• 

• Defying Police Unions, New York Lawmakers Ban Chokeholds

  Legislators, responding to protests over the death of George Floyd, are approving a package of bills aimed at police misconduct.

  

  Inspired by the protests sweeping the state and nation, New York legislative leaders on Monday began to approve an expansive package of bills targeting police misconduct, defying longstanding opposition from law enforcement groups, including police unions.
  The measures range from a ban on the use of chokeholds to the repeal of an obscure decades-old statute that has effectively hidden the disciplinary records of police officers from public view, making it virtually impossible for victims to know whether a particular officer has a history of abuse.

  The legislation marks one of the most substantial policy changes to result from the nearly two weeks of national unrest that followed George Floyd’s death in Minneapolis, including in New York City, where tens of thousands of protesters participated in mostly peaceful marches to demand more police accountability.

  The proposals signify a turning-point in Albany. Many of the policy changes being voted on this week languished for years because of opposition from influential police and corrections unions that contribute generously to the campaigns of elected officials — a tactic that had great effect in the State Senate, which has traditionally been under Republican control.

  
  
  But Democrats assumed control of the full Legislature last year for the first time in nearly a decade, clearing the way for lawmakers to pass some of the law enforcement bills on Monday. Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, a third-term Democrat, said on Monday he supported the bills and intended to sign them into law.
  

  The pressure on elected officials to enact police reforms has reverberated across the nation.

  Officials in Minneapolis moved to ban chokeholds and pledged to disband its police department. In Congress, Democrats plan to unveil expansive legislation this week to combat racial bias and excessive use of force by law enforcement. On Sunday, Mayor Bill de Blasio vowed for the first time to cut funding for the New York Police Department.

  The protests in New York, which in some cases included violent clashes between the police and demonstrators, sparked a groundswell of support that seemed unlikely just a few weeks ago, placing unavoidable pressure on state and city lawmakers who were already consumed with the deadly coronavirus outbreak.

  In one such clash, a police officer was recorded on video shoving a female protester to the ground and was heard calling her a “bitch.” The officer, who has been identified by elected officials as Vincent D’Andraia, is expected to be arrested on Tuesday and face prosecution by the Brooklyn district attorney’s office, according to three law enforcement officials.

  
  

  Officer D’Andraia, who has already been suspended without pay, is expected to face misdemeanor charges of assault, harassment and menacing over the May 29 incident, one of the officials said. The protester, Dounya Zayer, 20, has said she suffered a concussion and seizures as a result of the attack.

  The pending arrest lies in stark contrast to the aftermath of Eric Garner’s death on Staten Island after a police officer held him in a chokehold in 2014.

  The New York City Council soon introduced a bill to criminalize chokeholds by the police; after a Staten Island grand jury refused to approve criminal charges against the officers involved in Mr. Garner’s death, the measure gained momentum.

  But in December 2014, as anger against the police heightened, two police officers were assassinated in an attack that many officers thought had been inspired by anti-police rhetoric after Mr. Garner’s death. Mayor de Blasio, in danger of losing the support of the rank-and-file police and their unions, threatened to veto the legislation.

  The bill, which has languished since, now has enough support to overcome a mayoral veto, and will come to a vote on June 18. It would make the use of chokeholds by members of the New York Police Department a misdemeanor punishable by up to a year in jail and a $2,500 fine.The bill has been expanded this year because of the way in which Mr. Floyd was killed. It will prohibit any action that “restricts the flow of air or blood by compressing the windpipe, diaphragm, or the carotid arteries” in the effort to make an arrest.

  Another policing bill has been even more contentious: State lawmakers received thousands of emails in recent days urging them to repeal a 1970s-era law in the state’s civil code known as 50-a, which prohibits the release of “all personnel records used to evaluate performance” of police officers without permission from the officer or a judge.
  

  Under Mayor de Blasio, the New York Police Department fought in court to expand the interpretation of the law so that it shielded the results of disciplinary hearings against individual officers.

  The move to repeal the law drew forceful opposition from the state’s powerful police unions, which argued that the changes could lead to reputational harm if complaints of misconduct that have not been substantiated were allowed to be released.

  Union officials, including those from the Police Benevolent Association, which represents 40,000 active and retired New York City police officers, said lawmakers were voting with little deliberation and in the shadow of a pandemic and civil unrest.
  

  Andrea Stewart-Cousins, the Democratic majority leader in the Senate, said law enforcement has operated under “rules they set for themselves” for far too long. “If I’ve got 20 accusations of excessive force that are unsubstantiated, that’s got to be a red flag, one way or the other,” she said in an interview. “We can no longer afford complaint after complaint built up on your record and then nobody does anything about it. That’s over.”Mr. Cuomo, following years of remaining mostly noncommittal on the issue, threw his support behind repeal, acknowledging it would infuriate law enforcement unions.

  Lawmakers will vote later this week on 50-a and on a bill that would require state police officers to wear body cameras.

  Another bill entitled people to “a private right of action” if they believed someone called a police officer on them because of their race, gender, nationality or any other protected class. The bill was a direct response to incidents of black people being falsely reported to the police, including the encounter caught on video last month of a white woman falsely claiming in a 911 call that a black birder was threatening her.
• 
  
• 
  
• NY DAILY NEWS, HARRY SIEGEL
  

  Police accountability at last

  
  

  Before he was the guy posting Zen kōans and pictures of himself gazing wistfully at the horizon on Twitter, before he was the guy who Donald Trump fired and before he was the guy who put Trump in a position to fire him with his Inspector Clouseau investigation of Hillary’s emails, Jim Comey was The Man.

  Comey concluded that 2015 speech, full of anecdotes but without any hard numbers to back them up, by declaring that “We have to resist stereotypes. We have to look for information beyond anecdotes. And we must understand that we need each other.”

  And there things stood, with American policing and protest stuck in the same groove they’ve been in for 50 years or so, a forever war at home to go along with our overseas ones.

  As a plague has killed more New Yorkers in a matter of weeks than have been murdered here so far this century, it was police violence that brought people back out into the streets (and with the effective blessing of the mayor and the governor, despite their own public health emergency rules, with still unknown consequences). Police responded to people protesting the police by busting heads, in what looked locally and nationally more like cops at war than a war on cops.

  People are sticking it to The Man, and The Man has hit back with sticks, tear gas, rubber bullets and even helicopters to “dominate the battlespace,” all of that leading to more videos drawing more people out to the streets.

  The real Ferguson Effect is the end of 50-a, the despicable law that Mayor de Blasio essentially created after Eric Garner’s killing to make a state secret of police disciplinary records. It’s a statewide database in New Jersey, to keep bad cops from just bouncing from department to department. It’s cities banning chokeholds, tear gas and rubber bullets. And it’s real pressure on police departments — whose budgets go mostly to payroll and pensions — to account for what they provide in exchange for those spoils.

  This isn’t happening because the feds started collecting that information that Comey said they needed, or because of the Department of Justice’s halting attempts to reform a few local forces after particularly high-profile policing disasters.

  Instead, Washington, always reluctant to look too closely at local police practices, backed off almost entirely after Trump’s election. Until now, ignorance has been bliss from law enforcement’s perspective.

  This is happening because of the videos Comey was complaining about, on behalf of law enforcement, as elected “leaders” race to catch up with the national sentiment, as expressed in the streets and in opinion polls.

