Day: May 30, 2020

Protests over the police killing of George Floyd, and the larger problem of racial prejudice in American criminal justice, spread across the country on Friday night and into the weekend.

Demonstrators turned out in Minneapolis and in Atlanta. They rallied in Los Angeles and New York City and in Louisville, Kentucky, where 26-year-old Breonna Taylor, an emergency medical technician, was recently shot and killed in her own apartment.

A man was shot in Detroit during protests there, according to the Detroit Free Press. The National Guard is being deployed in Minneapolis and Louisville after incidents of …

Governors and mayors in states across the country where protests flared Friday night say a small number of demonstrators, and in some cases out-of-state agitators, are responsible for escalating the events with violence and property damage.

Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey said the protesters “are coming in largely from outside of the city, from outside of the region, to prey on everything we have built over the last several decades.”

St. Paul Mayor Melvin Carter said every person who was arrested in the city Friday night was from out of state. “We don’t know these folks,” he said.

“Last night is …

The death of George Floyd, an unarmed 46-year-old black man killed by police during an arrest in Minneapolis, Minnesota, has sparked protests across the country. It has reignited a centuries-long conversation around racism in America and the horrendous ways black people are often treated by police. And it came amid a pandemic that is disproportionately impacting people of color.

On Monday, May 25, Floyd, who had recently lost his job as a restaurant bouncer due to coronavirus-related closures, died after being pinned down under a police officer’s knee for nearly nine minutes. That officer, Derek Chauvin, ignored Floyd’s …

Late Friday night, the Supreme Court handed down a 5-4 decision establishing that states still have some power to regulate how many people are allowed to gather in churches during a deadly pandemic.

The case, South Bay United Pentecostal Church v. Newsom, began on May 11, when a California church sought a lower court order allowing it to hold in-person services, despite a state order requiring places of worship to hold services online to avoid spreading the coronavirus. While the case was pending before the Supreme Court, however, California relaxed its order to allow such in-person services, …

The video is horrific.

George Floyd lies on the ground, facing the back end of a police SUV, as three cops kneel on his body. One of them, Derek Chauvin, has his knee on Floyd’s neck as the helpless man begs for his life.

“I can’t breathe, man. Please understand. Please, man.”

It’s a sadly familiar scene, and quite like one that played out in 1976 after Los Angeles police officers pulled over Adolph Lyons for a broken taillight.

Like Floyd, Lyons was black. The officers met him with guns drawn and ordered him to face the car, …

Does President Trump’s favored coronavirus treatment, the antimalarial drug hydroxychloroquine, make you more likely to die of Covid-19? That was the finding in a recent study published in the medical journal The Lancet. The study looked at more than 96,000 coronavirus patients across the world and found that, after controlling for age, sex, and how sick the patients were, patients receiving hydroxychloroquine or a variant were about twice as likely to die as those who did not.

The result quickly made headlines in top papers, may have spurred the World Health Organization to discontinue the use of hydroxychloroquine in …