Tag Archives: Protests

What you need to know about the coronavirus right now 06-05-20

(Reuters) – Here’s what you need to know about the coronavirus right now:

When coronavirus and protests collide

Australian authorities are taking legal action to try to stop a Black Lives Matter protest scheduled for Saturday in Sydney, citing the risk of an outbreak of COVID-19 given the thousands expected to attend.

French police have also banned a demonstration planned for Saturday in front of the U.S. Embassy in Paris because of what they said were risks of social disorder and health dangers from large gatherings.

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention director Robert Redfield have urged participants in protests sweeping the United States to get tested for the coronavirus.

Demonstrations are planned in several cities around the world this weekend.

Hydroxychloroquine or not?

An influential study that found hydroxychloroquine increased the risk of death in COVID-19 patients has been withdrawn a week after it led to major trials being halted, adding to confusion about a malaria drug championed by U.S. President Donald Trump.

The Lancet medical journal pulled the study after three of its authors retracted it, citing concerns about the quality and veracity of data.

The World Health Organization will resume its hydroxychloroquine trials after pausing them in the wake of the study. Dozens of other trials have resumed or are in process.

Surging cases in Brazil, Mexico and India

The number of coronavirus deaths in Brazil has blown past Italy’s toll, while Mexico reported a record number of new cases, as Latin American leaders push to end quarantine measures and kick their economies back into gear.

Latin America as a whole has become a new focus of the pandemic, with health officials urging governments not to open their economies too fast and to avoid public crowds.

India’s coronavirus infections are meanwhile rising at the fastest daily rate than at any time in the past three months, but it plans to open shopping malls, restaurants and places of worship next week.

More drinkers cut than increase alcohol

People missing out on drinking in restaurants and bars during lockdowns are not entirely making up for it by pouring more at home, a survey of nine countries conducted on behalf of beer, wine and spirits companies showed.

The International Alliance for Responsible Drinking, made up of 12 major alcoholic beverage companies, said its survey of 11,000 people found that 30% were drinking less than before, and only 11% were drinking more.

(Compiled by Karishma Singh and Nick Tattersall)

Protests against police violence sweep across small-town America

By Brian Munoz and Mica Rosenberg

ANNA, Illinois/NEW YORK (Reuters) – Before sundown on Thursday around 150 protesters marched down the main street in Anna, Illinois, past Bob’s Tavern, Oasis of Grace Church, Douglas Skating Rink and Casey’s General Store holding homemade signs and chanting “black lives matter.”

Nearly a century ago this southern Illinois town of 4,200 residents expelled most of its African-American residents, according to historians.

The rally was held in solidarity with others protesting the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis with a white policeman’s knee on his neck. Some residents said they were marching as a way to try to move beyond their own community’s past.

Joe Plemon, 73, an elder at the First Evangelical Presbyterian Church, said he had prepared several Bible passages – laments – to read at the protest.

“We have been challenged within my own denomination, and I know this is going on at other churches as well, to say, ‘Let’s not just wink at this, let’s step up, let’s admit the things that we’re ashamed of and let’s confess the places where we’ve sinned.'”

Anna was once known as one of the “sundown towns,” or thousands of American localities where black people were not welcome, according to sociologist and historian James Loewen, who wrote a book about the phenomenon.

While most national attention has been focused on massive demonstrations and violent clashes with police in the United States’ biggest cities like New York and Los Angeles, hundreds of spontaneous demonstrations have popped up in little towns and rural areas across the nation in recent days.

A BuzzFeed reporter based in Missoula, Montana, has gathered a growing thread of local news reports and social media posts showing nearly 250 protests in smaller communities – some with just a few hundred residents – in all 50 states.

Many of them are being held in conservative towns like Anna, which is 90% white and sits in a county where Republican President Donald Trump won 68% of the votes in the 2016 election.

“We can’t put our head in the sand,” Plemon said. “It’s good for us to step up and say we want to be part of the solution.”

One of the mostly young organizers was 18-year-old Jenna Gomez from nearby Cobden, Illinois, who said she is used to seeing Confederate flags displayed by area businesses.

Gomez had thought maybe a handful of people would show up to the event when she and some others started a group chat about it.