  It turns out people still respond to what their eyes show them, even when their president or their mayor or their police commissioner insist otherwise.
• The FBI director, appointed by Barack Obama, amplified talk about an alleged “War on Cops” or “Ferguson Effect,” with a “chill wind blowing through American law enforcement” as “policing has changed in today’s YouTube world,” leaving “officers reluctant to get out of their cars and do the work that controls violent crime” and no one to protect the rest of us from “bad people standing on the street with guns.”
• 
  
• Minneapolis pledges to dismantle its police department

• In Minnesota, a veto-proof majority Minneapolis City Council on Sunday backed a plan to disband the city’s police department, which has long flouted reform attempts, in favor of a community-based public safety system. [Guardian / Oliver Milman]
•  
• A new model could involve community-based policing alongside a much larger system of social services that would deal with issues before they escalate into crime.
  Police would be demilitarized, removing the armored vehicles, high-powered weapons and teargas used against protesters during the outcry over Floyd’s death, and receive better training on how to deescalate situations without violence. The use of chokeholds and other aggressive methods during arrests would be outlawed.
•  
• The move wouldn’t be unprecedented: In 2012, the city of Camden, New Jersey, dissolved its corruption-laden police department outright and started anew with a county police department. The plan worked — violent crime rates and use of force complaints both plummeted. [NPR / James Doubek]
•  
• Camden made a shift to community-based policing in 2013, dissolving the local police department and using police from the local county instead. Daily non-crisis interactions between police and the community went up, training on de-escalating situations was rolled out, and firm rules on using force as a very last resort – virtually unheard of in the US – were installed. Officers are also required to intervene if a colleague breaks these edicts.
  The result has been stark – complaints over excessive police force in Camden have dropped 95% since 2014. But expanding these reforms across the US’s 18,000 police forces is a major challenge due to widespread resistance to change from pro-police legislators and powerful police unions.
• 

Does policing and criminal justice in the US differ greatly from other countries?

The US is somewhat of an outlier in its policing and sentencing compared with other wealthy nations. Six times more people die in police custody in the US than Britain, on a per-capita basis, with American police fatally shooting around 1,000 people in 2018 compared with just 11 such deaths in Germany and eight in Australia.

US police conduct far more arrests than their counterparts in other rich nations, with black men three times more likely than white men to die in these interactions. The justice system also condemns more people to prison, too – the US has more than 2 million incarcerated people, which represents the world’s largest prison population.

Many Americans are moving on, but the coronavirus isn’t.

A Maine facility that produces tests for Abbott Labs to detect the novel coronavirus has become the site of a viral outbreak.
Tesla employees in California revealed that several of their colleagues tested positive for the coronavirus following chief executive Elon Musk’s reopening of the company’s main production facility last month in defiance of government public health orders.

Members of the D.C. National Guard who were deployed last week in response to the protests over George Floyd’s killing have tested positive, but a spokeswoman refuses to reveal how many troops have the virus. Two members of the Nebraska National Guard who were activated last week in Lincoln, Neb., also tested positive. Public health experts are watching anxiously to see if the wave of nationwide protests leads to a spike of infections, especially among the African American community that has already been disproportionately affected.

Hospitalizations for coronavirus cases have been on the rise in at least nine states since Memorial Day: Texas, North and South Carolina, California, Oregon, Arkansas, Mississippi, Utah and Arizona. More than a dozen states, plus Puerto Rico, are recording their highest averages of new cases since the pandemic began. And the total number of new cases also continues to increase worldwide. Experts say this is not just because testing has become more widespread.

As states continue to push ahead with reopening, these are flashing red lights that we are not out of the woods, the danger of a second wave remains high and bringing folks back to work – while necessary for economic recovery – is fraught. Americans may be moving on, but the virus is not.

The United States surpassed two million coronavirus cases on Wednesday, according to a New York Times database, which showed that the outbreak was continuing to spread, with cases rising in 21 states as governments eased restrictions and Americans tried to return to their routines.

Despite improvement in states that were initially hit hard, such as New York, new hot spots have emerged in others, including Arizona, where an increase in cases and hospitalizations has alarmed local officials.

Arizona has also been struggling with its bed capacity. On Friday, Banner Health, one of the largest health-care systems in the country, confirmed that ICUs in Arizona were nearing capacity. Roughly 50 percent of all those hospitalized are in Banner Health facilities. As of Monday, 76 percent of all ICU beds in Arizona were in use, according to data from the state health department.

Arkansas has reported 10,080 cases, and in 11 of the past 15 days the state’s seven-day average of new cases has increased. It has had an 88 percent increase in hospitalizations since Memorial Day. Arkansas had 173 hospitalizations reported on Tuesday, compared with 92 on May 25.
With the current spike, 12 counties in South Carolina have reached 75 percent of hospital capacity or greater, according to the state’s health department.

Some parts of the South are finally showing signs of progress. New case reports have started trending downward in Alabama and leveled off in Mississippi. But persistent growth continues in Arkansas,[above] North Carolina and Florida. And in South Carolina, there have been nearly 1,000 new cases in the last two days.

States continue to ease restrictions. “We have to stay smart because reopening resets the whole game,” Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D-N.Y.) said at his daily briefing on Tuesday, pointing to a spike of cases in states like Florida as they reopened. “When you reopen, when people start coming out, in some ways, you go right back to day one.”

Republicans have tentatively settled on moving the bulk of their August convention from Charlotte to Jacksonville, Fla., to ensure that they can have large-scale events amid the pandemic, North Carolina health officials declined to promise that they would allow the Republican National Committee to fill an arena in Charlotte for the Aug. 24-27 convention. “I don’t want to be sitting in a place that’s 50 percent empty,” Trump told North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper (D) in a recent phone conversation about the convention. “We can’t do social distancing.”

Meanwhile, top officials from the White House’s own coronavirus task force told governors during a conference call that they’re worried about a spike in infections because of the protests.

Elaine Eklund holds her son as she visits the grave of her mother, Yok Yen Lee, a Walmart employee who succumbed to the coronavirus. (Hannah Reyes Morales for The Washington Post)

• “Cops,” the long-running reality show from the Paramount Network that glorified police, was canceled in the face of protests. The show’s 33rd season was scheduled to premiere on June 15. (NYT)
• 
• The movie “Gone with the Wind” has been pulled from HBO Max. The network said that the 1939 cinematic classic, set partly on a plantation during and after the Civil War, is a “product of its time and depicts some of the ethnic and racial prejudices that have, unfortunately, been commonplace in American society.” (WSJ)

In Rawalpindi, Pakistan, last week. Pakistan, where coronavirus infections have surged, has recently relaxed restrictions.Credit...Farooq Naeem/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images[

Despite Virus Infections Surging, Countries End Lockdowns

At Nigambodh Ghat, the oldest cremation grounds in India’s capital, the bodies keep coming.

One ambulance arrives with five inside. Then another. Then another, in an endless display of death.

As the coronavirus pandemic surges in New Delhi, a public health care system that was already strained might be reaching its breaking point. People can’t get tested. They can’t find a hospital bed. The situation has become so grim that government officials have proposed commandeering some of New Delhi’s fanciest hotels to turn into hospitals.

But ready or not, much of India’s coronavirus lockdown has ended, as have those in other countries struggling to balance economic damage with coronavirus risk. In many places — India, Mexico, Russia, Iran and Pakistan, among others — leaders have come to feel they have no choice but to take the surge of cases on the chin and prioritize the economy.

Some of these leaders, especially those in the developing world, said they couldn’t sustain the punishing lockdowns without risking economic catastrophe, especially for their poorest citizens. So the thinking has shifted, from commanding people to stay indoors and avoid the virus and other people at all costs, to now openly accepting some illness and death to try to limit the damage to livelihoods and to individual lives.

India is now producing more new daily infections, around 10,000, than all but two countries, the United States and Brazil.

Pakistan may soon be overwhelmed, but it has relaxed restrictions as well. Outside the cities, almost no one is wearing a mask or making attempts to socially distance. In Lahore, the windy alleyways of the old city are crammed with people.

In the past week, Pakistan’s infections have nearly doubled but there’s no way to gauge how prevalent Covid-19 really is because testing has been so scarce. A doctors association has claimed that more than 2,500 health care workers have contracted the disease and 34 have died. At least five Pakistani lawmakers have also died from coronavirus.

