Category Archives: Black Lives Matter movement

Black Lives Matter protests: Atlanta shooting of Rayshard Brooks declared homicide – live updates

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Overnight protesters have torn down a statue of Thomas Jefferson outside a high school that bears his name in North Portland, Oregon.

The school was the starting point for a 1,000 strong Black Lives Matter protest on Sunday evening. The statue was still intact at that point, and reports suggest it was pulled down by a smaller group after the main march had departed.

There’s a couple of stories that are breaking at the moment - one is that a US Air Force F15C fighter aircraft has crashed off the coast of England near Middlesbrough. The status of the pilot is not yet known.

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Color is not a crime: New York’s Black Lives Matter street art

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Across the US, artists have responded to the death of George Floyd and the ensuing protests with impactful and urgent work. In New York, artworks have appeared supporting the Black Lives Matter movement, and remembering the deaths of, among others, Breonna Taylor, Elijah McClain and Eric Garner

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Racism campaigners call for police watchdog to be abolished

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Black families whose relatives have died in police incidents demand end to systemic racism

Black families in the UK whose loved ones have died in incidents involving the police have called for the abolition of the Independent Office for Police Conduct, which investigates the police, and the immediate suspension of officers involved in deaths as part of a new plan to address systemic racism and unlawful killings.

The United Families & Friends Campaign (UFFC), which supports family members of those who have died following police incidents, has drawn up an eight-point plan calling for fundamental changes to the way deaths involving the police are dealt with. A disproportionately high number of these deaths involving the police are black and the UFFC said that failing to successfully prosecute police sends the message that the state can act with impunity.

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Police seek protests ban after 23 officers injured in London rallies

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Head of police union for England and Wales calls for emergency law during Covid-19 pandemic

Priti Patel has been urged to impose an emergency ban on all protests after Britain’s biggest police force condemned the “mindless hooliganism” and “utterly shocking” violence of far-right activists against its officers in London.

The head of the body representing rank-and-file police officers in England and Wales called for tougher restrictions on demonstrations after 23 officers were injured and more than 100 people were arrested during clashes in London on Saturday.

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Milan mayor refuses to remove defaced statue of Italian journalist

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BLM protesters targeted monument to Indro Montanelli, who admitted buying 12-year-old Eritrean girl

Milan’s mayor has rejected calls to remove a statue from a public park of an Italian journalist who acknowledged having bought a 12-year-old Eritrean girl to be his wife during Italy’s colonial occupation in the 1930s.

Giuseppe Sala said in a Facebook video that he was perplexed by “the lightness” with which Indro Montanelli had confessed to buying the child from her father, in a widely circulated video of a 1969 talkshow appearance, but said “lives should be judged in their totality” and he believed the statue should stay.

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Rayshard Brooks: protesters set fire to Wendy’s after black man shot dead by police – video report

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Demonstrators set fire to a fast food restaurant in Atlanta on Saturday where Rayshard Brooks, 27, was shot dead by a police officer the previous night. Police were called to the restaurant over reports that he had fallen asleep in the drive-through line.

The Georgia Bureau of Investigation, which is investigating the shooting, said Brooks failed a field sobriety test and then resisted officers' attempts to arrest him.

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Top public school accused of ‘toxic culture of racism’ among pupils

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Letter from Westminster alumni demands changes to teaching of black culture

More than 250 former pupils at Westminster School have signed a letter demanding that it combat the “toxic culture of racism within the student body”, promote the teaching of black culture and confront its links with the slave trade.

It is one of the first indications that Britain’s public school system is now coming under pressure to follow the example of many universities and examine how it tackles racial and colonial issues.

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How the killing of George Floyd exposed Hong Kong activists’ uneasy relationship with Donald Trump

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The US president may be the pro-democracy movement’s biggest backer, but some protesters feel they are being used

Hong Kong’s pro-democracy movement has struggled to reconcile the support it has received from Donald Trump with his administration’s brutal crackdown on protests over the police killing of George Floyd.

In the past few weeks, unprecedented Black Lives Matter protests, renewed by the killing of George Floyd by a white police officer, have spread to every US state and to countries across the world, regardless of pandemic restrictions.

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Rightwing protesters clash with police in central London

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Arrests made as ‘guard our monuments’ demonstrators chant ‘Eng-ger-land’ and throw bottles

At least five people have been arrested in clashes between protesters and police in central London at a demonstration against perceived slights to British national heritage.

Scotland Yard said that as of 5pm on Saturday, they had arrested five people for offences including violent disorder, assault on police, possession of an offensive weapon, being drunk and disorderly and possession of class A drugs.

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Riot police fire teargas on anti-racism protesters in Paris

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Peaceful protest erupts into skirmishes as anger at death of George Floyd resonates in France

Riot police fired teargas to prevent thousands of anti-racism protesters marching through central Paris on Saturday, as a wave of anger continued to sweep the world following the death of African-American George Floyd.

The protesters gathered in Place de la Republique, where the crowd chanted “No justice, no peace” and some climbed the statue of Marianne, who personifies the French Republic. Police refused organisers permission to proceed to the Opera House.

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Rightwing protesters clash with police in London – video report

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Rightwing demonstrators, who announced they would turn out on Saturday to protect London's monuments from anti-racism protesters, were involved in scuffles with police outside Parliament.

In and around Parliament Square, hundreds of people wearing football shirts, chanting 'England, England' and describing themselves as patriots, gathered alongside military veterans at the Cenotaph war memorial.

The group sang songs in support of rightwing activist Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, who goes by the name of Tommy Robinson. 'Winston Churchill, he's one of our own,' they also chanted, near his statue which last weekend was sprayed with graffiti reading: 'Churchill was a racist'.