“We wanted to show everyone that we are not the past,” she said at the rally over cheers and a call-and-response of “United we stand! United we fall!”

‘REMARKABLE’

About a half-hour north in Carbondale, Illinois, two other young organizers – sisters Adah, 16, and Maat Mays, 18 – came up with the idea of staging a vigil on Sunday in their small town of 25,000 while watching live Instagram feeds of demonstrations in Minneapolis.

“When the protests started in the larger cities, I thought, ‘I am not in a big city but I can still bring awareness and find a way to honor the names of the people who have been killed by the police,'” said Maat Mays.

One state over in Indiana, sociology professor Jared Friesen found it “remarkable” that more than a hundred people gathered on Wednesday in the center of Huntington – population 36,000, 96% white and the hometown of Republican former Vice President Dan Quayle.

“This runs contrary to the ideas that people have about small towns,” Friesen said, “That we are all hicks and we don’t care about what is happening.”

But some in these communities do not back the wave of public action.

Jeff Barnes, a retired housepainter and proud Trump supporter who lives in Anna, said he agreed with the president’s threat to use the military against looters.

“That won’t happen around here, I can assure you,” he said, gesturing to a group of about 20 men who were not visibly armed and said they were there to protect businesses.

The flashes of hostility did not faze seasoned activists like 72-year-old Mildred Henderson.

“Pretty soon the minority will be the majority, and they would not want to be treated the way they have treated some blacks and some other minorities,” she said. “They haven’t thought about the script being flipped. But it’s about to be.”

(Reporting by Brian Munoz in Anna and Carbondale, Illinois, and Mica Rosenberg in New York; editing by Ross Colvin and Jonathan Oatis)

‘Your Pain Is My Pain’: global anti-racism protests rage

FRANKFURT/LONDON (Reuters) – Protesters around the world took to the streets again on Friday, despite coronavirus warnings, in a wave of outrage at the death of African American George Floyd in the United States and racism against minorities in their own nations.

Floyd’s death, after a white police officer pressed a knee into his neck while detaining him, has convulsed the United States.

Rallies in the German cities of Frankfurt and Hamburg drew more than 10,000 people, according to Reuters witnesses, with many lifting hands in the air and holding banners with slogans such as: “Your Pain Is My Pain, Your Fight Is My Fight”.

As authorities in many nations warned of the risk of COVID-19 infections from large gatherings, some participants in Germany wore anti-coronavirus masks with a clenched fist image.

One banner at the Frankfurt rally asked: “How Many Weren’t Filmed?” in reference to the fact that Floyd’s case was caught on camera in Minneapolis.

In London’s Trafalgar Square, dozens took to one knee in solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement.

Placards read: “White People Must Do More” and “Justice for Belly Mujinga” in reference to a rail worker who died of COVID-19 after being spat at by a man who said he was infected.

“There are a lot of uncomfortable conversations that people have been avoiding because it’s unpleasant, it’s not fun, and it can create tension, whether that’s in your family or with your friends or in your workplace,” said law firm worker Ada Offor, 21, in Trafalgar Square.

“But they’re conversations that need to be had if we want to avoid things like this happening in the future, if we want to create reform, if we want to finally create a kind of society where black bodies are treated equally.”

In Australia, demonstrators marched to Parliament House in Canberra, social media images showed, despite attempts by the authorities to stop gatherings due to the coronavirus.

Australians have also been drawing attention to the mistreatment of indigenous nationals.

Police banned a demonstration planned to take place in front of the U.S. Embassy in Paris on Saturday, citing the risks of social disorder and the coronavirus pandemic.

Elsewhere, rallies were scheduled on Friday in the Netherlands, Liberia, Norway, Italy, Austria, Canada and Greece, with more planned for the weekend.

(Reporting by Reuters bureaux worldwide; Writing by Andrew Cawthorne; Editing by Janet Lawrence)

Outpouring of rage over George Floyd killing tests limits of U.S. police tactics

By Sarah N. Lynch and Jonathan Allen

WASHINGTON/NEW YORK (Reuters) – Responses by law enforcement authorities in the U.S. capital and in Flint, Michigan, to protests over the police killing of George Floyd illustrated starkly contrasting approaches to handling angry crowds on American streets and repairing relations with grieving communities.