Still, the country is opening up. Pakistan’s prime minister, Imran Khan, a millionaire former cricket star who campaigns as a populist, has called lockdowns elitist, implying that only rich people could afford to be sealed up in their homes.

In India, many people are anxious that however bad things are right now, they will soon get even worse. New Delhi and Mumbai, the two biggest cities, are overloaded with infections and experts said that the peak is still several weeks away.

As Vikas Khairwar stacked the firewood for his father’s pyre at Nigambodh Ghat, the revered cremation grounds in New Delhi, he spoke bitterly about his family’s experience with the public health care system.

After his father tested positive for coronavirus, Mr. Khairwar said that he begged for him to be put on a ventilator but the hospital didn’t have any available. His father died the next day. 

What’s different about this moment? Primarily the number of Americans supporting protests over racial injustice.

The numbers are staggering: Just two years ago, 40 percent of Americans called themselves supporters of the Black Lives Matter movement. Today, 74 percent of Americans support the protests after George Floyd’s killing, a new Washington Post-Schar School poll finds.
Even a majority of Republicans support the protests (they also support President Trump’s handling of protesters).

The Fix’s Eugene Scott asks why there has been such a big shift and came up with a few reasons:

• Smartphones. Scott writes that they have “allowed people around the world to witness virtually the violence that many black Americans have experienced at the hands of police for decades.”
•  
• Floyd’s death was the catalyst for this movement, but it came after a steady drumbeat of shocking killings of black people by police officers over the past few months: Ahmaud Arbery jogging in Georgia; Breonna Taylor at her home in Louisville; Sean Reed in Indianapolis after being pulled over and chased by police.
•  
• Finally, this is all coming as the coronavirus and its economic fallout affect communities of color more than the rest of America.

Federal Reserve predicts slow recovery with unemployment at 9.3 percent by end of 2020

The central bank plans to keep the benchmark U.S. interest rate near zero through at least 2022.

Federal Reserve leaders predict a slow recovery for the U.S. economy, with unemployment falling to 9.3 percent by the end of this year and to 6.5 percent by the end of 2021, after tens of millions of Americans lost their jobs in the stunning recession caused by the outbreak of the novel coronavirus.

Fed Chair Jerome H. Powell stressed Wednesday that more aid from Congress and the central bank is likely to be needed, especially since a substantial number of Americans may never get their jobs back.

Fox News and President Trump have been together for a long time, but like a lot of seemingly happy couples, they’re not immune to relationship turmoil.

The discontent has been brewing for a while, at least on Trump’s part. And he has made it clear he was ready to pick up the propaganda equivalent of Tinder and start scrolling for a new love.

Fox “is no longer the same . . . looking for a new outlet!” the president tweeted in mid-May, after host Neil Cavuto had the nerve to knock the president’s glorification of the potentially dangerous drug hydroxychloroquine as a coronavirus preventive. Days later he complained that “@FoxNews is doing nothing to help Republicans, and me, get reelected on November 3rd.”

That’s downright ungrateful given the network’s faithfulness in promoting the president’s agenda. A Pew survey found that of those whose main source of election news is Fox, 86 percent said they felt warmly toward Trump — a figure even higher than Republicans overall. 

Then, into this roiling discontent strolls an attractive newcomer: the San Diego-based cable outlet, One America News Network.

True, its audience is small. But Trump has touted it on social media, and its White House correspondent, Chanel Rion, [above] has been given special treatment at press briefings.

It’s no wonder given the reliably sycophantic softballs she pitches.

But this week, Trump signaled just how intrigued he is by OANN. He used his Twitter and Facebook accounts to magnify an evidence-free conspiracy theory floated in the outlet’s “news report” — a generous term under the circumstances.

The theory: That 75-year-old protester Martin Gugino, who was put in the hospital after being shoved to the ground by two Buffalo police officers last week, had been trying to “scan” and “blackout” their police equipment. (The officers have been charged with felony assault.)

Trump credited his new crush:

“Buffalo protester shoved by Police could be an ANTIFA provocateur. 75-year-old Martin Gugino was pushed away after appearing to scan police communications to blackout the equipment. @OANN I watched, he fell harder than was pushed. Was aiming scanner. Could be a set up?” the president tweeted.

Trump drew bipartisan criticism this week because the theory is so truly bonkers — and because he blasted it out on the same day as the funeral for George Floyd, whose death at the hands of Minneapolis police last month has sparked weeks of protest and invigorated a civil rights movement.

Although Gugino has used social media to bash the police, this portrayal strikes those who know him as pure fantasy.

“Oh, that’s ridiculous — they are just plain making things up,” Victoria Ross, who heads the Western New York Peace Center and who has known Gugino for years, told the Buffalo News.

The “reporter” on the OANN piece, Kristian Rouz, is a Russian national who also works for the Russian propaganda outfit Sputnik; and the cable outlet has said it based its report on a post in the Conservative Treehouse, a hoax-happy blog.

If Rouz’s voice sounded familiar, it may be because you managed to catch Rouz floating the notion that the coronavirus was a plot for “population control” by George Soros, Bill Gates, Anthony S. Fauci, Bill and Hillary Clinton, and China.

Say what you will about how low Fox News’s reporting and commentary can sink — and I have — but it seldom stoops this low. The network does make an effort, most of the time, to adhere to some sort of standards, citing where reporting came from and even trying to draw a line between reporting and opinion. (Granted, it was famously forced to retract its damaging and deeply flawed adherence to a conspiracy theory about Seth Rich, a former Democratic National Committee employee, absurdly attempting to tie his 2016 death to Hillary Clinton.)

OANN, which launched on July 4, 2013, has a tiny viewership compared with the major networks, and would be utterly obscure if not for Trump’s megaphone.

After making something of a mark in the early days of the 2016 presidential campaign by committing to broadcasting Trump’s campaign speeches live and in full, OANN has stayed the course. It even unapologetically described itself last year as “one of his greatest supporters.”

But even within the ranks of this reliable Trump cheerleading squad, the latest incident has caused embarrassment.

“I’m seeing how much response this is all getting on Twitter right now, and it’s freaking awful,” one OANN staffer said, according to the Washington Examiner. “I’m worried the next news director I send my reel out to will only see ‘OAN’ on my résumé and throw it in the trash.”

I’d call that a perfectly legitimate worry.

But for Trump — whose recent efforts to tie MSNBC host Joe Scarborough to a staffer’s accidental death suggest his increasing desperation to change the subject — the outlet’s lack of standards is far from disqualifying.

It’s a compelling part of the attraction.

A 20,000-ton oil spill in the Arctic

Late last month, a fuel tank at a power plant in the north of Russia spilled some 20,000 tons of diesel into a nearby river. The spill is severe enough that Russian President Vladimir Putin last week declared a state of emergency in the region. [Washington Post / Isabelle Khurshudyan] Now that fuel is flowing toward the Arctic Ocean, despite efforts to contain it. The diesel spill has already reached a nearby Arctic lake and is in danger of spilling into a nature reverse and, from there, the ocean. [NYT / Andrew E. Kramer] The spill is considered the worst in recent memory and has elicited comparisons to the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska. Consequences have been swift: The director of the power plant responsible for the spill has been arrested, and the Russian government has opened a criminal case. [BBC] Thawing permafrost in the region may have been a partial cause of the spill, which according to local officials could take as much as a decade to clean up. However, environmental organizations and Putin have both stressed that mismanagement on the part of Nornickel, the company responsible for the spill, is “the main factor.” [Guardian / Andrew Roth]

Wave of New Polling Suggests an Erosion of Trump’s Support

NY TIMES

The coronavirus pandemic, a severe economic downturn and the widespread demonstrations in the aftermath of the death of George Floyd in police custody have posed severe challenges for Trump. His approval rating has fallen to 13.2 percentage points among registered or likely voters, down from 6.7 points on April 15, according to FiveThirtyEight estimates. And now a wave of new polls shows Joe Biden with a significant national lead, placing him in a stronger position to oust an incumbent president than any challenger since Bill Clinton in the summer of 1992.

