Black Lives Matter protesters form mile-long line along Brighton seafront
Michael Drummond, PA Media: UK News13 June 2020

More than 1,000 protesters have gathered in Brighton to stand in solidarity with Black Lives Matter demonstrations worldwide.

Forming a mile-long line along the seafront, activists wearing black clothes and masks and holding signs held a silent protest on Saturday afternoon.

Anti-racist demonstrators poured in from all over the city for the event for the second week in a row.



Protesters lined up along the sea front for the silent demonstration (Andrew Matthews/PA)More

It comes as people across the world continue to express outrage over the death of George Floyd in the US, and over racism in society.

Observing social distancing where possible, the Brighton protesters joined together in applause in the balmy sun.

Ahead of the silent protest, organiser Ellie Ruewell said to those planning to attend: “We will be lining the closed Madeira Drive road along the seafront to show solidarity to all BIPOC (black, indigenous, people of colour) communities who continuously and tirelessly have their human rights challenged and fear dangerous oppression from authorities and governments alike.

“I need to again stress this is a peaceful, silent protest where we stand in solidarity.”



It was the second weekend in a row that a protest supporting the Black Lives Matter movement had been held in Brighton (Andrew Matthews/PA)More

Protesters held signs calling out racism and prejudice, with one saying: “If you had time to watch Tiger King, you had time to learn.”

Another echoed the phrase chanted across the world: “No justice. No peace.”

The demonstration was watched over by Sussex Police, with officers on foot and motorcycle seen at the edges of the crowd.

Many of the protesters were later expected to join a separate event, marching through the streets of the East Sussex city.

UK considers ending financial support for fossil fuels overseas

Jillian Ambrose The Guardian12 June 2020

Photograph: Maxim Shemetov/Reuters

The UK government is considering steps to end its ongoing financial support for fossil fuels overseas after using £3.5bn of public funds to support polluting projects since signing the Paris climate agreement.

Senior civil servants are understood to be planning a new climate strategy that would phase out financial support for oil and gas infrastructure in developing countries ahead of the UN’s Cop26 international climate talks next year.

The talks come amid growing outcry from MPs and campaign groups over the government’s continuing financial support for fossil fuel projects in Africa and south-ease Asia through its foreign finance institutions.

Separate investigations by campaigners, to be published this week, reveal that the government has offered billions of pounds-worth of overseas fossil fuel financing since the Paris climate accord was agreed in 2016, and forged close links with the fossil fuel industry through a series of hospitality events and gifts.

UK Export Finance (UKEF), a government credit agency, has offered loans, guarantees and insurance worth at least £3bn to UK companies involved in foreign fossil fuel projects since the Paris climate agreement, according to figures unearthed by Global Justice Now.

The campaign group found that the government’s development bank, CDC Group, has directly invested at least £300m in high-emissions projects in Africa and south Asia, including fossil fuel power plants and cement-making.

CDC’s indirect investments include £34.5m for the African Infrastructure Investment Fund III, which has invested some of this money in four different fossil fuel projects, according to Global Justice.

Daniel Willis, a climate campaigner with Global Justice, said the financial support offered by the financial institutions and other aid since the Paris agreement in 2016 has totalled £3.5bn.

“For the government to show real climate leadership ahead of Cop26 and support a global green recovery from Covid-19, it needs to end these highly damaging investments,” he said.

A separate investigation by Global Witness has found that 96% of the gifts and hospitality accepted by UKEF in the past 20 years related to the energy sector were paid for by major fossil fuel companies, including Saudi Arabia’s state-owned oil business Saudi Aramco and Gazprom, which is owned by the Russian government.

The gifts include Nokia mobile phones from Sabic, a petrochemical company owned by Saudi Aramco, and trips worth several thousand pounds to visit a gas project in Russia that was paid for by Gazprom.

A modest 4% of UKEF’s energy industry hospitality events were linked to renewable energy companies, according to the report.

Adam McGibbon, a senior campaigner at Global Witness, said UKEF’s hospitality records “underline just how in bed they are with some of the world’s biggest polluters”.

“Hospitality gifts are more than just pleasantries; they are a tried and tested technique for big business to maintain influence over policy. When the UK-hosted Cop26 finally happens in 2021, ending the hypocrisy of exporting pollution abroad will be a key test of just how serious this government is about fighting climate change,” he said.

A UKEF spokesperson said the agency supported UK exports “in all sectors”, and was “proactively developing the breadth of our support for renewable sectors”. UKEF has allocated £2bn to its direct lending facility for clean growth and renewable energy projects, the agency added.