Sheriff Christopher Swanson of Michigan’s Genesee County was keenly aware that some protests in other cities against police brutality after the May 25 death of Floyd, an unarmed black man, in police custody in Minneapolis had descended into arson and looting.

Tensions were rising in Flint on Saturday when Swanson saw a few officers actually exchange friendly fist-bumps with protesters. So Swanson removed his helmet, strode into the crowd, hugged two protesters and told them, “These cops love you.” Swanson then joined the march.

“We’ve had protests every night since then. … Not one arrest. Not one fire. And not one injury,” Swanson said in a telephone interview.

Federal law enforcement officers took a far less conciliatory approach on Monday evening in confronting a crowd of peaceful protesters outside the White House. The officers charged and used tear gas to clear a path for President Donald Trump to walk to a nearby church for a photo opportunity holding up a copy of the Bible.

“Not only is it a terrible tactic and unsafe … it also is sending a tone as if this is the president that has ordered this,” said Ronald Davis, who headed the Justice Department’s Office of Community Oriented Policing Services under Trump’s predecessor Barack Obama.

Davis oversaw a task force that in 2015 released new federal guidelines for improving police practices after demonstrations that turned violent over the 2014 police killing of a young black man named Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, one of a long list of similar killings.

The guidelines addressed ways to improve trust between police and their communities and included recommendations to prevent protests from escalating into violence.

They advised officers to ease rather than rush into crowd control measures that could be viewed as provocative, to consider that anger over longstanding racial disparities in the American criminal justice system was the root cause of such protests and to not to start out with the deployment of masked, helmeted officers and military-style weapons.

That approach appears to have been seldom used in protests that have engulfed many U.S. cities since Floyd’s death after a white police officer knelt on his neck for nearly nine minutes during his arrest.

LACK OF TRUST

For example, police in New York City have used pepper spray on protesters, hit people with batons and in one case drove two cruisers into a crowd. In New York and some other cities police themselves have been the target of violence.

“If we were dealing with traditional, peaceful protest, everything would have been different,” New York Mayor Bill de Blasio told reporters on Monday.

Candace McCoy, a professor at New York’s John Jay College of Criminal Justice, noted police face a complicated task.

“They know that there are people who have announced beforehand that they intend to do violence both to property and to other people,” McCoy said. “The notion that the property destruction could have somehow been prevented is, I think, perhaps naive.”

New York police were heckled by some demonstrators when some officers knelt in solidarity at a Brooklyn protest. During a Manhattan protest, a police officer shook the hand of a young woman wearing a T-shirt showing slain civil rights leader Martin Luther King and hugged her. Just a few minutes later, another officer zip-tied the woman’s arms behind her back and detained her.

U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham said he plans a hearing on police conduct and race.

“This committee has a unique opportunity to build on some things that the Obama administration did and ask ourselves some hard questions,” Graham said.

Some Obama administration law enforcement reforms aimed at reducing racial discrimination and improving community policing came to a halt after Trump became president in 2017 and his Justice Department took actions such as ceasing investigations into police departments suspected of systemic racial bias.

Civil rights advocates have taken heart over conciliatory approaches displayed in places like Camden, New Jersey, as well as Baltimore, a city torn by violent protests following the 2015 death in police custody of another black man, Freddie Gray.

“I’ve been somewhat encouraged to see that there are some police departments that have demonstrated that police can make the decision to operate in a constitutional fashion and give protesters an opportunity to speak to exercise their First Amendment rights to vent their anger,” Sherrilyn Ifill, president of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, told reporters this week, referring to the right of free speech.

Community policing experts said that will be important.

“You have to be transparent and police need to be held accountable when they make mistakes,” said Roberto Villaseñor, the former police chief of Tucson, Arizona, who worked on the 2015 guidelines. “What we need to do is just listen.”

 

(Reporting by Sarah N. Lynch and Jonathan Allen; Additional reporting by Andrea Shalal in Washington; Editing by Scott Malone and Will Dunham)

Six Atlanta cops face excessive force charges after tasing college students

(Reuters) – Six Atlanta police officers will face charges for an incident in which they tased two college students and removed them from their car during protests over the death of George Floyd, an unarmed African American in police custody.