He leads the president by around 10 percentage points in an average of recent live-interview telephone surveys of registered voters. It’s a four-point improvement over the six-point lead he held in a similar series of polls in late March and early April. Since then, Bernie Sanders has left the Democratic race, the severity of the coronavirus pandemic has become fully evident, and the president’s standing has gradually eroded.

The erosion has been fairly broad, spanning virtually all demographic groups. But in a longer-term context, the president’s weakness is most stark in one respect: his deficit among women. He trails Mr. Biden by 25 points among them, far worse than his 14-point deficit four years ago. He still leads among men by six points in the most recent polls, about the same margin as he led by in the final polls of registered voters in 2016.

Over the shorter term, the decline in the president’s standing has been particularly pronounced among white voters without a college degree, helping to explain why the Trump campaign has felt compelled to air advertisements in Ohio and Iowa, two mostly white working-class battleground states where Mr. Trump won by nearly 10 points four years ago.

In the most recent polls, white voters without a college degree back the president by 21 points, down from 31 points in March and April and down from the 29-point lead Mr. Trump held in the final polls of registered voters in 2016.

Mr. Trump didn’t just lose support to the undecided column; Mr. Biden ticked up to an average of 37 percent among white voters without a degree. The figure would be enough to assure Mr. Biden the presidency, given his considerable strength among white college graduates. 

Mr. Biden has also made some progress toward redressing his weakness among younger voters. Voters ages 18 to 34 now back Mr. Biden by a 22-point margin, up six points from the spring and now somewhat ahead of Hillary Clinton’s lead in the final polls of 2016. Young voters will probably never be a strength for Mr. Biden — a septuagenarian who promised a return to normal, rather than fundamental change during the Democratic primary — but for now his margin is not so small as to constitute a grave threat to his prospects.

BUT five months remain until the presidential election. There is plenty of time for the race to swing in Mr. Trump’s favor, just as it did in the final stretch of the 2016 campaign. Indeed, the 2016 race was characterized by a predictable, mean-reverting oscillation between nearly double-digit leads for Mrs. Clinton — as in August and October — and a tighter race in which Mr. Trump trailed in national polls but remained highly competitive — as in July, September and November.

Mr. Biden’s lead in the polls today is not vastly different from the leads Mrs. Clinton claimed at her peaks after the “Access Hollywood” tape was revealed or when Mr. Trump became embroiled in a feud with a Muslim Gold Star military family.

If the race does revert toward the president, as it did on so many occasions four years ago, he could quickly find himself back within striking distance of squeaking out a narrow win. His relative advantage in the Electoral College compared with the nation as a whole, or possibly among likely voters compared with registered voters, means that he doesn’t need to gain anywhere near 10 points to get back within striking distance of re-election. In the final national polls of registered voters in 2016, Mr. Trump trailed by around an average of five points. It was close enough.

If the election were held today, the Electoral College would pose no serious obstacle to Mr. Biden, thanks to his strength compared with Mrs. Clinton among white voters and particularly those without a college degree. He would win even if the polls were exactly as wrong as they were four years ago.

Trump's campaign announced he will restart his “Keep America Great” rallies with a rally in Tulsa Oklahoma 0n June 19.

Campaign manager Brad Parscale previously said the rallies would probably resume in late summer, but Trump has been increasingly determined to get back out on the road as he slips in the polls. (Josh Dawsey and Felicia Sonmez)

Trump campaign officials are unlikely to put into place any social distancing measures for rally attendees, or require them to wear masks, people familiar with the decision-making process said, adding that it would be unnecessary because the state is so far along in its reopening.

Mr. Trump has also made it clear he doesn’t want to speak in front of gatherings that look empty because of social distancing, or to look out on a sea of covered faces as he tries to project a positive message about the country returning to normal life and the economy roaring back, even as his top health advisers have warned the pandemic is far from over. “Oh my goodness,” Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the federal government’s top infectious disease expert, said Tuesday. “Where is it going to end? We’re still at the beginning of it.”

Campaign officials said they were considering some modest attempts at reducing risk by providing hand sanitizer on site, but said no final decisions had been made about how to safely bring together a large group of people.

As of Wednesday afternoon, Oklahoma had recorded 7,480 cases of the coronavirus and 355 deaths, according to its health department.

Mr. Trump will return to the campaign trail on Juneteenth, an annual holiday commemorating the end of slavery in the United States and celebrated as African-Americans’ Independence Day. After weeks of protests over the killing of George Floyd in police custody, protests and marches are already planned this year for the holiday in many states.

In 1921, Tulsa was the site of one of the country’s bloodiest outbreaks of racial violence, when white mobs attacked black citizens and businesses with guns and explosives dropped from airplanes.

For years now, Mr. Trump’s rallies have not shocked, awed and driven news cycles the way they did during the 2016 election, when he was an unknown political entity

.

And during the 2018 midterm election cycle, aides and advisers unsuccessfully pinned their hopes on rallies to improve the president’s mood over his lackluster polls and the special counsel’s investigation. But they did little to stabilize his frame of mind, or keep him less active on Twitter.

Why Mayor De Blasio Is Hemorrhaging Support

In the week or so since Mayor Bill de Blasio first defended the NYPD's response to protests against police brutality — and instituted the city's first curfew since 1943 — more than 1,000 current and former staff members have signed a letter saying the mayor is failing at his job. A senior aide resigned, as Politico put it, over "de Blasio’s near-unconditional defense of the NYPD amid incidents of violence against protesters." And yesterday, hundreds of employees from the mayor's office gathered at City Hill to express opposition to their boss.

"We came to this administration because we saw someone who was listening," Catherine Almonte, who has served in various roles in the administration, told Gothamist. "We saw someone who shared our values and we showed up to do the work. And we are not happy right now. This is not what we signed up for."

One of the boldest public rebukes yet has come from Public Advocate Jumaane Williams, who accused the mayor last week of "hiding behind your black wife and children."
"I don’t know if they give out F-minuses," Williams added, "but he deserves one, at least for this entire year, in how he responded to the pandemic and how he’s responding to the protests. We’re probably better off with no mayor at all, to be honest."

George Arzt, who was Mayor Ed Koch’s press secretary and has spent years working in city government, told Gothamist that it's "unprecedented" in city history "to have employees protest the policies of the current mayor en masse."

"He’s the first person from the progressive wing of the [Democratic] party to have become mayor, and so within that wing of the party, there was great hope," Arzt said. "And the results haven’t been there."

There are other reasons why liberals rag on the mayor — he takes an SUV to the gym, he hasn't turned the city into a cyclist's paradise, his affordable housing expansion hasn't gone far enough. But some see the root of this current backlash not just in his shortcomings as a progressive, but in his futile attempt to appease the police — and conservative police unions — who never liked him in the first place.

To recap: De Blasio originally ran on ending Bloomberg's stop-and-frisk policing strategy (his son Dante highlighted the point in that famous ad from 2013). Then, after a Staten Island grand jury failed to indict an NYPD officer for killing Eric Garner in 2014, de Blasio said he "couldn’t help but immediately think what it would mean to me to lose Dante." At a subsequent funeral for two officers who were gunned down in their squad car, police officers turned their backs on him.

"The mayor was clearly so deeply affected by the NYPD backlash in 2014," said City Councilmember Ritchie Torres, "that he has been governing in a state of fear of his own police department ever since. . . . He went from a reformer of the police to an enabler of the police and the culture of silence and indifference to black and brown lives."

