertion that the president fired the retired general in 2018.
•  
• In a major break with Trump, Sen. Lisa Murkowski (Alaska) said Thursday that she is struggling with her support for her fellow Republican president and praised Mattis for a statement in which he sharply criticized Trump.

New US unemployment claims reached 1.9m last week despite rate of increase slowing

• ‘The figures are so high that it’s hard to grasp the reality’
•  
• New filings down for ninth consecutive week
•  
• Another 1.9 million Americans filed for unemployment benefits last week as the total number of claims passed 42 million since the coronavirus pandemic hit the US.The pace of layoffs has slowed dramatically from its peak of 6.6m at the start of April as states start to relax quarantine orders and last week was the ninth consecutive week of declines. But the scale of layoffs remains staggeringly high. In the worst week of the last recession “just” 665,000 people filed for unemployment.Jason Reed, professor of finance at the University of Notre Dame’s Mendoza College of Business, said the numbers may be coming down, but “this is unprecedented. The figures are so high that it’s hard to grasp the reality.”

Two Buffalo police officers are suspended after shoving a protester.

Two Buffalo police officers were suspended without pay on Thursday night after a video showed them shoving a 75-year-old protester, who was hospitalized with a head injury, the authorities said.

Mayor Byron Brown said the man was in serious but stable condition. A video showed the man motionless on the ground and bleeding from his right ear.

Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo of New York condemned the actions of the officers in a statement late Thursday night.

As coronavirus took jobs or workers fell ill, teen children have toiled full-time, becoming lifelines

As the pandemic took jobs or workers fell ill, teens have toiled full time, becoming lifelines

With parents in quarantine or unemployed, teens have had to forgo schooling to become family breadwinners, working jobs in grocery and big-box stores and keeping links in the nation’s food supply intact while eschewing almost everything about being a teenager.

Few police and a relaxed atmosphere at a Brooklyn vigil.

People assembling for a 7 p.m. Black Lives Matter vigil at McCarren Park in Brooklyn were almost indistinguishable from regular parkgoers, until an air horn and a round of applause on a plaza between two ball fields signaled the start — and suddenly hundreds of people who had been lounging on the grass, playing catch and listening to reggae from a sound system on a vintage school bus turned to face a small band of speakers and organizers.

“This seems more chill,” Emily Engle, 26, of Bushwick said before the start of the vigil as she sat on a park bench. She wanted a relaxed gathering, she said, after seeing the mayhem firsthand in SoHo on Sunday night. “We felt the rage,” Engle said. She didn’t condemn it, or its connection to what became a night of looting that led to a citywide curfew. “It’s an important time to take physical action because it’s easy to just post something online,” Engle said. But she added that it’s “a tough question” of how far to take it.

The McCarren vigil seemed unlikely to test limits. There was virtually no visible police presence, a fact one speaker, a woman, referenced in call-and-response opening remarks delivered through a bullhorn to a predominantly white crowd.

“We acknowledge our privilege to assemble without police violence,” she said. Demonstrators then knelt or sat for 30 minutes of silence, which fell over the park.

 

Manhattan judge denies Legal Aid request to free hundreds of George Floyd protesters held more than 24 hours

A Manhattan judge sided with police on Thursday by denying Legal Aid lawyers’ request for the immediate release of hundreds of prisoners held in custody for days after their arrest amid George Floyd protests.

The emergency lawsuit filed Tuesday against the NYPD called for the release of 108 New Yorkers “detained illegally” in violation of New York state’s 24-hour arrest-to-arraignment requirement.

As of the Thursday afternoon hearing, the number of people arrested in Manhattan who have been waiting to see a judge in cramped cells for more than 24 hours had climbed to 202, according to an NYPD lawyer.

After lengthy arguments from Legal Aid and city lawyers — who all appeared via video — Manhattan Supreme Court Judge James Burke denied the request, saying the police processing of the cases is “a crisis within a crisis."

Burke elaborated, saying he saw “a civil unrest crisis within the overarching Covid-19 crisis.”

"To that end, the entire police department has been deployed and the entire Manhattan DA’s office is, quote, all hands on deck and working to relieve the problems which we are currently addressing,” Burke said.

“It is simply a fact that virtual parts [remote hearings] slow down the pace of arraignments, including but not limited to technical issues," Burke said. He also noted that the volume of cases before the courts and police has increased.