Both UKEF and CDC have increased the proportion of renewable energy within their financial support for energy projects. A CDC spokesman said the development bank will reveal its new climate strategy later this year, which will prioritise investment in renewable energy over fossil fuels.

Government officials are understood to be wary of calling for fossil fuel financing to be ruled out entirely at the expense of helping developing countries achieve other development goals, including access to reliable electricity for almost 1 billion people for the first time.

This stance would likely draw criticism from environmentalists and MPs who believe renewable energy could help power developing economies.

The Labour party leader, Keir Starmer, before his election as leader of the opposition, said earlier this year that “rather than funding fossil fuel projects abroad, we should use our development budget and technical expertise to help other countries skip our bad habits and grow their own low-carbon economies on renewables instead”.

A spokesperson for the Department of International Development said the UK government had agreed that “all future aid spend will be aligned with the Paris agreement” and last year doubled its investment to help developing countries tackle climate change.

Indigenous inequality in spotlight as Australia faces reckoning on race

REMNANTS OF THE BRITISH EMPIRE

Luke Henriques-Gomes in Melbourne

The Guardian 12 June 2020

Photograph: Rick Rycroft/APMore
Australia’s prime minister took his time before weighing in on the country’s Black Lives Matter movement. Five days after tens of thousands of people joined protests over Indigenous deaths in custody, Scott Morrison spoke out on Thursday, wondering aloud on a right-leaning radio station whether something that had started with a “fair point” had lost its way.

“I think we’ve also got to respect our history as well,” he said. “And this is not a licence for people to just go nuts on this stuff.”

As Black Lives Matter protests have swept around the world after the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander campaigners have sought to seize the moment. Pointing to figures showing 437 Indigenous people have died in custody since1991, they argue it is time for Australia’s own national reckoning.

Successive governments have failed to move the dial on Indigenous inequality, despite an apology in 2008 to the stolen generations – Indigenous people who were forcibly removed from their families as children by the state – from the then prime minister, Kevin Rudd. Indigenous Australians account for 28% of people in prison. Life expectancy is 10 years less than that of the general population. Decades of calling for recognition in the constitution have gone unanswered.

Now that racism is in the headlines, there has been a greater focus on Indigenous Australians, although campaigners have expressed frustration that it took the death of an African American man to shine a light on their plight.

The anger has coalesced around high-profile deaths in custody. Public rallies have become vigils to those lives lost: people such as David Dungay, whose last words were “I can’t breathe” as he was restrained by prison guards in 2015; Tanya Day, who died from a fall in prison in 2017 following an arrest for public drunkenness; and Ms Dhu, who was denied medical care by police who arrested her over unpaid fines and died in custody in 2014.

In the week before protesters took to the streets, a Sydney police officer slammed an Indigenous teenager’s face into concrete.

A man places a candle at a vigil with a portrait of David Dungay during a protest in Sydney. Photograph: Anadolu Agency/Getty Images
Morrison’s conservative government has done little to directly address the frustrations of campaigners who say recommendations from a 1991 royal commission into Indigenous deaths in custody still have not been implemented.

The prime minister said he viewed the “very high level of Indigenous incarceration” as a genuine issue. Yet he dismissed the broader argument from campaigners that Australia should not see itself as absent of the kind of racism present in the US.

“Australia, in this global moment of Black Lives Matter, is revealing itself as the colonial outpost that it is,” said Dr Chelsea Bond, a Munanjali and South Sea Islander academic at the University of Queensland. She questioned how it was that Morrison could say in the radio interview that there was “no slavery in Australia”.

Morrison later acknowledged he had been wrong. From the “blackbirding” of Pacific Islander people who were were kidnapped and forced into labouring work, to the Indigenous farmhands and domestic servants who were traded between settlers and not paid, there certainly was slavery in Australia. But in his apology, Morrison said he did not want to start a “history war”.

“Appealing for truth-telling in history is not a matter of feelings,” Bond said. “It’s deeply irresponsible for our prime minister to be trying to incite a history war based on lies. It strikes me that he wouldn’t want to use this moment to honour the pain and trauma Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people have experienced in this country. Why wouldn’t you want to do that?”

The Labor opposition has sought to elevate the case for a “voice to parliament”, a constitutionally enshrined representative body to advise politicians on Indigenous policy. This has been rejected by the government.