New York City began to reopen. 

“Monday marked the first, limited phase of a four-part reopening plan. Wholesale sellers and manufacturers were allowed to resume business, and the construction industry made its noisy return. Many businesses remained closed. In Lower Manhattan, where City Hall and most city agencies are based, lunch spots were still closed or boarded up. Vehicle traffic was light and there was a fraction of the foot traffic that would normally clog sidewalks.”

NYC Transit officials on Tuesday said that subways and buses saw an additional 213,548 riders on Monday, the first day of the city's reopening, compared to the same day last week.

It was the first time that subway ridership reached 800,000 since before the coronavirus crisis began. Manhattan, which had seen the largest drop in ridership during the pandemic, saw a 20 percent increase on Monday.

Overall, bus ridership has fared better, reaching 40 percent of pre-pandemic levels. Ridership on subways on Monday was 15 percent of its level one year ago.

The fraction of New York City residents tested for coronavirus and found to be positive is now 1 percent, the lowest it has been since the coronavirus crisis began,

Although the infection rate is based on the number of city residents getting tested, the city has significantly ramped up testing to nearly 34,000 people tested in one one day. Governor Andrew Cuomo on Monday said that going forward, the city would test a minimum of 35,000 people a day to ensure that health officials receive a reliable snapshot of the daily infection rate.
On Monday, the state recorded 40 new deaths from the prior day.


A new Washington Post-Schar School poll finds Americans’ move toward acknowledging racism as a top problem in the United States has been remarkably fast. The issue in the context of police brutality isn’t new, but the iteration of this debate made national news in 2014 in Ferguson, Mo. At that time, less than half the country, 43 percent, saw police killings of black men as a sign of a broader problem, The Post reports. Today 69 percent say as much.

Perhaps the only other issue to move public opinion so quickly in recent years has been same-sex marriage.

Mnuchin arrives for a Presidential Recognition Ceremony in the Rose Garden[/caption]

Following messy start, enormous Paycheck Protection Program shows signs of buttressing economy

New jobs report suggests PPP helped prevent broader economic collapse, but its overall effectiveness remains unknown

The government’s giant corporate loan forgiveness program initially ran dry, prompting outrage. The new problem: Now not enough businesses are taking advantage.

The economy remains extremely weak, with a high unemployment rate and a surge in Americans seeking assistance. Many economists say conditions will remain shaky for at least another year.

But they also say things would be even worse without the giant loan forgiveness program, which Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) shepherded through Congress and then helped defend during chaotic weeks of implementation.

Getting to this point strained the government, the banking industry and small businesses, with many missteps and pivots along the way as they tried to build a program from scratch. And the Trump administration vacillated wildly between trying to rush money out the door and then trying to tighten rules, enraging lawmakers such as Rubio, confusing borrowers and nearly overwhelming banks, even those with small-business expertise.

Two months later, the PPP has directed more than $530 billion to 4.5 million companies, and economists, business leaders, White House officials and lawmakers from both parties think it helped stabilize the economy. Because the government has released no detailed information about how many jobs the program has saved, it’s still unclear whether it achieved its primary goal of apportioning the lion’s share of the money to workers.

People are sawing through and climbing over Trump’s border wall. Now contractors are being asked for ideas to make it less vulnerable.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection has asked contractors for help making President Trump’s border wall more difficult to climb over and cut through, an acknowledgment that the design currently being installed along hundreds of miles of the U.S.-Mexico boundary remains vulnerable.

The notice of the request for information that CBP posted gives federal contractors until June 12 to suggest new anti-breaching and anti-climbing technology and tools, while also inviting proposals for “private party construction” that would allow investors and activists to acquire land, build a barrier on it and sell the whole thing to the government.

Trump continues to campaign for reelection on a promise to complete nearly 500 miles of new barrier along the border with Mexico by the end of 2020, but administration officials have scaled back that goal in recent weeks. The president has ceased promoting the $15 billion barrier as “impenetrable” in the months since The Washington Post reported that smuggling crews have been cutting through new sections of the structure using inexpensive power tools.

“We have an adaptive adversary; regardless of materials, nothing is impenetrable if given unlimited time and tools,” the agency said. “Walls provide the U.S. Border Patrol (USBP) the ability to slow and stop potential crossings. That means building wall will deter some people from attempting to cross, while slowing the efforts of those who still try.”

The public notice is the first indication that CBP officials do not think the steel bollard design they selected from prototypes in 2017 is sufficiently formidable to achieve that goal.

Smuggling crews have managed to saw through the steel bollards using commercially available demolition tools such as reciprocating saws with inexpensive metal-cutting blades. Others have fashioned long, improvised ladders out of cheap rebar. More-athletic fence jumpers have been seen using rope ladders to climb up the barrier, sliding down the other side by gripping a bollard like a firehouse pole.

Trump is expected to attend a ceremony in Yuma, Ariz., next week to mark the completion of the barrier’s 200th mile, according to officials who were not authorized to describe the plans.

Houston Bids Goodbye to George Floyd, Whose Killing Galvanized a Movement

The funeral served as both a national reckoning and a moment of personal mourning. The Rev. Al Sharpton demanded more action against police brutality.

George Floyd died at the hands of police officers in Minneapolis. A thousand miles to the south, in the Texas city where he was raised, two rows of police officers saluted as his coffin went past.

Hours before Mr. Floyd’s funeral began at a southwest Houston church, uniformed officers stood between the hearse and the front doors. As relatives and friends pushed the gold coffin with blue trimming into the church, the officers raised their hands in a show of respect.

Mourners arriving for a memorial of George Floyd at the Fountain of Praise church in Houston on Monday.Credit...Michael Starghill Jr. for The New York Times

Mr. Floyd’s funeral and the public viewing that preceded it a day earlier have been a counterpoint to the fury that his death touched off in cities across America. Mr. Floyd, who grew up in a tough public housing complex in Houston’s predominantly black Third Ward, was considered a native son, and the tone adopted by protesters, activists, elected officials and police officers has been one of honoring a grieving Houston family.

Inside the Fountain of Praise church, Mr. Floyd, 46, the emblem of an international movement whose name has been chanted by thousands of people since his death, was remembered as the son, brother, uncle and father that he was in life.

The funeral aired live on broadcast and cable television, and as it began at noon, the New York Stock Exchange went silent for eight minutes, 46 seconds — the length of time a Minneapolis police officer held Mr. Floyd’s neck under his knee before he died. It was the longest moment of silence on the stock exchange floor in its 228-year history.On Monday, a public viewing in Houston drew nearly 6,400 people, including Gov. Greg Abbott, nurses fresh from work dressed in scrubs, new fathers holding babies and Mr. Floyd’s high school classmates.

In a video message, former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, offered his condolences to the family, saying he understood the weight of grieving in public. Mr. Biden, who has often connected to people through grief after suffering deep losses in his own life, spent time with the Floyd family in private on Monday. “No child should have to ask the question that too many black children have had to ask for generations: ‘Why? Why is Daddy gone?’”

“This was not just a tragedy. It was a crime,” said the Rev. Al Sharpton, the civil rights leader who delivered the eulogy.

No one mentioned President Trump, but Representative Al Green, Democrat of Texas, said that the next person in the country’s highest office needed to tackle racial inequality. And Brooklyn Williams, a young niece of Mr. Floyd’s, called for an end to hate crimes.

“Someone said, ‘Make America great again,’ but when has America ever been great?” she said. “America, it is time for a change!”

One by one, Mr. Sharpton named the relatives of other black men and women whose killings have invoked concerns over racial injustice and asked them to stand. Other mourners stood, too, until everyone in the sanctuary was up and clapping and the funeral of one man briefly became a funeral for all the other lives lost.