Fulton County District Attorney Paul Howard said on Tuesday he would seek prison sentences of several years for the officers involved in the Saturday encounter with Messiah Young, 22, and his 20-year-old girlfriend, Taniyah Pilgrim.

“The conduct involved in this incident — it is not indicative of the way that we treat people in the city of Atlanta,” Howard told a briefing, which Young and Pilgrim also attended.

Video footage shared at the briefing showed officers stopping the car, relaying orders and firing a taser gun into the vehicle. Pilgrim is then pulled from the car screaming. There is no sign that either resisted or posed any threat.

Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms said on Sunday that she and the city’s police chief had decided to fire two of the officers after reviewing body-camera footage of the incident.

The Atlanta Police Department did not respond to a request for comment on the charges, which range from aggravated assault to criminal damage to Pilgrim’s car.

“I feel a little safer now that these monsters are off of the street,” said Young, a senior at Morehouse College, who suffered a fractured wrist during the incident. “Moving forward, we just need to make sure that all officers are held accountable.”

Vince Champion, southeast regional director for the International Brotherhood of Police Officers, said the move to bring charges without a thorough investigation was unfair to the officers, none of whom have been interviewed.

“We believe that this is premature,” Champion said, adding he believed Howard and Bottoms were trying to score political points rather than uncover all the facts. “Why were the students stopped? We don’t know the answer to that.”

 

(Reporting by Nathan Layne; Editing by Bernadette Baum)

Seattle police oversight to continue after 12,000 Floyd protest complaints

By Gregory Scruggs

SEATTLE (Reuters) – Police in the city of Seattle will continue to be overseen by federal monitors, the mayor said on Wednesday, days after the force drew 12,000 complaints for its handling of protests over the death of George Floyd.

Mayor Jenny Durkan reversed her position from last month when she and the U.S Justice Department filed a motion to end the eight-year federal intervention, arguing police had met obligations under a “consent decree” imposed for excessive use of force, such as killings of young men of color.

Prosecutors have leveled new criminal charges against four policemen implicated in the death of Floyd, a black man pinned by his neck to the street during an arrest in Minneapolis. Outrage over the death has sparked more than a week of protests and civil strife in major U.S. cities.

The backpedaling in Seattle came after its Office of Police Accountability on Monday reported a host of complaints against the police response to weekend protests, including pepper-spraying a young girl and placing knees on the necks of two people arrested.

“The City knows it still needed to address concerns on discipline and accountability,” Durkan, who helped introduce the 2012 consent decree as a U.S. attorney, said in a statement. “We should pause as our community is rightfully calling for more police reforms.”

The Seattle Police Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Seattle’s decision came as former President Barack Obama urged every American mayor on Wednesday to work with communities to review police use-of-force policies.

Seattle lawyer and community organizer Nikkita Oliver, who ran against Durkan in the 2017 election, characterized the city’s decision to continue federal oversight as a longstanding demand from police reform advocates.

States like New Jersey and Colorado have proposed police reforms in response to the Floyd killing, but critics say deeper overhauls like defunding or dismantling of departments are necessary to bring real change.

(Reporting by Gregory Scruggs in Seattle, additional reporting and writing by Andrew Hay in Taos, New Mexico; Editing by Bill Tarrant and Raju Gopalakrishnan)

Three white men to face Georgia judge in death of black jogger

By Rich McKay

ATLANTA (Reuters) – Three white men charged with the murder of an unarmed black man in Georgia will face a judge Thursday morning in a case that caused a national outcry after cellphone video of the shooting was leaked on social media.

Protests are expected outside the courthouse after more than a week of demonstrations across the United States over the death of George Floyd, a black American who was pinned down to the ground by a white police officer in Minneapolis.

In the case in Georgia, the three men were not charged until more than two months after Ahmaud Arbery, 25, was shot dead while running on Feb. 23.

State police stepped in to investigate after the video was widely seen and Glynn County police took no action, and the Georgia Bureau of Investigation (GBI) pressed charges.

