It’s hard to believe the media training Rochelle Walensky, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, allegedly sought out from a Democratic consultant is paying off. The director, who started her position last January, has been criticized time and time again for ever-changing CDC guidance issued in light of the coronavirus pandemic and more poignantly how she communicates said guidance.
Ali Badr, an Uber driver and Egyptian immigrant, launched a federal lawsuit last month against a California police department, a police dog handler, and six other individual police officers after video showed a police dog being sent to bite into the driver’s arm as he asked repeatedly what he did. The answer to that question is more of a technicality—a late rental payment—than a crime, according to a lawsuit obtained by the San Francisco Chronicle.
Cynthia Harris, a Black homeowner in the Petworth neighborhood of Washington, D.C., did something that a lot of heirs in her situation simply do not do: She held on to her inheritance. Harris, who was left a home her parents paid about $23,000 for in 1969, told NPR that she thought about selling it 15 years ago and even reached out to a realtor.
The personal Twitter account for the COVID-19 misinformation expert Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene herself was permanently suspended after “repeated violations,” Twitter announced on Sunday. How’s that for bringing in the new year right? “We permanently suspended the account you referenced (@mtgreenee) for repeated violations of our COVID-19 misinformation policy,” Twitter said in a statement NBC News obtained.
Having lived in California for about half a decade, I’m embarrassed to write that I only learned of Paul Revere Williams when I came across a social media post about him circulating Twitter and Facebook decades after his death. The post, confirmed by KABC, reads: “Paul Williams was a Black architect who learned to draw upside down so he could sit across from clients, as many of them in the 1920’s wouldn’t sit next to him.
When people talk about their experiences, listen. Truly listen. Take in what they’re saying and not just how what they’re saying affects you. It’s a simple means of education, but the good news is, it’s completely free—no tuition, no registration. Someone else does all the work, and you get all the benefits.
Those benefits with regards to a virtual panel we hosted with our Daily Kos staff in December simply cannot be quantified.
A 14-year-old aspiring engineer who came to America from Chile after fearing for her safety was killed two days before Christmas in a tragic police shooting. Valentina Orellana-Peralta wasn’t a suspect when officers were called to a Burlington department store to investigate an assault with a deadly weapon in progress around 11:45 AM Thursday in the North Hollywood neighborhood of Los Angeles, police said in a news release.
A call from millions of petitioners got an initial answer on Monday in their effort to have reduced a 110-year sentence imposed on a Texas truck driver. In short, that answer will wait a few weeks. During a web-based hearing, Judge Bruce Jones scheduled an in-person resentencing hearing for Jan. 13 to determine the fate of Rogel Lazaro Aguilera-Mederos, who lived in Texas but was driving in Colorado when his semi-truck triggered a deadly crash.
The Black experience is so diverse culturally, socioeconomically, and ethnically that it’s difficult to summarize with one descriptive phrase. It is no one thing, but media culture can depict it as such. So it’s refreshing and much appreciated when films centering Black people show Blackness as something more than what it means to be Black to white people.
The now-retired Ohio sheriff’s deputy/pastor who shot and killed 23-year-old Casey Goodson Jr. on Dec. 4, 2020 after earlier bragging to a congregation about being able to “hunt people” is finally facing charges, according to ABC News. Jason Meade shot Goodson in the back five times, netting him charges including two counts of murder and one count of reckless homicide Thursday.
It’s a matter of when—and not if—a Tucson police officer who fatally shot a man in a motorized wheelchair will be fired, police officials have said. Ryan Remington, an officer with the Arizona police department for four years, was working a security detail Monday night at a Walmart when he fired nine times at Richard Lee Richards, killing the 61-year-old man suspected of shoplifting and brandishing a knife, according to the Associated Press.
Following the not guilty verdict in the Kyle Rittenhouse case, video has began to circulate online of several white supremacists celebrating the acquittal. And well, that’s sadly expected following a presidency that championed such hate. But if the Rittenhouse case—which meant little justice for two protesters killed and one injured when the then 17-year-old fired at protesters on Aug.
Nine days after at least eight people were killed during rapper Travis Scott’s set at the Astroworld festival at NRG Park, journalists are asking all the right questions.
We won! OK, so I’m not from Pittsburgh and have never even been to the city, but when I learned the news, albeit expected, that voters had elected State Rep. Ed Gainey as the first Black mayor to lead the city, it felt deeply personal.
As a child, Gainey lived in a Pittsburgh housing project. After his political ascension to the state Senate, his sister, a mother of three, was murdered in her own city.
If she were running in any other state, I might be tempted to take Republican Rachel Hamm seriously, but she’s running for secretary of state in California. Her goal is to align with other Republicans to fill the top elected positions in states throughout the country so they can avenge their beloved former President Donald Trump by flipping his 2020 defeat into a win. That’s her goal, and like many a Republican before her, Hamm is using God to achieve it.