“The mother of Trayvon Martin, will you stand,” he said. “The mother of Eric Garner, will you stand. The sister of Botham Jean, will you stand. The family of Pamela Turner, here in Houston, will you stand. The father of Michael Brown from Ferguson, Mo., will you stand. The father of Ahmaud Arbery, will you stand.

“All of these families came to stand with this family because they know better than anyone else the pain they will suffer from the loss that they have gone through,” Mr. Sharpton said.

Protests spread over police shootings. Police promised reforms. Every year, they still shoot and kill nearly 1,000 people.

WASHINGTON POST

Protests against the use of deadly force by police swept across the country in 2015.

Demonstrators marched in Chicago, turned chaotic in Baltimore, and occupied the area outside a Minneapolis police station for weeks. Protesters repeatedly took to the streets of Ferguson, Mo., where a white police officer had killed a black teenager the previous year and fueled anew a national debate about the use of force and how police treat minorities.

That year, The Washington Post began tallying how many people were shot and killed by police. By the end of 2015, officers had fatally shot nearly 1,000 people, twice as many as ever documented in one year by the federal government.

With the issue flaring in city after city, some officials vowed to reform how police use force.

The next year, however, police nationwide again shot and killed nearly 1,000 people. Then they fatally shot about the same number in 2017 — and have done so for every year after that, according to The Post’s ongoing count. Since 2015, police have shot and killed 5,400 people.

This toll has proved impervious to waves of protests, such as those now flooding American streets in the wake of George Floyd’s death at the hands of police in Minneapolis. The number killed has remained steady despite fluctuating crime rates, changeovers in big-city police leadership and a nationwide push for criminal justice reform.

 Even amid the coronavirus pandemic and orders that kept millions at home for weeks, police shot and killed 463 people through the first week of June — 49 more than the same period in 2019. In May, police shot and killed 110 people, the most in any one month since The Post began tracking such incidents.

Since The Post began tracking the shootings, black people have been shot and killed by police at disproportionate rates — both in terms of overall shootings and the shootings of unarmed Americans. The number of black and unarmed people fatally shot by police has declined since 2015, but whether armed or not, black people are still shot and killed at a disproportionately higher rate than white people.

[/caption][caption id="" align="alignnone" width="916"]

“The reduction in fatal shootings of unarmed suspects is much more of an important factor than the overall number,” said Geoffrey P. Alpert, a criminology professor at the University of South Carolina and co-author of “Evaluating Police Uses of Force.” “That shows real progress. . . . That probably is a better barometer of what’s going on with police in the black community than the total number of fatal shootings.”

Fatal police shootings are relatively rare events in a country where nearly 40,000 people die from firearms each year. Hundreds of thousands of police officers work in America, most of whom will never fire their guns on duty.

When fatal shootings occur, police officials often contend that officers, facing mortal threats, had to make split-second decisions to protect themselves and others. Police patrol a country with almost as many guns as people, and they never know if the next traffic stop, 911 call, or search warrant will be the one in which someone comes out shooting.

White people, who account for 60 percent of the American population, made up 45 percent of those shot and killed by police. Black people make up 13 percent of the population but account for 23 percent of those shot and killed by police. Hispanic people, who account for about 18 percent of the population, make up 16 percent of the people killed. For 9 percent of people, The Post was unable to determine their race.

Since 2005, 110 nonfederal law enforcement officers have been charged with murder or manslaughter for shooting someone on duty, Stinson’s records show. From those ranks, 42 officers were convicted of a crime — often a lesser offense — while 50 were not, their cases usually ending with acquittals or dismissals. More than a dozen cases are pending, according to Stinson.Policing has gotten safer in recent decades, with line-of-duty deaths dropping, records show. But police patrol a country with nearly one gun for every person.

Recent studies from professors at Harvard and Carnegie Mellon universities have found that areas with higher rates of gun ownership have higher rates of police shootings.

Another consistent statistic from The Post’s examination is the number of people killed by police while in mental distress. About 1 in 4 had some mental-health issues.

Advocates of police reform said part of the problem is the lack of a full, nationwide accounting of police use of force.

Government officials pledged years ago to start collecting more data on the use of force, but that effort has not produced any better awareness.

After The Post demonstrated a dramatic undercount by the FBI of fatal police shootings, the bureau’s then-director, James B. Comey, called the lack of federal data “embarrassing and ridiculous.”

An FBI policy board recommended that the agency track fatal and nonfatal shootings. The new effort was soon widened to catalogue all use-of-force incidents that result in serious bodily harm or death.

That data collection only began in earnest in January 2019. The program also suffers from some of the same shortfalls as the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting Program — chiefly that participation is voluntary. So far, only 40 percent of the 18,000 police departments nationwide submit data on police use-of-force incidents, according to the FBI.

Mask Compliance in NYC Subways is Imperfect, Mail-in Voting is Safe, Recession is Official. UPDATES.

UPDATES:

Demonstrations continued across Brooklyn this weekend as thousands of protesters again took to the streets in support of the Black Lives Matter movement, and to decry the recent police killings of black people across the country.  And after nearly three months, New York City is ready to make a comeback from COVID-19.

Protesters hope this is a moment of reckoning for American policing. Experts say not so fast.

WASHINGTON POST

Glimmers of hope have emerged for Americans demanding action on police violence and systemic racism in the aftermath of the death of George Floyd, the black man who gasped for air beneath the knee of a white Minneapolis police officer last month.

All four officers involved have been fired and charged in his death, a far more rapid show of accountability than has followed similar killings of unarmed black people. Massive, diverse crowds have filled streets nationwide, sometimes with politicians and law enforcement officials marching and kneeling alongside. Legislation banning chokeholds and other forms of force have been passed by local governments. And on Monday, congressional Democrats plan to roll out a sweeping package of police reforms on Capitol Hill.

But there are signs that Floyd’s killing might not be the watershed moment that civil rights advocates are hoping for, some experts say.

 The extraordinary facts of the May 25 incident — the gradual loss of consciousness of a handcuffed man who cried out for his deceased mother with his final breaths — distinguishes it from the more common and more ambiguous fatal police encounters that lead to debate over whether use of force was justified. And the politics of police reform that have squashed previous efforts still loom: powerful unions, legal immunity for police and intractable implicit biases.

“We have 400 years of history of policing that tell me things tend not to change,” said Lorenzo Boyd, director of the Center for Advanced Policing at the University of New Haven. “It’s a breaking point right now, just like Trayvon Martin was a breaking point, just like Michael Brown was a breaking point. But the question is: Where do we go from here?”

It’s a familiar question for Gwen Carr, who watched her son take his final breaths on video as a New York police officer held him in a chokehold and he pleaded, “I can’t breathe.”  Gwen Carr, the mother of Eric Garner, speaks on May 28 to a group of people gathered outside the Cup Foods where George Floyd died while in police custody in Minneapolis, Minn. Carr was joined by Rev. Al Sharpton (L) and spoke about the need to hold police officers accountable for their actions. (Stephen Maturen/Getty Images)

Thousands of Americans filled the streets for Eric Garner in 2014 — mostly black men and women — with bull horns and protest signs in dozens of cities.

But their pleas for comprehensive police reforms took hold in only a smattering of the country’s more than 18,000 police departments. Dozens of agencies adopted training on de-escalating tense encounters. Sixteen states passed stricter requirements for use of deadly force.

Not a single piece of federal legislation passed on Capitol Hill.

The effectiveness of policy changes is blunted by police union contracts that protect officers from discipline and firing for wayward behavior.

“There are so many terms and conditions in the collective bargaining agreements that insulate police from accountability and transparency,” said Jody Armour, a law professor at the University of Southern California. “Can we know who the bad police are? Are there public records? A lot of times, that is squelched in collective bargaining.”

