Val Demings, a Democratic congresswoman and a former police chief, said on Sunday the officer who fatally shot teenager Ma’Khia Bryant in Ohio this week “responded as he was trained to do”.
Related: Derek Chauvin was found guilty – how typical is that of US police who kill?
Continue reading...Joe Biden was briefed on Wednesday on the “tragic” fatal police shooting of a 16-year-old Black girl in Columbus, Ohio, White House press secretary Jen Psaki announced.
Related: Ohio county where girl, 16, was killed is state’s deadliest for police shootings
Continue reading...Police in Columbus, Ohio, fatally shot a 15-year-old girl on Tuesday afternoon, just moments before Derek Chauvin was found guilty of murdering George Floyd. The girl was identified by local media as Makiyah Bryant.
Officers were responding to an attempted stabbing call and, when police arrived, shot the girl around 4.45pm, officials said. The 911 caller reported a female was trying to stab them before hanging up, they said.
The shooting, which took place approximately 25 minutes before the judge handed down the guilty verdict against Chauvin, cast a shadow over the celebrations across the country that followed the trial’s conclusion.
Officers responding to an attempted stabbing call shot Makiyah Bryant just before judge delivers a guilty verdict in Derek Chauvin trial
Police in Columbus, Ohio, fatally shot a 15-year-old girl on Tuesday afternoon, just moments before Derek Chauvin was found guilty of murdering George Floyd.
The girl was identified by local media as Makiyah Bryant.
Continue reading...At least five monkeys are on the loose in Cincinnati after being spotted swinging from the trees in a graveyard in the Ohio city’s West Side neighborhood.
Local media reported that residents called the police in alarm after spotting the escaped monkeys late on Wednesday night. Video of the creatures also circulated on social media.
Continue reading...The venture capitalist and author of Hillbilly Elegy hopes to take his place in a Republican party rebranding itself as the working-class party
As a prospective conservative candidate for the US Senate from Ohio, author JD Vance can claim a rarely authentic connection to the white working-class voters who helped make Donald Trump president.
In his bestselling 2016 memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, Vance told the tale of his escape from generations of poverty and addiction in the shadow of Appalachia, thanks to a fiercely loving grandmother and a stroke or two of lonesome luck. (The Netflix film adaptation was less well received than the book.)
Continue reading...Twelve-year-old boy was killed when a white police officer shot him in a playground in 2014
The US justice department has closed its civil rights investigation into the fatal 2014 shooting by Cleveland police of Tamir Rice, a 12-year-old Black youth, and said that no federal criminal charges would be brought in the case.
The announcement came five years after an Ohio grand jury cleared two Cleveland officers, Timothy Loehmann and Frank Garmback, of state charges of wrongdoing in the death of Rice, who was shot in a playground while holding a toy gun capable of shooting pellets.
Continue reading...An Ohio death row inmate who survived an attempt to execute him by lethal injection in 2009 has died of possible complications of Covid-19, the state prisons system said.
Related: US judge again delays execution of woman on federal death row
Continue reading...Authorities call killing ‘a tragedy’ after Hill, 47, was shot while holding a cellphone and then denied aid
A white Ohio police officer was fired Monday after bodycam footage showed him fatally shooting Andre Hill, a Black man who was holding a cellphone, then refusing to aid him for several minutes.
Columbus police officer Adam Coy was fired hours after a hearing. His firing was announced in a statement from Ned Pettus Jr, the director of Columbus public safety.
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It’s been a lively day on the election trail. We’re closing this blog now but will be back with all the developments in US political news, as it happens, tomorrow.
Here are the main events of the day:
Democratic vice-presidential candidate Kamala Harris is calling for an administration that is frank about racist police brutality in America.
“There isn’t a Black man I know, be it a relative or friend, who has not had some sort of experience with police that’s been about an unreasonable stop, some sort of profiling or excessive force,” she said.
We can’t just speak the truth about police brutality in our nation—we must act to change our systems of justice and demand accountability. pic.twitter.com/arSdFLi7Wj
Continue reading...After winning the 2016 election, Donald Trump promised to deliver new jobs and economic prosperity to Youngstown, Ohio, a city suffering from decades of decline. But four years on those promises never manifested. Oliver Laughland and Tom Silverstone meet residents who lost their jobs and had their families split by economic necessity, and witness how the demise of the city’s only newspaper made it harder to hold politicians accountable for their failures
More from the Anywhere but Washington series:
A standout image by photographer Alyson McClaran captures a face-off between a healthcare worker and an angry protester
The weekend has seen a spate of anti-lockdown protests across the US in Ohio, Michigan and Colorado.