A banner at a protest in Melbourne. Photograph: Darrian Traynor/Getty Images

Labor has walked a fine line in declining to directly criticise people taking to the streets in defiance of rules on physical distancing, while arguing that everyone should follow the authorities’ health advice. The advice, unequivocally, is that protests should not go ahead.

“My point is that for people to think carefully about what they decide to do,” said Linda Burney, Labor’s most senior Indigenous MP. “It is not up to me or anyone else to tell people what to do, but to heed the health warnings and to think about what the issues are here. And that’s what I would like the media to also focus on: it’s not ‘do you or don’t you’. It’s actually thinking about deeply what the issues are.”

Morrison appeared somewhat chastened as he was taken to task about his claims that there was no slavery in Australia. “I acknowledge there have been all sorts of hideous practices that have taken place. And so I’m not denying any of that. OK. I’m not denying any of that. And I don’t think it’s helpful to go into an endless history wars discussion about this.”

Protesters have indicated they intend to hold more rallies at the weekend. Many argue that while they acknowledge the health risks from the pandemic, racism poses its own risks to Australia’s First Nations people. A popular placard at last weekend’s rallies read “Racism is a pandemic”.

Bond said it was a painful moment. “We’re hearing that black lives matter, but what black people are being reminded of is how little they’ve mattered,” she said. “People are hurting because it’s taking them back to the first time they noticed that race was real and was violence. We are reliving all of our experiences of racial violence in this moment. In the hope that it could lead to some change, not just a hashtag trending.”

TRUMP'S RACE WAR
Trump is poised to accept the GOP nomination in Jacksonville on August 27 — the same day and city where white men violently attacked Black people 60 years ago

Sarah Al-Arshani,Business Insider•June 12, 202

President Donald J. Trump spoke to several thousand supporters at the Monroe Civic Center in Monroe, Louisiana on November 6, 2019.
Michael S. Williamson/Getty Images

President Donald Trump will give his speech at the Republican National Committee convention, which was relocated to Jacksonville, Florida, on August 27, if the RNC sticks to its initial plans for the convention.

It's the same date as the 60th anniversary of Ax Handle Saturday, where a white mob attacked Black people participating in a sit-in with baseball bats and ax handles.

Trump on Friday announced that he was moving the date of an upcoming rally which was set to be on Juneteenth in Tulsa, Oklahoma, the site of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre.

President Donald Trump will give his Republican National Committee convention speech in Jacksonville, Florida, on August 27, The New York Times reported, if the RNC sticks to its initial schedule.

August 27 is also the 60th anniversary of Ax Handle Saturday in Jacksonville. In 1960, a group of 200 white men attacked African American protesters conducting a sit-in at Hemming Park with baseball bats and ax handles. The violence spread, and the mob started attacking all African Americans, according to The Florida Historical Society.

According to The Times, it's one of the grimmest days in the city's history. A marker to commemorate Ax Handle Saturday was added to the park in 2001.

It's not clear if Republican officials were aware of this historical event when they chose Jacksonville as the site for Trump's speech.

The venue was initially set for Charlotte, North Carolina, but after Trump clashed with the governor over social distancing guidelines amid the coronavirus pandemic, only a portion of the convention will be in Charlotte, while Trump's speech will be a six-hour drive away in Jacksonville.

In a statement, Paris Dennard, an RNC adviser for Black media affairs said, "While we cannot erase some of the darkest moments of our nation's past, we can denounce them, learn from them, fight for justice and a more perfect union for every American."
Monica Alba (@albamonica) June 12, 2020

On Friday, Trump announced that he would be rescheduling a June 19 rally in Tulsa, after he was advised to change the date out of "respect for this Holiday, and in observance of this important occasion and all that it represents." The rally will now be held on June 20, rather than on Juneteenth, a day that celebrates emancipation.

Tulsa, Oklahoma, is also the site of another brutal race massacre. June 1 marked the 99th anniversary of the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921, where a white mob attacked Black Americans and destroyed part of the city.

The Trump campaign was widely criticized for initially scheduling the rally on an important holiday for Black Americans in Tulsa, the site of a massacre that historians estimate left 300 dead and "Black Wall Street" destroyed.

Read the original article on Business Insider

Michael Bennett: NFL owners cannot support both Trump and Black Lives Matter

Austin Knoblauch,LA Times•June 12, 2020

NFL defensive end Michael Bennett says team owners' support for players protesting can't hide their support for President Trump. (LM Otero / Associated Press)

NFL free agent Michael Bennett, a longtime advocate in the fight against racial inequality, is calling out the NFL for its stance on the Black Lives Matter movement.