A Black mother is suing a Florida jail after she says staff members ignored her calls for help and left her to deliver her child in a cell. The baby girl, Ava Daniels, later died at a local hospital, News 4 Jax reported. Erica Thompson said during a press conference that she was six months pregnant, having contractions, and planning to go to the hospital when deputies arrested her on Aug.
Two mothers with children at the same Chicago Public Schools site have died of COVID-19 after 11 of 17 of the classrooms at Jensen Elementary School were in quarantine due to reported cases of the virus, according to the Chicago Teachers Union.
“Both mothers had children sent home from quarantined Jensen classrooms,” the union wrote on its website Tuesday. “One mother complained bitterly on social media that she was never contacted by a contact tracer.
Former Cobb County District Attorney Joyette Holmes was one of several prosecutors tasked with seeking justice in the death of Ahmaud Arbery after months-long delays in charging his alleged killers.
It took five years for the Texas State Commission on Judicial Conduct to issue a public warning to a judge who ordered a defendant, on three occasions, to be shocked with a stun cuff during his criminal trial. The order to place the cuff came after the defendant’s “disruptive conduct” led bailiffs and the judge to believe he was a security threat.
In yet another example of police callousness and insensitivity, a Florida deputy has been fired after not only telling an inmate he looks like George Floyd, but asking him to say, “I can’t breathe,” words the Black father repeatedly told Minneapolis police before he was murdered. Deputy First Class Rodney Payne’s termination was unearthed on Wednesday when an internal affairs report was released to the Fort Myers News-Press.
As hospital workers desperately try to save lives with limited resources and dwindling available beds during the COVID-19 pandemic, public health officials Idaho activated a “crisis standards of care” for northern hospitals last week that would in rare cases allow hospitals to save beds and ventilators “for those who are most likely to survive,” The Associated Press reported of the guidelines dated last year.
I’m no real estate expert. I’ve never even owned property, but I am now effectively under contract for a property in metro Atlanta—no small feat if you’re familiar with this market, or really any market. The coronavirus pandemic has had a bewildering effect on real estate, which the White House confirmed in a report dated Sept. 1.
I’ve never owned land. Homeownership wasn’t really something that was talked about beyond my immediate household, but it has always been a dream of mine and a dream of my mother’s. For years before my mom bought her first home, we were renters, staying in two- and three-bedroom apartments, sometimes just us and sometimes with my aunt and cousins. That said, after years of renting herself, my grandmother was able to buy a home.
President Joe Biden declared a state of emergency for Mississippi and ordered federal assistance for the state the day before Hurricane Ida evolved into a Category 4 storm early Sunday, sending sustained winds of 150 mph, according to CNN. “We have issued an Extreme Wind Warning for Hurricane #Ida,” the National Weather Service New Orleans said in a tweet. “If you are still in LA or MS, you need to shelter in place. Winds will be between 115-150 mph.
Civil rights attorney Ben Crump called for surveillance video to be released after a white security guard shot and killed 48-year-old Alvin Motley, Jr., a Black man, after complaining that his music was too loud. Crump spoke at Motley’s funeral on Thursday at Mt. Olive Cathedral Christian Methodist Episcopal Church in Memphis. Motley was killed at a Memphis Kroger gas station on August 7.
“Don’t say no mo’.
After falsely accusing Black Lives Matter protesters of a crime, a former New York ice cream shop owner has been ordered to pay each of the protesters $500, amounting to $4,500.
I’m not a person who believes gentrification is inherently evil. You want to help a community that wants to update its housing and attract more business development? Great. The problem is, that seldom happens without displacing the people already there and pricing people of color out of their own communities—communities, by the way, that often have a history of white flight driven by racist ideology.
Viral video of Afghans clinging to a U.S. military plane departing Afghanistan circulated online Monday in the aftermath of the Taliban occupying the presidential palace in Kabul and taking control. President Ashraf Ghani fled the country on Sunday, The New York Times reported. For many, the takeover U.S.
Within 24 hours, two teachers, a teaching assistant, and a graduate of Broward County Public Schools in Florida have died after testing positive for COVID-19, the local teacher’s union president told CNN. The three educators were unvaccinated. The recent deaths, like the some 1,000 reported last week throughout the state, have done little to motivate Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis to reverse his stance after banning schools from implementing mask requirements.
Sen. Cory Booker, of New Jersey, went viral on Tuesday for a satirical speech seemingly aimed at calling out the redundancy in a GOP senator’s amendment promising that the federal government wouldn’t bail out local governments who earlier voted to slash police budgets. Booker’s point about the resolution posed by Republican Sen.