But a standout image by photographer Alyson McClaran came on Sunday from Denver, Colorado. As protesters gathered outside the capitol steps and others assembled in their automobiles to ask the city to reopen for business, healthcare workers stood in the middle of the road in their scrubs. After having spent the last weeks treating Covid-19 patients, they staged their own demonstration: they wanted to remind the protestors of why the shutdown measures are important.
Continue reading...Demonstrations have taken place across the US against orders put in place to limit the spread of coronavirus. The protests were organised by the far-right media site Infowars. Rallies were held in state capitals, with more planned for next week in other states. Hundreds of people stood and chanted for the US to be reopened. Rightwing media and Donald Trump have supported the protests but they appear to represent a minority opinion
Intergenerational incubator and creative writing program Twelve Literary Arts seeks to to inspire young people to participate in democracy
“Hey y’all, I’m Tai,” 15-year-old Tai-Charle’ Walker says into the single microphone. “Hi Tai!” shouts back the audience for tonight’s spoken-word open mic event. “What am I made of?” Tai begins, and then, to cheers, she lights whatever trepidation she has on fire: “You asked a simple question, but get many different complex answers. I myself am made up of pain.”
Pain from the historical trauma of slavery, the “crooked cops’ nightstick”, violence on her street. “I am the moon – everybody wants to get close but once they actually do they have no clue what to do … You ask me what I be? Between you and me, you’ll never know what I’ll be.”
Continue reading...Ohio introduces one of the most extreme bills to date for a procedure that does not exist in medical science
A bill to ban abortion introduced in the Ohio state legislature requires doctors to “reimplant an ectopic pregnancy” into a woman’s uterus – a procedure that does not exist in medical science – or face charges of “abortion murder”.
This is the second time practising obstetricians and gynecologists have tried to tell the Ohio legislators that the idea is currently medically impossible.
Continue reading...Campaigner Kim Foreman helped drive the creation of historic anti-lead poisoning legislation in the Ohio city earlier this year – and she is not done yet
The city of Flint, Michigan, made headlines around the world in 2014 when improperly treated water from the Flint River began corroding lead pipes and releasing harmful chemicals into the city’s tap water.
But many other cities across the US have faced – and continue to face – serious health risks because of new contaminations of lead, or the legacy of failures to get it out of the environment, with children most affected by exposure.
Continue reading...Billy Foister died last month after a heart attack at work. The incident was just one in a series of recent accidents and fatalities
In September, Billy Foister, a 48-year-old Amazon warehouse worker, died after a heart attack at work. According to his brother, an Amazon human resources representative informed him at the hospital that Billy had lain on the floor for 20 minutes before receiving treatment from Amazon’s internal safety responders.
“How can you not see a 6ft 3in man laying on the ground and not help him within 20 minutes? A couple of days before, he put the wrong product in the wrong bin and within two minutes management saw it on camera and came down to talk to him about it,” Edward Foister said.
Continue reading...Twelve Democratic 2020 presidential candidates will share the stage in the perpetual swing state on Tuesday
The Democratic 2020 presidential candidates will gather once again on Tuesday night to face off in their fourth debate, this time in the perpetual swing state of Ohio.
Twelve of the candidates have qualified to participate, and they will all share one stage – marking the most crowded debate stage of this election cycle so far. But the dynamics of the race have changed since the candidates last met in September, and some of the contenders face the prospect of this being their last debate.
Continue reading...Australian PM Scott Morrison received a full-blown welcome from the US president. Katharine Murphy was on hand for an inside account
Scott Morrison has made his first visit to the United States as prime minister. It was a trip that included a close encounter with the unpredictability of the Trump White House, a foreign policy pivot, and a backlash about a lack of climate policy action. Guardian Australia’s political editor, Katharine Murphy, travelled, with the prime minister. Here is what she witnessed:
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Venezuela’s U.N. ambassador is accusing the Trump administration of trying to start a war by sabotaging talks between president Nicholas Maduro and his opposition, as the Trump administration’s national security adviser John Bolton doubled down on his view that “Maduro has to go,” according to the Associated Press.
Addressing a summit on Venezuela’s crisis in Peru’s capital, Lima, Bolton pronounced Maduro’s “dying regime” doomed – even though a seven-month US-backed campaign has so far failed to topple Hugo Chávez’s authoritarian successor.
Bolton claimed Donald Trump’s latest moves – which will also see those who do business with Maduro’s government sanctioned – would help end “Maduro’s tyrannical reign”.
Related: 'It will not work': experts question Venezuela sanctions as Bolton touts them
Two members of Congress have sent a letter to the National Archives seeking records related to the supreme court Justice Brett Kavanaugh.
“In the coming year, the supreme court will again address important matters regarding civil rights, criminal justice, and immigration,” reads the letter, authored by the New York congressman and House judiciary committee chairman Jerrold Nadler and the Georgia congressman Hank Johnson.
Related: Judicial council tosses misconduct claims against Brett Kavanaugh
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