In an interview with the Daily Beast, the three-time Pro Bowl defensive end said the NFL's efforts to support player protests and causes can't erase the fact that many team owners have supported President Trump.

“If you’re supporting him, then your letter is really null and void," Bennett said in regard to team statements and a video apology by NFL commissioner Roger Goodell in the wake of George Floyd's death.

According to multiple reports, at least eight NFL team owners collectively donated close to $8 million to Trump's inaugural committee in 2016. Even after Trump publicly criticized the NFL for its stance on players protesting and called for fans to boycott games, some owners still supported him. New York Jets owner Woody Johnson is serving as the Trump-appointed U.S. ambassador to the United Kingdom, Jacksonville Jaguars owner Shad Khan said he supports Trump's economic policies and Miami Dolphins owner Stephen Ross hosted a Trump fundraiser in the Hamptons last year.

As a result, Bennett doesn't believe the NFL is being genuine in actively fighting racism.

“[Goodell] saying that Black lives matter is almost like a slap in the face,” Bennett said. “Black talent has been exploited at a high level in the NFL. He knows Black lives matter, because without Black players the NFL wouldn’t be as lucrative as it is.”

This isn't the first time Bennett has called out the NFL for not doing enough to address social issues. In August 2016, Bennett criticized NFL players, particularly the league's stars, for not being at the forefront of change.

In addition to statements and messages in support of player protests and racial equality, the NFL announced Thursday it will commit $250 million over 10 years as part of its initiative to combat systemic racism. The NFL also is recognizing Juneteenth as a league holiday. Bennett, however, believes the NFL needs to show more than just words and money to prove it's indeed a fighter for change.

“Is the intent of the NFL to really make a positive impact or is it not to be seen as if they don’t respect the players?" Bennett asked. “We have to continuously push the NFL to change its core values and change its moral compass on a consistent basis."

Fired Florida scientist builds coronavirus site showing far more cases than state reports

CITIZEN HERO

Chris Persaud, The Palm Beach Post,
USA TODAY•June 12, 2020


PALM BEACH, Fla. – Florida’s former top coronavirus data scientist has launched a website showing far more COVID-19 information than she said the state allowed her to report as an employee, including statistics contradicting Florida’s official coronavirus numbers accompanying the push to reopen the state.

Former Health Department geographic data scientist Rebekah Jones has created FloridaCOVIDAction.com, which asserts that the state’s widely read public-facing dashboard under reports how many people have tested positive for the pathogen. Florida also overcounts how many have been tested, Jones said, to the benefit of Gov. Ron DeSantis’ push to reopen the state after two months of quarantine.

“I decided to stop wallowing in self-pity and do something constructive, something useful with the skill set I’ve been using for so long,” Jones said. “People have a right to know what’s going on in a straightforward nonpolitical kind of way.”

More: Fired DOH official to speak out, reveals new details of alleged COVID-19 data 'manipulation' attempt

The information her dashboard reports comes from publicly available state data, much of which is not reported front-and-center on state websites, but buried in thousand-page reports or scattered PDF files. It includes hard-to-find hospital capacity information provided by another state agency, the Agency for Health Care Administration.

Jones, who built the state dashboard, says she was fired May 18 after refusing to “manipulate” COVID-19 data to justify reopening. DeSantis said she was fired because “she didn’t listen to the people who were her superiors.”

In her most noticeable break from the state, Jones’ site shows far more people with the illness than the state reports. To the daily number of people with positive coronavirus tests, Jones adds those testing positive to antibodies that may indicate the presence of the disease.

While the Health Department reported 69,069 confirmed cases on Thursday, Jones’ website showed 75,897.

More: Public remarks prompted Florida virus data curator's firing

That could be a mistake, cautioned Dr. Terry Adirim, chairwoman of Florida Atlantic University’s Department of Integrated Biomedical Science. She warned against combining the results because antibody tests are more prone to false positives. Jones separately shows the state’s tally as well.

Jones' site also offers a different death toll. She listed 2,938 deaths in Florida on Thursday while the state listed 2,848 because her site includes deaths of non-residents who caught the virus in Florida.

The state has excluded those people since mid-April. The Palm Beach Post includes non-resident deaths in its daily reporting.
Tests or people tested?

One of Jones’ most controversial claims after her firing was that the state fiddled with the so-called positivity rate to make it easier to justify reopening counties that weren’t ready by using the wrong testing data to draw its conclusions.