This male is arrested on the corner of W. 14th Street and Fifth Avenue in Manhattan on Tuesday, June 2. (Sam Costanza/for New York Daily News)

Burke said in this case, an exception the 24-hour rule could be made because of the unusual circumstances.

[More New York] 14-year-old boy pleads guilty to robbery in connection to Tessa Majors’ murder, prosecutors drop murder charge »

 

Legal Aid Society lawyers said they’d monitor the situation and would appeal “if necessary.”

“We are also disheartened, however, because the overwhelming number of people held illegally are those accused of charges that should have resulted in their automatic release,” the society said in a statement.

"Motivations aside, the NYPD is fully responsible for the hundreds of New Yorkers who are currently languishing in cages, deprived of their due process rights and at an increased risk of contracting COVID-19.”

[More New York] MTA pulls newest subway cars after two trains come unhitched in tunnel while carrying passengers »

 

Social distancing is nearly impossible in holding cells, NYPD Assistant Deputy Commissioner Janine Gilbert said in court. “But I might add that these protesters are not social distancing when they’re out in the street,” she said.

There are many disorderly people — looters and rioters — who are fighting with the police, throwing bottles at the police, throwing Molotov cocktails at their vehicles, setting several ablaze, throwing flaming garbage and Molotov cocktails at vehicles with officers inside them.”

The NYPD said cops have provided masks to suspects not wearing them when they were arrested, but said there is no hand sanitizer dispensers in holding cells as prisoners were making weapons out of them.

Senior staff attorney for Legal Aid Marlen Suyapa Bodden lambasted the NYPD’s narrative, claiming the NYPD has ample resources to handle the caseload and is delaying the processing on purpose.

“They have 38,000 police officers, so they have plenty of police officers to do their policing work. The fact is, the police department is not doing its job,” she said.

"The NYPD is one of the wealthiest police departments in the world. They have access to the best technology and that’s why they can run around surveilling people, wiretapping people, doing all sorts of things.

“But now, when it comes to processing protesters, people who are asserting their First Amendment rights, oh, all of a sudden, because they’re protesting police brutality, now we’re back to the days of carrier pigeon.” 

VOX

Rubber bullets can seriously mess you up

The dangers of “nonlethal” police weapons — like rubber bullets, flash-bang grenades, and tear gas — explained.

Around the country, police and law enforcement agents are responding to the protests against police brutality with ... brutality.

Standard crowd-control weapons — including rubber bullets, chemical irritants, flash-bang grenades, and contraptions that combine aspects of all three — are being deployed against protesters and the journalists covering them to disperse crowds, sometimes seemingly unprovoked, and against peaceful protesters.

While these riot-control weapons are said to be “nonlethal” or “less lethal” by police and their manufacturers, they can still cause significant harm. In some cases, they can kill or cause lasting disability.

“These weapons are supposed to be used as a last resort, if there’s really an uncontrollable level of violence that threatens public safety,” Rohini Haar, an emergency room physician who has studied the impact of crowd-control weapons, tells Vox. “Without that level, that threshold, the use of weapons against unarmed civilians is pretty unjustified.”

Here are three of the more common crowd-control weapons being used on protesters. Let’s walk through them.

Rubber bullets are bullets. Bullets can kill.

Rubber bullets are not always made out of rubber. Technically, they are called “kinetic impact projectiles.” Some are made out of hardened foam or plastic. Others contain a metal core. Some are more like beanbags shot out of a rifle. Wooden bullets also are grouped into this category, and they are also dangerous and have been used against protesters in recent days.

Regardless of their composition, these projectiles are shot out of guns at speeds comparable to that of a typical bullet, and when they hit their target, they can maim, blind, or even kill. The rubber bullets are meant to be “nonlethal” or “less lethal” and used in crowd control. But research shows how brutal these bullets can be.

“It sounds like a Nerf gun or something, but it’s definitely much more dangerous than that,” Haar says. “From our research, we find that there’s really no safe way to use rubber bullets.” The group found 26 studies on the use of rubber bullets around the world, documenting a total of 1,984 injuries. Fifteen percent of the injuries resulted in permanent disability; 3 percent resulted in death. When the injuries were to the eyes, they overwhelmingly (84.2 percent) resulted in blindness.