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‘He just doesn’t get it’: has Trump been left behind by America’s awakening on racism?

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The killing of George Floyd has been a turning point for for everyone but the president – who has seldom been so isolated from his own party and the public

Longtime observers of Donald Trump have often compared him to an old man sitting at the end of a bar, holding forth with crazed opinions, overwhelming self-assurance and taboo-busting shock value guaranteed to draw a crowd.

Now, perhaps for the first time, it seems the US president may have lost the room.

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Trump says ‘concept of chokeholds sounds innocent’ as states move to ban practice – live

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That’s it from me today. My west coast colleague, Lois Beckett, will be taking over the blog for the next few hours.

Here’s where the day stands so far:

The Trump administration has finalized a rule rolling back Obama-era protections for transgender Americans under the Affordable Care Act’s non-discrimination policy.

According to the new version of the policy, the department of health and human services will be “returning to the government’s interpretation of sex discrimination according to the plain meaning of the word ‘sex’ as male or female and as determined by biology.”

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For Scott Morrison, one protester’s free expression is another’s dangerous activity | Katharine Murphy

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As the prime minister says, when it comes to coronavirus advice, consistency is important

I know it is probably mad to yearn for consistency from political leaders, but indulge my winter madness for a few minutes while we review some recent events.

On 8 May, Scott Morrison was keen to convey the news that Australia would be reopening in stages between that Friday and July. The prime minister acknowledged that tracking back to normal would likely spark new Covid-19 infections but he said, more than once, this wasn’t something that should slow the trajectory. “Outbreaks are not a reason to slow things down,” Morrison said. “Outbreaks are going to happen, all premiers and chief ministers understand that.”

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Boris Johnson ‘stoking fear and division’ ahead of BLM protests

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Critics say PM’s claim that George Floyd protests ‘hijacked by extremists’ is dangerous

Boris Johnson was accused of “stoking fear and division” ahead of a weekend of Black Lives Matter demonstrations after he unequivocally condemned the removal of historic statues and claimed the protests had been “hijacked by extremists intent on violence”.

As statues – including of Winston Churchill – were boarded up to protect them ahead of planned marches, the prime minister tweeted his opposition to those calling for memorials with links to slavery and racism to be torn down.

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Johnson’s ‘culture war’ trap seems designed for Corbyn, not Starmer

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As No 10 hopes to divide Labour on statues and TV archives, its leader has made practical demands on race inequality

Boris Johnson appeared to have had his say about the Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests earlier this week, telling the nation in a carefully phrased article for the black newspaper the Voice: “I hear you.”

Yet on Friday morning, he dramatically returned to the fray, tweeting that taking down controversial statues was to “lie about our history” and warning would-be protesters: “The only responsible course of action is to stay away.”

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Twitter deletes 170,000 accounts linked to China influence campaign

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Content focused on Covid-19 and the protests in Hong Kong and over George Floyd in the US

Twitter has removed more than 170,000 accounts the social media site says are state-linked influence campaigns from China focusing on Hong Kong protests, Covid-19 and the US protests in relation to George Floyd.

The company announced on Thursday that 23,750 core accounts – and 150,000 “amplifier” accounts that boosted the content posted by those core accounts – had been removed from the platform after being linked to an influence campaign from the People’s Republic.

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City of Hamilton in New Zealand removes statue of British naval captain

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City council says memorial to Captain John Hamilton comes down after Māori elder calls him a ‘murderer’ and threatens to remove by force

A statue of a British naval captain has been removed by the city council in Hamilton, New Zealand after a local Māori elder threatened to take it down by force.

The statue of Captain John Hamilton, after whom the city in the central North Island is named, was gifted to the city by a local company in 2013.

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Racism is at the heart of fast fashion – it’s time for change | Kalkidan Legesse

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The fashion industry makes huge profits from the exploitation of black and brown women. Now is the time to call it out

Of all the shocks that the past few weeks and months have brought to all our lives, one of the biggest for me as a black woman working in the fashion industry is that finally people are realising that racism is more than calling someone a derogatory name.

The killing of George Floyd while in police custody and the global outrage and protest that followed is bringing a dawning collective understanding that white supremacy relies on the exploitation of black and brown people. 

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George Floyd protests: officer bailed as protesters topple Confederate statue in Virginia – live

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Officer involved in George Floyd killing freed on bail, as statue of Confederate president toppled in Richmond, Virginia

This is Joan Greve in Washington, taking over for Martin Belam.

Trump’s most recent tweet that the National Guard troops who patrolled Washington amid the George Floyd protests “could hardly believe how easy it was” is at odds with recent reports about the troops.

The first days of June, a calamitous period for the Trump presidency, have been a debacle for the National Guard.

There has been a torrent of criticism from Congress, senior retired military officers and Guard members themselves since more than 5,000 Guard troops — from the District of Columbia and a dozen states — were rushed to the streets of the capital to help in the crackdown on mostly peaceful protesters and occasional looters after the killing of George Floyd in police custody. The D.C. Guard has halted recruiting efforts, and at least four National Guard troops have tested positive for the coronavirus.

Donald Trump is up and tweeting, and is straight on the attack against “Antifa”.

Our great National Guard Troops who took care of the area around the White House could hardly believe how easy it was. “A walk in the park”, one said. The protesters, agitators, anarchists (ANTIFA), and others, were handled VERY easily by the Guard, D.C. Police, & S.S. GREAT JOB!

Domestic Terrorists have taken over Seattle, run by Radical Left Democrats, of course. LAW & ORDER!

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