On Thursday, the Health Department’s site declared more than 1.3 million “total people tested” in bold type on its website. But Jones’ website says the true figure is about 30 percent less, just over 1 million.

More: Fired scientist defends her COVID-19 data role, portrays Florida Dept. of Health as corrupt

More: Accusations fly around dismissed Health Department official, but questions about COVID-19 data persist

The state’s testing tally reflects the number of tests conducted, not how many people were tested, a state data guide shows.

The figure Jones reports isn’t on any easily viewed public website maintained by the state. It can be found by downloading data non-programmers would find incomprehensible. The Post uses that data for a county-by-county testing map that has been on its website since March.

If Florida is indeed misreporting how many people have been tested, it makes the health situation in Florida look better than it is. By dividing the number of cases into the number of tests instead of the number of people tested, the state erroneously reports a lower percentage of people testing positive, Jones said.

More: Florida scientist was fired for 'refusing to manipulate' COVID-19 data, she said

When DeSantis allowed most of the state to reopen in early May, he relied in part on positivity, demanding that less than 10 percent of those tested in every county have positive test results before a county could reopen.

Some counties that met the criteria using the state’s formula may have fallen short under Jones’ definition.

For instance, Palm Beach County would have a 12 percent positivity rate under Jones’ formula, while the state calculates a positivity rate of less than 8 percent.
A report card on reopening

The state allowed Palm Beach County to start reopening businesses on May 11 even after testing uncovered outbreaks in the Glades and Lake Worth Beach. The number of new daily cases in the county has skyrocketed since late May.

Jones’ dashboard shows “report cards” judging each county’s readiness to enter Phase 2.

The state’s benchmarks for reopening also include two weeks of declining counts in new cases, declines in COVID-like illness from hospitals and emergency rooms and positivity.

By Jones’ calculations based on data reported last week, only two counties qualify: Liberty and Clay.

But without the backing of the state, it is uncertain that her site will win over the public. In a statement announcing the new site, Jones said her website “will always be under construction,” and “we look forward to hearing from the community about what they would like to see on their dashboard.”

Jones’ site also lists details collected by the state for each victim, including those from before March 1, when Florida announced its first cases. “92-year-old Male in Palm Beach County, who was first diagnosed or tested 2/29/2020, 7:00 PM and became an official case after DOH received positive lab results 3/27/2020, 1:00 AM,” one record reads for example.

“We weren’t allowed to really draw attention to deaths, which is why I added hospitalizations and deaths which use something we buried in a PDF but never showed on our dashboard,” Jones said. “So people can bring the humanity aspect of this to the forefront.”
Where can you get tested?

While the state’s dashboard reports only the number of residents who have ever been hospitalized with COVID-19, Jones’ includes hospitalizations and deaths of non-residents. It also pulls the AHCA data to show the number of intensive care unit beds available by hospital, illustrating the strain the virus is putting on health care.

Unlike the state dashboard, Jones includes a map showing hundreds of testing sites statewide, with information such as phone numbers, addresses and how to schedule an appointment.

Jones created the state’s dashboard and map in March, working at one point, she said, 36 days straight without a day off. It earned praise from Dr. Deborah Birx, the White House coronavirus response coordinator. Jones was in charge of updating statewide coronavirus figures, which detail the number of tests and confirmed cases for each county.

A Health Department manager asked Jones in early May to hide state data from public view the night before The Post reported that Floridians felt COVID-19 symptoms as early as January. Jones told her boss in an email it was the “wrong call” but removed the data.

After The Post story published, it was returned to the site.

Jones was removed from her data management duties on May 5, she said, in retaliation for refusing to “manipulate” the data to make coronavirus look less prevalent among those getting tested for the pathogen.

On May 29, the state’s dashboard went offline for a day, hidden behind a login screen, when a Health Department worker tried to program the software powering the dashboard to make the data private.

Jones, who lives in Tallahassee, has set up a GoFundMe account while she works on her dashboard, with a goal of raising $50,000. Contributors have donated more than $4,000 so far.

“I was very very worried about paying bills next Friday,” she said.

Loblaw, Metro scrap premium pay for grocery workers

IF THESE COMPANIES COLLABORATED TO FIX PRICES IT WOULD BE ILLEGAL 
WHY NOT WHEN THEY COLLABORATE TO FIX WAGES?

Alicja Siekierska Yahoo Finance Canada June 12, 2020

REUTERS/Mark Blinch GALEN WESTON CEO

Grocery retailers are preparing to end the $2 per hour pay raise provided to frontline workers through the coronavirus pandemic.