These weapons can also cause internal bleeding in the abdominal region, concussions, injuries to the head and neck, and skin and soft-tissue damage. Furthermore, these weapons are unwieldy and hard to aim at specific targets.

“At short range, they come out of the gun as fast as a bullet,” Haar says. “And so they can break bones. They can fracture skulls. If they hit the face, they can cause permanent damage and disability. At long distances, they ricochet, they have unpredicted trajectories, they bounce, and they’re quite indiscriminate. So they can’t possibly target either an individual or a safe body part of an individual.”

Flash-bangs, a.k.a. stun grenades, can burn and damage hearing

Rubber bullets are hardly the only problematic “nonlethal” weapon used against protesters. Flash-bang grenades, or stun grenades, are another tool being deployed by police that explode with a bright light and incredibly loud sound to get people to scatter from an area. How loud? 160 to 180 decibels, according to Physicians for Human Rights.

These noise levels are “not safe for any period of time” according to the American Speech-Language Hearing Association. They can damage the eardrums and cause temporary deafness. The light can temporarily blind a person. Pieces of the grenade may fly off as shrapnel, injuring a person. These grenades can also burn people at close range. The North Carolina Supreme Court has even declared them a weapon of “mass death and destruction.”

Tear gas is illegal in warfare, yet it can be used by police

Finally, there’s tear gas, or chemical irritants that affect the eyes, nose, mouth, lungs, and skin (there are several types of chemicals that fall under the “tear gas” category). These chemicals are banned internationally in warfare, yet they are still legal for domestic police forces — including in the US — to use to disperse crowds.

They cause immediate irritation to the eyes and lungs, but their long-term effects are less well understood.

“It’s still questionable what kinds of respiratory damage tear gas does,” Anna Feigenbaum, a journalism professor and the author of a book on the history of tear gas, told Vox’s Jen Kirby.

“We don’t really know what its impacts are in terms of different kinds of asthma and lung disease,” she continued. “What we do know is that for people who have any kind of preconditions, it’s incredibly dangerous for them to be in spaces that are tear-gassed. For anyone who’s very young or very old, it has increased dangers.”

Putin’s Favorite Ex-Congressman Dana Rohrabacher Is Now Pitching a Cure for COVID

Former Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA) has booked his first lobbying client, a company promising a COVID-19 cure and led by a California businessman who’s been collaborating with Rudy Giuliani on a documentary on Joe Biden and Ukraine.

The company, Linear Therapies, is seeking to develop drugs that can both prevent people from getting the virus and cure them if they do. And Rohrbacher’s role is pretty simple: use his political connections to pitch Vice President Mike Pence’s office, which is playing a leading role on the White House coronavirus task force.

But while Linear is one of many companies turning to K Street for help to pitch its COVID remedies to federal legislators and regulators, the cast of characters behind it—from Giuliani to Rohrabacher to Tim Yale, the Orange County Republican who leads the company—makes it a notable entrant in an industry where political connections can mean a financial windfall.

Yale said Rohrabacher’s tenure on the House Science, Space and Technology Committee, as well as his particular “network of skills,” made him a natural advocate for the company.
Rohrabacher began plotting his move to K Street just weeks after he was defeated in 2018 at the hands of Democrat Harley Rouda. In February 2019, less than a month after leaving office, Rohrabacher’s new firm, R&B Strategies, signed its first client, a Kuwait-based company fighting what it says is that country’s political prosecution of one of its Russian-born executives.

During his thirty years in Congress, Rohrabacher had a quixotic reputation and ideological streak. He was ahead of the curve in his advocacy for medical cannabis, and though Linear was incorporated on 4/20 this year, Yale told PAY DIRT that it’s not doing any work in that space.

Rohrabacher also had a famously friendly relationship with Russian president Vladimir Putin, so friendly in fact that the FBI warned the congressman in 2012 that the Kremlin considered him a potential intelligence source. In 2017, he attempted to broker a deal whereby the U.S. would pardon Assange in exchange for evidence that Russia was not, in fact, behind the hacking of Democratic email accounts during the 2016 presidential election.

China, Iran hackers are targeting presidential campaigns, Google says

The company said the efforts so far to hack staffers’ Gmail accounts have failed.

By Matt Viser, Josh Dawsey and Ellen Nakashima ●  Read more »

y Robert Klemko ●  Read more »

 

•