It has been seven weeks since Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis, an ally of US president Donald Trump, took a coronavirus “victory lap” and pressed ahead with a swift reopening program in the state while berating the media for a “doom and gloom” approach to the pandemic.
The former Atlanta police officer charged with felony murder in the death of Rayshard Brooks was involved in another shooting five years ago that left a man with a punctured lung, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution has reported.
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Citing court documents, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported that the older case was investigated by Atlanta police and turned over to Fulton County District Attorney Paul Howard, who cleared the officers involved including Garrett Rolfe in February.
A judge on Friday denied bond for the 27-year-old Rolfe, who has been charged with felony murder and other crimes after fatally shooting Rayshard Brooks in the back outside of a Wendy’s restaurant in Atlanta after Brooks fired a stun gun in his direction. Rolfe is white; Brooks was Black.
The 2015 shooting was not mentioned in the original incident report or in documents made available to the court-appointed attorney for the man who had been shot, Jackie Harris, the newspaper reported.
Retired Fulton County Superior Court Judge Doris Downs presided over Harris’ 2016 trial. She told the newspaper that it was the first time she had ever come across a case of an incident report failing to mention that shots were fired.
Harris, 40 at the time, had tried to flee from police after he was spotted driving a stolen truck, records show. He eventually crashed into a gas meter and twice ran into a parked police car.
Six Trump campaign staffers in Tulsa test positive for coronavirus
Six members of the Trump campaign’s advance team in Tulsa ahead of Saturday’s rally have tested positive for coronavirus, NBC News is reporting.
Tim Murtaugh, communications director for the Trump campaign, said the six staffers were a small fraction of the hundreds of tested performed and “quarantine procedures were immediately implemented”.
“No Covid-positive staffers or anyone in immediate contact will be at today’s rally or near attendees or elected officials,” Murtaugh said in a statement. “As previously announced, all rally attendees are given temperature checks before going through security, at which point they are given wristbands, facemasks and hand sanitizer.”
A banner is pictured outside the venue for Donald Trump’s rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Photograph: Shannon Stapleton/Reuters
White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany has issued a statement on a federal judge’s decision to decline to block the publication of a tell-all book by John Bolton, Donald Trump’s third national security adviser.
The United States District Court for the District of Columbia today vindicated the Government’s claims against former National Security Adviser John Bolton, ruling that “Bolton likely jeopardized national security by disclosing classified information in violation of his nondisclosure agreement obligations.” The court rightly chastised Bolton for treating as “intolerable” a review process for his book that the court believed was “reasonable.” As the court explained, “Bolton has gambled with the national security of the United States,” hoping to secure profits by violating his nondisclosure agreements. But Bolton bet wrong, and the downside of his losing bet is that he “stands to lose his profits from the book deal, exposes himself to criminal liability, and imperils national security.”
The court denied the Government’s request for an injunction solely because Bolton’s wrongful conduct – carried out in secret – had already ensured that the book was so widely disseminated that the court believed it could no longer grant an effective remedy.
The Government intends to hold Bolton to the further requirements of his agreements and to ensure that he receives no profits from his shameful decision to place his desire for money and attention ahead of his obligations to protect national security.
The shooting happened at about 3am in the area near downtown known as the Chaz, short for “Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone”, police said in a statement on Twitter.
Sgt Lauren Truscott of Seattle police told the Seattle Times she did not know if police had taken anyone into custody and had no immediate details about how the shooting unfolded.
Investigators were reviewing public-source video and body-camera video for clues and authorities planned to disclose more information about the shooting later, Truscott said.
Oliver Laughland, the Guardian’s US southern bureau chief, is on the ground in Tulsa ahead of tonight’s Trump rally where a festival-like atmosphere of vendors, InfoWars correspondents, protesters and counter-protesters has prevailed.
Judy Nyegaard and Trisha Hope are here selling entire volumes of Donald Trump’s tweets printed in book form.
An arrest warrant for first-degree arson has been issued in Georgia for a woman fire officials suspect of burning down the Wendy’s restaurant where police shot and killed Rayshard Brooks just over a week ago.
In a tweet posted Saturday lunchtime, Atlanta Fire Rescue identified a woman named Natalie White, who is white, as the suspect, accompanied by two photographs of her in what appears to be a convenience store.
No age or hometown was given for her in the tweet, but media reports say she is 29.
Police were called to the Wendy’s on the night of 12 June, where Brooks was asleep in his car. Atlanta police officer Garrett Rolfe shot Brooks in the back and killed him after Brooks ran from him. The killing sparked renewed protests over police brutality following the earlier death of George Floyd in Minneapolis, and led to the resignation of Atlanta’s chief of police.
Rolfe was fired and charged with felony murder.
The restaurant was burned down 24 hours after Brooks’ death amid protests at the scene.
At a press conference earlier this week, police shared photographs of two white women they suspected of being involved in the arson.
Randy Travis, an investigative reporter for Fox5 Atlanta, tweeted on Saturday that Brooks – who was married with three children – was caught on police bodycam calling out for a Natalie White, whom he referred to as his girlfriend.
Pam Bondi, one of Trump’s lawyers who served as Florida’s attorney general from 2011 to 2019, downplayed concerns by public health officials about today’s rally in Tulsa.
“We hope that people are going to stay socially distanced, are going to wear a mask, (use) hand sanitzer and be respectful of each other,” Bondi told the Guardian’s Oliver Laughland on Saturday afternoon.