Even changes to training can have little effect. A growing number of police departments are providing cadets with de-escalation and anti-bias training, but once they are assigned to a field training officer — a veteran on the force — the training can fall by the wayside, according to police training experts.

One of the rookie officers who helped hold Floyd down questioned whether they should roll the gasping man over, but then-officer Derek Chauvin dismissed the suggestion and insisted on “staying put” with his knee on Floyd’s neck, according to court records.

“Seasoned officers will push away from what they learned in the academy and go to what works for them in the street,” Boyd said. “And officers will often say, ‘We have to police people differently because force is all they understand.’”

“When you give police discretion to enforce any law, it seems to get disproportionately enforced against black folk. Whether it’s curfew, social distancing,” said Armour, noting that Floyd was accused of using a counterfeit $20 bill.

“Would you have put your knee on a white guy’s neck like that? Would you have a little more recognition of humanity, and when he’s screaming out, ‘I can’t breathe,’ would that have raised more concern?” he said. “That’s the deeper problem.”

The vast majority of such cases are not caught on video and therefore often go unnoticed, Boyd said. For example, Breonna Taylor, the 26-year-old emergency room technician who was shot at least eight times inside her home by Louisville police in March, is often left out of the discussion of systemic injustice — in part because no one was there to record Taylor getting shot by officers serving a drug warrant, said Andra Gillespie, director of the James Weldon Johnson Institute at Emory University. All three remain on administrative leave, but no charges have been filed, according to the Courier Journal.

Even killings captured on video rarely lead to prosecution of police officers. Sterling had a handgun in his pocket when he was tackled by police outside a Baton Rouge convenience store, and police said he was reaching for it when officers shot him six times. The DOJ and Louisiana attorney general decided not to file criminal charges against the officers involved. Attorneys for the officer who put Garner, 43, in a chokehold argued that he probably died because he was obese and had resisted arrest. Daniel Pantaleo lost his job after a disciplinary hearing four years later, but the Justice Department declined to bring criminal charges.

Charles H. Ramsey, a former chief in the District and Philadelphia and co-chair of President Barack Obama’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing, said perhaps the biggest obstacle to nationwide change is the unwieldy way in which police departments are organized. With every city, town, state and county fielding its own force, he said, it’s hard to standardize training and policies.

“Regionalizing them would be a solid first step,” Ramsey said. “But then you get into the politics. Every county and every mayor; they want their own police force, they want their own chief.”

Meanwhile, the FBI still hasn’t followed through on a pledge to aggressively track the nation’s fatal police shootings.

“It’s been five years since they promised to fix that database,” Ramsey said. “Come on. That’s enough time.”

As New Yorkers Return To Subways, Mask Compliance Remains An Open Question

SCOTT LYNCH / GOTHAMIST

As riders trickle back to the New York City subway system as Phase One of reopening gets underway and regular service resumes, Governor Andrew Cuomo and the Metropolitan Transit Authority have said that face coverings are required on public transit. But whether New Yorkers will comply, especially heading into a hot summer, remains an open question.

At Atlantic Terminal, there were MTA staffers distributing free masks and free hand sanitizer bottled by state prison inmates.
While many were seen wearing masks across a span of two hours, dozens of riders were seen entering the station without a mask. Several wore the masks incorrectly, either failing to cover their noses or mouths.

Jose Martinez

✔@JMartinezNYC

Scorecard from a subway car on a Bronx-bound No. 2 train with 13 riders:

Nope: 2
Try Again: 3
That’s the one: 7
No mask: 0

52

12:57 PM - Jun 8, 2020

Twitter Ads info and privacy

Interim President of New York City Transit Sarah Feinberg reported seeing, “nearly 100% compliance on wearing masks,” on the L, F and Q lines.

MTA Chairman Pat Foye, speaking on WCBS said the agency conducted a survey last week and found out of 50,000 customers, 92 percent wore masks.

“That's an incredibly high level," he said. "We want to get it even higher. It is a requirement of state law. Compliance by our employees I think it's fair to say is 100 percent.”

Aside from relying on mask-wearing and social distancing measures, the MTA has been spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on extensive cleaning during the day and during overnight shutdowns (the exact figure has yet to be released).

“The tiles, the floor, and even when you go in the train system itself you can smell the complete difference,” Chad Brown, 23, an electrician from East Flatbush, said.

Brown, who was returning to work in Midtown for the first time since the pandemic began, added that he was happy with the cleanliness and the number of people wearing masks, although during the early morning there were relatively few riders.
“I really wonder how we’re going to work it out when we’re on the train and it’s rush hour and there’s a lot of people. That’s my biggest concern,” Brown said.

Platforms at several major hubs were empty Monday morning, allowing most riders to have plenty of room, with only a couple of people standing. At Union Square and Fulton, there were social distancing decals, mostly of a sneaker footprint with an MTA tread, but also others variations, including paws, horseshoes, heels, and even prosthetic limbs.

STEPHEN NESSEN / GOTHAMIST

With about 15 percent of normal ridership levels expected Monday, the MTA expects to see a nearly $8 billion deficit this year. Still, a recent report from the Tristate Transportation Campaign finds that 92 percent of those surveyed plan to return to transit.

Overnight subway service is still suspended from 1 a.m. to 5 a.m., and Governor Cuomo suggested Monday that he doesn’t see an end to that.

To tout the return of the city’s “mojo” the Governor himself broke his more than three year streak of not riding the subway, by taking a symbolic ride on the 7 train from Queens to his office in Midtown.

Minuscule number of potentially fraudulent ballots in states with universal mail voting undercuts Trump claims about election risks

WASHINGTON POST

A Washington Post analysis of data collected by three vote-by-mail states with help from the nonprofit Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC) found that officials identified just 372 possible cases of double voting or voting on behalf of deceased people out of about 14.6 million votes cast by mail in the 2016 and 2018 general elections, or 0.0025 percent.

The figure reflects cases referred to law enforcement agencies in five elections held in Colorado, Oregon and Washington, where all voters proactively receive ballots in the mail for every election.

The minuscule rate of potentially fraudulent ballots in those states adds support to assertions by election officials nationwide that with the right safeguards, mail voting is a secure method for conducting elections this year amid the threat of the novel coronavirus — undercutting the president’s claims.

Until now, the polarized debate about ballot fraud has largely featured individual anecdotes from around the country of attempts to vote illegally. The voting figures from the three states examined by The Post provide a robust data set to measure the prevalence of possible fraud.

Current and former election officials in the three states said allegations that mail voting fosters widespread cheating are not only defied by the data, but also do not acknowledge the sophisticated and tightly controlled ways that voting operates in their jurisdictions, which have layers of security designed specifically to root out fraud and build confidence in the system.

Election officials and security experts said certain measures are important for preventing fraud in mail voting, such as accurate voter rolls and a method of authenticating ballots such as signature matching. Such safeguards have been put in place over time in the five states that currently run universal mail elections: Colorado, Hawaii, Oregon, Utah and Washington.

As states move quickly to expand mail voting in response to health concerns, not all have implemented the full range of security measures.

 Critics of mail ballots say they provide a bigger opening for fraud than in-person voting because state voter registration rolls contain errors and could allow ballots to be sent to ineligible voters or wrong addresses. And vote-buying schemes may be harder to detect in by-mail elections, as would voter coercion and intimidation, they note.

Current and former election officials in vote-by-mail states said their systems are designed specifically to mitigate these risks, starting with a regular stream of mail contact with voters to establish that the address listed for them on the rolls is accurate. The ERIC system, as well as regular checks against DMV, death and other records, flag voter registration entries that may need updating. Federal law also requires states to conduct basic list maintenance.

Once voting begins, the linchpin of the process is a ballot return envelope, which typically requires the voter’s signature and includes a unique bar code linked to that voter’s record. When the ballot is returned and the bar code is scanned, no other ballot can be cast by that voter for that election.

