Prosecutor says actions of Mark and Patricia McCloskey’s actions led to risk of violence
A white couple who pointed guns at protesters marching against racial injustice outside their mansion will face criminal charges, the city’s top prosecutor announced on Monday.
Mark and Patricia McCloskey, both personal injury attorneys in their 60s, will be charged with felony unlawful use of a weapon and a misdemeanor charge of fourth-degree assault.
Continue reading...As the first young person in China to engage in Greta Thunberg-inspired Fridays for Future climate strikes, Howey Ou says she has become a target for the authorities who see that activism as a challenge to their control.
The 17-year-old claims she has been told to ditch her climate activism as a condition for her restarting studies at Guangxi Normal University affiliated high school in Guilin, where she studied until late 2018.
It is not necessarily her concerns for the climate that have sparked a pressure campaign from authorities, Kecheng Fang, an assistant professor at the school of journalism at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, told the Guardian. He said: 'Most importantly, because it is about collective action ... No matter what kind of collective action it is, it’s considered highly sensitive'
Continue reading...Donald Trump has equated the Black Lives Matter movement with displays of the Confederate flag, saying: “I’m not offended either by Black Lives Matter, that’s freedom of speech. You know the whole thing with cancel culture – we can’t cancel our whole history. We can’t forget that the north and the south fought.”
Related: Trump's 2020 strategy: paint Joe Biden as a puppet for the 'radical left'
Continue reading...Trio who participated in November demonstrations received public support following request of retrial
Iran’s supreme court has agreed to suspend the executions of three men on death row for their participation in anti-government protests in November, whose sentences sparked an online outcry last week.
Lawyers for the trio – Saeed Tamjidi, 26, Mohammad Rajabi, 28, and Amirhossein Moradi, 26 – said in a statement on Sunday the country’s supreme court had agreed to examine the men’s application for a retrial.
Continue reading...Lewis helped Martin Luther King organise the March on Washington in 1963 and once suffered a fractured skull at the hands of state troopers
John Lewis, the civil rights leader and Democratic congressman, has died. He was 80.
Related: John Lewis obituary
Continue reading...Demonstrators call for new constitution, new elections and end to repressive laws
Several thousand anti-government protesters rallied in Thailand’s capital on Saturday to call for a new constitution, new elections and an end to repressive laws.
Chanting and waving placards, the demonstrators, comprising mainly young Thais, converged on Bangkok’s iconic Democracy Monument in the old part of the city.
Continue reading...Mahmoud Dicko has emerged as a key player in a country in crisis. But is he a zealot or a pragmatist?
A fragile calm has returned to Bamako. The debris has been cleared from the streets and the barricades around the Salam mosque in the neighbourhood of Badalabougou are gone. For the moment, a bloody confrontation between security forces and demonstrators in the capital of Mali appears to have been averted.
But the pause is likely to be temporary. Leaders of the landlocked west African nation’s protest movement have promised to go “right to the bitter end” to force through dramatic political change, after six weeks of rising unrest. “We will wage this battle until we bring in a new democratic era in Mali. We have lost too many killed to retreat now,” Mohamed Salia Touré, a prominent protest leader and young politician, told the Observer.
Continue reading...Militarized federal agents deployed by Donald Trump to Portland, Oregon, fired tear gas at protesters again late on Friday night, even as the city’s mayor demanded the agents be removed and the state’s attorney general vowed to seek a restraining order against them.
Related: Camouflaged federal agents have descended on Portland. Trump's DHS is out of control | Trevor Timm
Continue reading...The civil rights leader John Lewis, known at the ‘conscience of America’, has died. Born the son of sharecroppers in Alabama on 21 February 1940, he attended segregated public schools and, inspired by the words of Martin Luther King Jr, became active in the civil rights movement. From university onwards he organised sit-ins at segregated lunch counters, took part in the Freedom Rides, was chair of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee and was a key speaker at the historic March on Washington in 1963. He led one of the pivotal moments in the civil rights movement, a march over the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama that was brutally attacked by state troopers.
Continue reading...A police raid on a gay bar in New York led to the birth of the Pride movement half a century ago – but the fight for LGBTQ+ rights goes back much further than that. By Huw Lemmey
Continue reading...New analysis finds economic shock of pandemic coupled with existing grievances makes widespread public uprisings ‘inevitable’
The economic impact of coronavirus is a “tinderbox” that will drive civil unrest and instability in developing countries in the second half of 2020, according to new analysis.
Highest risk countries facing a “perfect storm”, where protests driven by the pandemic’s economic fallout are likely to inflame existing grievances, include Nigeria, Iran, Bangladesh, Algeria and Ethiopia, the analysis said.