A former police officer is accused of involvement in Arbery’s death in the coastal community of Brunswick, and state officials have called in the National Guard to assist with the crowds expected outside the courthouse.

Glynn County Magistrate Judge Wallace Harrell who will review whether or not the GBI had probable cause to bring the charges.

Former police officer Gregory McMichael, 64, and his son Travis McMichael, 34, are charged with murder and aggravated assault.

William “Roddie” Bryan, a neighbor of the McMichaels who took the cellphone video, was charged with felony murder and attempt to illegally detain and confine.

Police say Gregory McMichael saw Arbery running in his neighborhood just outside Brunswick and believed he looked like a burglary suspect. The elder McMichael called his son and the two armed themselves and gave chase in a pickup truck, police said.

Bryan’s video footage appears to show the McMichaels confronting Arbery before Arbery was shot with a shotgun.

The U.S. Department of Justice is also investigating the case as a possible federal hate crime. The GBI is investigating the police department and two local district attorneys offices over the handling of the case.

If convicted, the three men face life in prison or the death penalty.

(Reporting by Rich McKay; Editing by Timothy Heritage)

Hackers and hucksters reinvigorate ‘Anonymous’ brand amid protests

By Joseph Menn

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – The amorphous internet activist movement known as Anonymous staged an online resurgence in the past week on the back of real-world protests against police brutality.

Born from internet chat boards more than a dozen years ago, the collective was once known for organizing low-skill but effective denial-of-service attacks that temporarily shut down access to payment processors that had stopped handling donations to the anti-secrecy site WikiLeaks.

But accounts using variations of the Anonymous name recently claimed credit for temporarily knocking a Minneapolis police website offline and, inaccurately, for hacking police passwords.

At the same time, millions of Twitter accounts began following longstanding Anonymous posters and retweeting them, helping boost Anonymous into Twitter’s Trending column and greater attention. Many of the boosted tweets opposed police actions, defended Black Lives Matter or faulted President Donald Trump.

It is unclear who or what is driving the resurgence, and exactly why. McGill University anthropology professor Gabriella Coleman, who wrote a book on Anonymous, said she was told by insiders that some key figures from a decade ago are involved and they are being assisted by mechanical amplification.

“The ability to create so many new accounts is classic Anonymous social-technological hacking,” Coleman said. “It’s low-hanging fruit.”

Even one of the heavily boosted old accounts, YourAnonNews, tweeted that it had no idea what was going on. It experimented by tweeting nonsense and asking not to be retweeted, only to see those tweets repeated hundreds of thousands of times.

A Twitter spokeswoman said the company had seen no evidence of “substantial coordinated activity” among longstanding Anonymous accounts but deleted one spammy new one brought to its attention by a researcher Tuesday.

“We have seen a few accounts change their profile names, photos, etc. in an attempt to visibly associate with the group and gain followers,” said Twitter spokeswoman Liz Kelley.

Anyone can call themselves a member of Anonymous and adopt its Guy Fawkes mask, other imagery and slogans, such as “we are legion.” It has no acknowledged leaders, making it more of a brand than an ordinary assemblage.

One account with 120,000 followers, AnonNewz, had deleted all prior tweets before June 1, when it started promoting protests. But it had neglected to delete its old “likes,” which were about Korean pop music, and it had interacted in the past with other K-pop fans touting giveaways.

After researcher Marcus Hutchins of cybersecurity company Kryptos Logic tweeted about the account, Twitter suspended it.

Twitter told Reuters it removed AnonNewz for “spam and coordination with other spammy accounts.”

(Reporting by Joseph Menn; Editing by Greg Mitchell and Leslie Adler)

George Floyd, a ‘gentle giant,’ remembered in hometown Houston march

By Ernest Scheyder

HOUSTON (Reuters) – George Floyd’s hometown of Houston held a memorial march for him on Tuesday, where attendees recounted a “gentle giant” whose legacy had helped the city largely avoid the violent protests seen elsewhere in the United States.

The mayor’s office said 60,000 people gathered downtown to honor Floyd, who died after a white police officer pinned his neck under a knee for nearly nine minutes in Minneapolis on May 25.. Floyd’s death has ignited protests across the country.