“I hear chatter a lot about Washington state mailing millions of ballots into a black hole, into the wind,” said Julie Anderson, auditor of Pierce County, Wash., which includes Tacoma. She said many people don’t understand how the envelope design prevents double voting, comparing would-be cheaters to people who purchase a single movie ticket online and print dozens of copies with the goal of admitting others free.

“When the attendant scans your bar code, that’s it,” she said. “All the tickets you gave your friends — they’re out of luck.”[ A voter places a ballot in a secure box as Providence City Clerk Shawn Selleck observes on June 2 in Providence, R.I. (Steven Senne/AP)[

The other mainstay of election security in vote-by-mail states is the signature verification process. Election workers are trained by law enforcement agencies to detect when a signature on the ballot envelope does not match signatures in a voter’s file. Discrepancies trigger a review that could end with a voter proving his or her identity — or being reported to law enforcement for possible ballot tampering.

U.S. economy officially went into a recession in February, ending record 128-month expansion

“The time that it takes for the economy to return to its previous peak level of activity or its previous trend path may be quite extended,” the committee’s report said.

Now, as states gradually ease pandemic restrictions, the question will be whether “reopening” fuels an economic turnaround anytime soon, or whether the downturn will extend into next year as people struggle to go back to work and the nation contends with a possible second wave of infections.

That the economy had plunged into a recession was not a surprise. As economist Ernie Tedeschi put it: “It’s now official (and utterly unsurprising).”

The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office expects the economic consequences of the novel coronavirus to exceed $8 trillion. It also expects unemployment to hover above 10 percent into 2021, meaning the nation could still have joblessness that is worse than the Great Recession for months.

But experts say the turnaround will hinge on controlling the spread of the novel coronavirus, which has killed more than 109,000 people in the United States.

The NBER report had no effect on Wall Street, which is in the midst of a stunning three-month rally. On Monday, the Standard & Poor’s 500 index moved into positive territory for the year, the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite set a record high and the Dow Jones industrial average extended its winning streak to six days.

  New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has lifted almost all coronavirus restrictions in New Zealand.HAGEN HOPKINS/POOL PHOTO VIA AP[

New Zealand eradicates Covid-19

New Zealand announced that it's eradicated Covid-19, and most pandemic-related restrictions will now be lifted. [New Zealand Herald / Amelia Wade] There have been no new Covid-19 cases in two weeks, and the last treated patient was released from the hospital 12 days ago. The country had a total of 1,154 confirmed cases and 22 deaths from the virus. [U.S. News / Michael Baker and Nick Wilson] As a result, the country it's bringing its alert system down to Level 1 –– the lowest of the four ranks. Most restrictions will now be lifted: social distancing is no longer required and people can freely gather in public. Borders, however, will remain closed, and those arriving from abroad will still have to quarantine for 14 days. [BBC] People will also have to use a government contact tracing app to scan a QR code whenever they enter a business. This will make it easier for officials to track and isolate the virus before a major outbreak occurs. [NYT / Damien Cave] New Zealand has been applauded for its swift and drastic response to Covid-19 –– which at the time was criticized for being too strict. The country went into lockdown on March 23 when there were no deaths and just 102 confirmed cases. [CNN / Ben Westcott] New Zealand now joins a small group of countries that have announced their eradication of the virus –– Montenegro, Fiji and the Faroe Islands –– and the only to do so with more than 1,000 cases. Meanwhile, Taiwan, Iceland, Cambodia, and Trinidad and Tobago say they have less than 10 actives cases. [The Guardian / Charlotte Graham-McLay]

In massive day of rallies, more than 10,000 people pour into nation’s capital to protest racism, police brutality. 

Demonstrations across the United States, which began as spontaneous eruptions of outrage after the death of George Floyd at the hands of the Minneapolis police less than two weeks ago, appeared to have cohered by Saturday into a nationwide movement protesting systemic racism. 

Thousands marched in big cities like New York and Seattle, and tighter groups in small towns like Vidor, Texas; Havre, Mont.; and Marion, Ohio, denouncing a broken law enforcement system marked by racial injustice.

The outpouring of activism came at a time when the coronavirus pandemic has underscored many deep inequities in society, and has also removed competition for the public’s attention by disrupting work, school and entertainment.

One of the largest protests was in the nation’s capital, where new fences, concrete barriers and a force of unidentifiable guards have shrouded the White House, projecting a new symbolism of militarized defensiveness rather than openness and democracy.

 

A multiethnic, multigenerational crowd of thousands of protesters converged there, at the mouth of Lafayette Square. Demonstrators on foot and bicycle headed to the freshly painted Black Lives Matter mural on the main thoroughfare, passing cars with “BLM” and “Stop Killing Us” written on their rear windows. Later, they also passed people sipping cocktails at a few upscale restaurants open for outdoor dining.

At times, it felt as if the entire city had emptied into downtown Washington as the numbers swelled to high for the two weeks. Lines of protesters — often but not always masked against the virus — snaked their way through side streets, while others converged in nearby parks.

By early evening, 16th Street had the feel of a street fair. Ice cream trucks idled on the side of the road, parents rolled tired children in strollers, people played guitars and harmonicas. Music was playing out of the back of cars. Some people danced.

Protesters also gathered in the once predominantly black neighborhoods of U Street and Columbia Heights, north of the White House. In Meridian Hill Park, which locals call Malcolm X Park, a large crowd gathered to chant, “No justice, no peace.”

Just down the street, the intersection of 14th and U Streets was filled with protesters who had gathered to listen to D.J.s and musicians play go-go music, a type of funk music recently designated the official music of the district. The chanting crowd paused to listen to a woman sing “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” which black Americans have embraced for more than a century as an anthem of liberation.

Protesters fill the streets of the boroughs of New York 

Several thousand demonstrators marched from Brooklyn’s Grand Army Plaza at noon Saturday, walking through the borough and eventually crossing over the Brooklyn Bridge to New York city hall in Manhattan. The event was just one of dozens of protests planned throughout the day in the city, with tens of thousands of people out in the streets.

The first protests kicked off around 11 a.m., with demonstrators meeting at dozens of locations across the city’s five boroughs and continuing to do so sporadically later in the day. Multiple waves of rallies and marches are expected at such places as Grand Army Plaza in Brooklyn and Washington Square Park in Manhattan.

In a city hit hard by the coronavirus, parents could be seen carrying children on their shoulders, and even blocks away from the marches, the sidewalks were filled with people walking to and from protests, carrying signs at their sides. Police officers have been escorting participants of the marches, which have so far been free of clashes.

A largely peaceful night, as marches continue well after curfew.

Protest marches against racism and police brutality continued in New York City well past 11 p.m. on Saturday, defying an 8 p.m. curfew but allowed to continue peacefully by the police, who had moved aggressively to stop protests after curfew on recent nights.

The biggest march of the night, which began at Barclays Center as curfew fell, with well over 1,000 people, made a jubilant 8-mile loop through the center of Brooklyn.

“We’re in our neighborhood!” Courtney Taylor, an organizer, yelled into a megaphone as the procession turned onto Church Avenue in Flatbush, a heavily African-American and Caribbean area. “This whole neighborhood, they got us!” The Brooklyn protest took one last knee and observed a minute of silence back at Barclays Center before dispersing with a loud cheer shortly after 11:30 p.m.

 

There were no reports of major confrontations or mass arrests as of 1 a.m.

After more than a week of images flooding social media of the police cornering, roughly arresting and sometimes beating protesters, one of few arrests the police reported Saturday was of an angry motorist who drove onto the sidewalk to get around protesters on a street in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. The driver struck a man on the ankle, the police said, and mangled a protester’s bike. He was arrested.