Continue reading...I had grown up in brutal poverty, and saw touch as a privilege for those with less traumatic backgrounds. Then a friend and mentor changed my life
Welcome to the Guardian’s Power of Touch series
It happened one day during my first year of college at Rutgers University, in my home state of New Jersey. The anti-apartheid movement was raging on my college campus, there was still a massive buzz about Jesse Jackson’s first run for president and I had instantly become woke, as we say, because of names such as Winnie and Nelson Mandela, because of the Aids and crack epidemics, and because of my adopted big sister on campus, an older student named Lisa Williamson, who would later become the famed activist and bestselling author Sister Souljah.
For sure, Lisa was one of the most incredible speakers I had ever heard. She was a fearless leader, and I became so instantly fond of her, I even called her “Ma” just like I did my own mother. And she adored me, taught me and shared with me everything that she knew and was learning, in real time.
Continue reading...Call for increased security as French president tells demonstrators ‘be cool’
Anti-government gilets jaunes (yellow vests) hurled abuse at Emmanuel Macron as he walked with his wife, Brigitte, on Bastille Day in a public garden in Paris, prompting calls from opposition leaders for increased security.
Demonstrators confronted the French president and his wife, Brigitte, as they walked with bodyguards in the Tuileries Gardens in Paris on Tuesday.
Continue reading...A Black Lives Matter protester, Jen Reid, says she 'shed a tear' when she saw a sculpture of her replace that of the slave trader Edward Colston in Bristol on Wednesday.
The artist Marc Quinn had the new statue installed without council permission. It replicates a photograph of Reid with her fist raised taken after the statue of Colston, a 17th-century merchant, was toppled by Black Lives Matter demonstrators in June.
Arriving in two lorries before 5am, a team of 10 people worked quickly to install the figure of Reid, who said she had been secretly working with Quinn on the idea for weeks
Continue reading...Muralists are covering the Afghan capital’s blast walls with agitprop imagery and calling out corruption
From the killing of George Floyd in the US and the drowning of Afghan refugees in Iran, to the signing of the US-Taliban agreement towards peace and brutal murder of a Japanese aid worker, a group of Afghan artists have taken paintbrushes to adorn Kabul’s grey blast walls with vivid imagery.
The barriers have been transformed into politically inspired murals, which the artists hope will create “visual dialogue” and raise awareness of corruption and injustices.
Continue reading...Wearing a mask may feel like being muzzled to some, but across the world people are using masks to send political messages
Continue reading...Harper’s letter asserts way to ‘defeat bad ideas is by exposure, argument, and persuasion’, but critics accuse authors of censorious mentality
JK Rowling, Salman Rushdie and Margaret Atwood are among the signatories to a controversial open letter warning that the spread of “censoriousness” is leading to “an intolerance of opposing views” and “a vogue for public shaming and ostracism”.
Rowling, whose beliefs on transgender rights have recently seen scores of Harry Potter fans distance themselves from her, said she was “proud to sign this letter in defence of a foundational principle of a liberal society: open debate and freedom of thought and speech”.
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The tell-all book due out shortly from Mary Trump, the niece of the president, tells of a family divided by trauma.
The Trump family failed to block the book after court efforts failed to stop publisher Simon & Schuster printing and distributing it, even though a restraining order was ongoing against Mary Trump herself, the daughter of Donald Trump’s late oldest brother.
In response to the news that New York state has sanctioned Deutsche Bank, the bank put out a statement by a spokesperson.
We acknowledge our error in onboarding Epstein in 2013 and the weakness in our processes, and have learnt from our mistakes and shortcomings. Immediately following Epstein’s arrest, we contacted law enforcement and offered our full assistance with their investigation.
The Department of Financial Services factual findings on Danske Estonia and FBME, like our own internal investigation, identified various deficiencies in our oversight and monitoring of the banks that used our clearing services. There was no intentional effort by anyone within the bank to facilitate unlawful activity...while the settlement reflects our upmost [sic] cooperation and transparent engagement with our regulator, it also shows how important it is to continue investing in our controls and enhancing our anti-financial crime capabilities.
Just got the following statement from @DeutscheBank spokesman Dan Hunter ––> pic.twitter.com/NpmzXuujcb
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Trump is still tweeting away, now insisting schools must reopen in the fall, despite concerns about the spread of coronavirus once in-person classes resume.
“SCHOOLS MUST OPEN IN THE FALL!!!” the president tweeted moments ago.
SCHOOLS MUST OPEN IN THE FALL!!!
Nascar driver Bubba Wallace has responded to Trump’s tweet suggesting he should apologize after a noose was found in his garage.
Wallace, the only top black driver in Nascar, addressed his response “to the next generation and little ones following my foot steps.”
To the next generation and little ones following my foot steps..#LoveWins pic.twitter.com/tVaV3pkdLe
Continue reading...Protesters have held up blank pieces of white paper to avoid using slogans banned under a new national security law in Hong Kong on Monday.
The law, which was imposed by China after anti-government protests last year, has made it illegal to shout slogans or hold up banners and flags calling for the city's independence. Hong Kong police cleared the group of demonstrators who gathered in a shopping centre in the central business district