Floyd lived most of his 46 years in Houston’s historically black Third Ward neighborhood, located about a mile south of the park where the march began. He moved to Minneapolis in recent years for work.

The memorial march was organized by well-known Houston rappers Trae Tha Truth, who was a longtime friend of Floyd’s – and Bun B, who worked directly with Floyd’s family for the event. Houston’s mayor and police chief attended.

“We’re gonna represent him right,” Trae Tha Truth, whose given name is Frazier Thompson III, told the crowd of several hundred people gathered for the march. “We are gonna tear the system from the inside out.”

He added: “George Floyd is looking down at us now and he’s smiling.”

After a prayer, the marchers exited the park and began to walk toward City Hall.

Democratic U.S. Representative Sheila Jackson Lee, who represents portions of Houston where Floyd was raised, told the crowd that she would introduce police reform legislation in Congress on Thursday in honor of Floyd.

Mayor Sylvester Turner, who is black, said he understood marchers’ pain and told them they were making an impact.

“People that are in elected office and positions of power – we are listening,” Turner said. “It’s important for us to not just listen, but to do. I want you to know your marching, your protesting has not gone in vain. George did not die in vain.”

Houston has so far largely escaped the violent protests, with some attributing that directly to the legacy of Floyd himself.

“The people who knew George the best help set the tone for Houston. They knew what he was about. He truly was a gentle giant, a sweet guy,” said David Hill, a Houston community activist and pastor at Restoration Community Church, who knows the Floyd family.

(Reporting by Ernest Scheyder; Editing by Brad Brooks and Peter Cooney)

‘No justice, no peace’: Tens of thousands in London protest the death of Floyd

By Michael Holden and Dylan Martinez

LONDON (Reuters) – Tens of thousands of people chanting “no justice, no peace, no racist police” and “black lives matter” gathered in central London on Wednesday to protest against racism after the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis.

Floyd died after a white police officer knelt on his neck for nearly nine minutes while he lay handcuffed on the ground in Minneapolis on May 25.

His death drew outrage across a nation that is politically and racially divided five months before a presidential election, reigniting protests that have flared repeatedly in recent years over police killings of black Americans.

Since then anti-racism rallies have been held in cities around the world, from Paris to Nairobi.

In London’s Hyde Park, many of the protesters wore face masks and were dressed in red. They chanted “George Floyd” and “Black lives matter”.

“This has been years in the coming, years and years and years of white supremacy,” 30-year-old project manager Karen Koromah told Reuters.

“We’ve come here with our friends to sound the alarm, to make noise, to dismantle supremacist systems,” Koromah said, cautioning that unless there was action the United Kingdom would face similar problems to those in the United States.

“I don’t want to start crying,” she said of the images from the United States. “It makes my blood boil.”

Some protesters waved banners with slogans such as: “The UK is not innocent: less racist is still racist”, “Racism is a global issue” and “If you aren’t angry you aren’t paying attention”.

‘BLACK LIVES MATTER’

Prime Minister Johnson said on Wednesday that black lives mattered and that he supported the right to protest in a lawful and socially-distanced way.

“Of course, black lives matter and I totally understand the anger, the grief that is felt not just in America but around the world and in our country as well,” he told parliament.

British police chiefs said they were appalled by the way Floyd lost his life and by the violence which followed in U.S. cities but called on potential protesters in the United Kingdom to work with police as coronavirus restrictions remain in place.

But in Hyde Park, near Speakers’ Corner, many cautioned that racism was still a British problem too.

“My mum was a protester in apartheid and that was 30 to 40 years ago – it’s pretty disappointing that we have had to come out today to protest the same thing today they were protesting how many years ago,” Roz Jones, 21, a student from London told Reuters.

Jones came to Britain as a small child with his mother from South Africa.

“It’s a systematic issue all over the world. It’s not like this is just about someone dying, we live our lives made awfully aware of our race. That’s not right, that’s not the natural order,” he said.

The Hyde Park rally is the second major protest in Britain after hundreds gathered in London’s Trafalgar Square on Sunday before marching to the U.S. embassy.

(Editing by Guy Faulconbridge and Raissa Kasolowsky)