She added: “It’s not a legal requirement, it’s people’s own free choice. But we hope everyone will be peaceful and happy and have a great rally and social distance.”
NBC News reported on Friday that both Dr Anthony Fauci, America’s top infectious disease expert, and the White House coronavirus taskforce’s response coordinator, Dr Deborah Birx, had raised concerns about the wisdom of such a large event in the middle of a pandemic that remains undefeated.
The network reported the two experts had “both vocalized concerns internally” in the past week, but to no avail.
The 19,000-seat BOK Center in Tulsa will host the rally on Saturday night, marking Trump’s return to active campaigning in the 2020 election.
Protesters in San Francisco tore down and defaced statues of white men who had enslaved black and indigenous people, targeting statues of Father Junipero Serra, Francis Scott Key, and former US president Ulysses S Grant.
Videos posted on social media and from local news outlets on Friday night show a small crowd in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park cheering as people toppled the monuments with rope, covering them with blood-red paint, and, in at least one instance, dragged them through the grass.
Activists just toppled the Junipero Serra statue in Golden Gate Park here in San Francisco
Now they’re onto Francis Scott Key, slave owner and writer of the Star Spangled Banner pic.twitter.com/Ykv0hFMZvK
Junipero Serra was a Spanish priest who played a central role in the violent colonization of California. His path towards being canonized as a saint in the Catholic church has long been met with protest from Native Americans.
Serra’s own contemporaries, including French explorer Jean François de Galaup de la Pérouse, compared the Catholic missions the priest founded across California to slave plantations, where indigenous people were forced to work and harshly disciplined.
Crowd beat up on the statue after and tagged it, plus a nearby statue of Cervantes for good measure pic.twitter.com/F7foXW1ez6
“By law, all baptized Indians subjected themselves completely to the authority of the Franciscans; they could be whipped, shackled or imprisoned for disobedience, and hunted down if they fled the mission grounds,” PBS News wrote in its biography of Serra. “Indian recruits, who were often forced to convert nearly at gunpoint, could be expected to survive mission life for only about ten years.”
“Everywhere they put a mission the majority of Indians are gone,” Ron Andrade, executive director of the Los Angeles City/County Native American Indian Commission, told the Guardian in 2015. “Serra knew what they were doing: they were taking the land, taking the crops, he knew the soldiers were raping women, and he turned his head.”
Statue of Francis Scott Key, slave owner and author of the Star Spangled Banner, toppled in San Francisco. pic.twitter.com/uhoSNVmoEn
Francis Scott Key, the author of the Star-Spangled Banner, America’s national anthem, not only personally enslaved people, but also tried to silence the free speech of abolitionists. He used his position as the district attorney for Washington DC in the 1830s to launch high-profile cases attacking the abolitionist movement.
Protesters dragged the Key statue through the grass and were going to dump it in a nearby fountain, until they were told the fountain was a memorial to the AIDS epidemic and stopped, a witness tweeted.
Long snail trail left after group pulled statue towards a fountain to dump it in
Then in sweetest moment of the night, someone came up to the group and said “no no no, that’s the AIDS memorial fountain,” and everyone immediately stopped and brought the statue back to the grass pic.twitter.com/sefi4QkRMA
Grant, a general who fought on the side of the United States during the Civil War, was the last US president to have personally owned another human being. While Grant’s father was an abolitionist, he went on to marry a woman from a slaver family and personally direct the labor of the family’s enslaved workers.
As president, Grant also “launched an illegal war against the Plains Indians, and then lied about it,” as Smithsonian Magazine reported.
Nearby statue of Ulysses S. Grant is also toppled. He was a slave owner too, before the Civil War. That’s three for three this night. pic.twitter.com/Lyw6bXeOTO
Even as Grant was leading battles against the Confederate Army, his wife, Julia, was traveling around army camps with a woman named Jules who was still enslaved, a decision that prompted public condemnation. The Grant family did not free Jules after Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation; instead, Jules self-emancipated by running away, according to the White House Historical Association.
On Friday, Americans celebrated Juneteenth, a holiday celebrating the end of slavery. Juneteenth also marks the long period of waiting between when the United States government officially ended slavery, and when formerly enslaved people across the country actually learned they were free.
Donald Trump has entered the chat to claim victory in today’s court decision, which denied his administration’s attempt to block the forthcoming publication of a tell-all book by former national security advisor John Bolton.
“BIG COURT WIN against Bolton,” the US president tweeted. “Obviously, with the book already given out and leaked to many people and the media, nothing the highly respected Judge could have done about stopping it...BUT, strong & powerful statements & rulings on MONEY & on BREAKING CLASSIFICATION were made.”
He continued: “Bolton broke the law and has been called out and rebuked for so doing, with a really big price to pay. He likes dropping bombs on people, and killing them. Now he will have bombs dropped on him!”
BIG COURT WIN against Bolton. Obviously, with the book already given out and leaked to many people and the media, nothing the highly respected Judge could have done about stopping it...BUT, strong & powerful statements & rulings on MONEY & on BREAKING CLASSIFICATION were made....
....Bolton broke the law and has been called out and rebuked for so doing, with a really big price to pay. He likes dropping bombs on people, and killing them. Now he will have bombs dropped on him!
Although it strains credulity to frame Saturday’s ruling by US district judge Royce C Lamberth as anything but a defeat for the administration, Trump’s framing of the outcome leans heavily on the opinion of Lamberth, who Bolton said had failed to complete a national security review and “likely published classified materials”.
