Day: August 29, 2020

President Donald Trump wants his enemies locked up — he says so all the time.

He told Hillary Clinton that once he won, she’d be “in jail.” He wants foreign countries to investigate the Bidens. He said that John Kerry “should be prosecuted.” He wants Adam Schiff “questioned at the highest level for Fraud & Treason.” John Bolton, he says, should be “in jail, money seized.” James Comey should face “years in jail.” The list goes on. This isn’t just empty political rhetoric — Trump says similar things to officials in private, and grows angry when his …

The winds shook the whole building. The fire alarm went off. Sometime, between about 2 am and 4 am Thursday, the roof of the building curled away. The rainwater came in, soaking the ceiling of the second floor apartment, dripping down the walls.

Bailey, who’s 26 and lives in Lake Charles, Louisiana, emerged from the apartment at sunrise, after riding out the storm with her boyfriend and her dad and their two pets, a Persian cat and French-Boston Terrier bulldog mix. Outside, she saw the metal awning of the building’s roof rolled up like the end of a toothpaste tube. …

Fifty-seven years after Martin Luther King Jr. spoke at the 1963 March on Washington, thousands of protesters for racial justice again gathered on the National Mall in Washington, DC. It was an emotional day of protesting against police violence, the culmination of a summer of nationwide protests in the wake of George Floyd’s death.

Jonathan Ernst/Pool/Getty Images

Rev. Al Sharpton, who first announced the “Get Your …

04neighborhood_materials.pdfSummer is coming to an end, and as we head back to school here on the Island of Explained, we’re thinking about the fun times we’ve had with the Experimoth and Bored the Whale. But we’re also thinking about some of the hard issues this summer has raised: news about people being killed because of the color of their skin.

So we’re devoting our fourth, and final, episode of Today, Explained to Kids summer series to systemic racism. We talk with Kennedy Mitchum, a recent college grad who got Merriam-Webster to update its definition of racism; Morgan Givens, …

House Democrats have had enough with another member of President Donald Trump’s administration flouting oversight requests: On Friday, they launched contempt of Congress proceedings against Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.

House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Eliot Engel (D-NY) cited Pompeo’s noncooperation with President Donald Trump’s impeachment inquiry, his speech this week at the Republican National Convention, and his promotion of “a Senate Republican-led smear against the president’s political rivals,” which represented an “alarming” disregard for laws over his own conduct.

Drafting a resolution is the first step in a process that could ultimately conclude with the House voting to hold …

On August 6, President Trump issued an executive order prohibiting transactions with the video-sharing app TikTok. Since the app is owned by the Beijing-based ByteDance, it could pose national security and privacy risks to users in the US, the order states.

But the Trump administration’s actions targeting TikTok mark a departure from the traditional American techno-libertarian position on internet governance and free speech online. And it comes at a time when the concept of a global internet is under threat.

Nations are increasingly pursuing various forms of internet sovereignty, from Russia building a walled-off intranet to India regularly shutting down …

Black Panther star Chadwick Boseman has died at age 43 of colon cancer, according to his family, in a shocking announcement made Friday night.

“Chadwick was diagnosed with stage III colon cancer in 2016, and battled with it these last four years as it progressed to stage IV,” Boseman’s family said in a statement posted to his Twitter account. “From Marshall to Da 5 Bloods, August Wilson’s Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom and several more, all were filmed during and between countless surgeries and chemotherapy.”

Boseman’s cancer diagnosis wasn’t public knowledge prior to his passing. Back in April, …