Loblaw (L.TO), Metro (MRU.TO), Empire (EMP) and Walmart Canada have each confirmed that the temporary pandemic pay bump will be coming to an end. Loblaw, Metro and Empire, which operates the Sobeys chain, said the pay increase will end on June 13. Walmart did not specify a date.

In a letter sent to PC Optimum customers on Thursday, Loblaw executive chairman Galen Weston said it was “the right time” to end the temporary pay premium, which was introduced when the pandemic began in mid-March.

“Things have now stabilized in our supermarkets and drug stores,” Weston wrote.

“After extending the premium multiple times, we are confident our colleagues are operating safely and effectively in a new normal.”

Metro spokesperson Marie-Claude Bacon said in a statement the company will pay full-time and part-time employees bonuses of $200 and $100, respectively, as the company ends the premium pay.

“We are no longer working under the crisis conditions that prevailed from March through May as grocers were amongst the only retailers open to the public,” Bacon said.

“Demand is stabilizing as other business are reopening. A host of prevention measures have been implemented and adopted, by both employees and customers, and we are now transitioning into recovery while not letting our guard down.”

Michael Medline, chief executive of Sobeys, sent a letter to employees on Friday announcing the end of its “Hero Pay” program, saying that it was “a natural time” to end the program with provinces reopening and customer behaviour shifting to normal. He said the company will be offering bonuses to employees, with specific details about the program to come.

Walmart Canada, which implemented the pay boost, said in a statement that it has also returned wages to pre-pandemic levels.

Loblaw, Metro and Walmart were three of several retailers that offered a pay increase to workers through the coronavirus pandemic. Empire Ltd., which operates several grocery retailers including Sobeys, also offered a temporary top up of wages for their employees. Empire has not responded to a request for comment.

The United Food and Commercial Workers union, which represents thousands of grocery workers across Canada, released a statement on Thursday calling on companies to continue paying workers the premium wage.

“UFCW Canada is disappointed that employers in various sectors across Canada are choosing to stop paying COVID-19 premium pay while the pandemic continues, and some provinces are still enforcing precautionary measures,” the union said in a statement.

“Premium pay should be maintained throughout the pandemic.”

Grocery stores have seen sales surge amid the coronavirus pandemic.

Sales at Loblaw jumped in the company’s most recent fiscal quarter, which included the first three weeks of March, when the pandemic struck and governments began enforcing lockdowns across the country. The company an extra $751 million in sales in that quarter related to the coronavirus pandemic, while overall sales increased by $1.1 billion, or 10.8 per cent, to $11.8 billion.Expenses also increased, as the company spent more on expanding online capabilities, increasing staffing and wages, cleaning and safety supplies, installing plexiglass barriers, and social distancing promotion. The measures cost Loblaw $90 million every four weeks, the company said.

At Metro, sales in its most recent quarter hit $3.99 billion, up from $3.7 billion during the same time last year, representing an increase of 7.8 per cent. The company estimated that COVID-19 contributed to a $125 million increase in sales in the quarter.

Fauci 'concerned' that George Floyd protests could lead to coronavirus spike, but has no comment on Trump rallies

FAUCI HAS BECOME TRUMPIZED

Alexander Nazaryan National Correspondent,Yahoo News•June 12, 2020

WASHINGTON — The nation’s most prominent public health official said he is worried that the recent widespread protests against police brutality could lead to a spike in coronavirus cases. At the same time, he declined to speculate on whether campaign rallies resumed by President Trump would result in a similar spike.

“You know, I’m concerned. I am,” Dr. Anthony Fauci told Yahoo News about the protests in a conversation that ranged from the 1918 influenza pandemic to the 79-year-old immunologist’s famous running habit.

Though his official title is director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at the National Institutes of Health, millions of Americans have come to trust and revere the blunt Brooklynite, elevating him to celebrity status.

Dr. Anthony Fauci. (Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images)

A leading member of the White House coronavirus task force, Fauci has sometimes angered Trump by straying from the president’s optimistic view on matters. But at least in the case of the protests that followed the killing of George Floyd by police officers in Minneapolis, Fauci appears to be aligned with those in the president’s camp who say that some media outlets, public health officials and politicians have shied from criticizing the protests, even if just weeks ago those same people were quick to condemn sometimes-armed protesters pushing states to end lockdown restrictions.

Without commenting on the protesters, Fauci observed that the demonstrations contravened virtually all of the social distancing guidelines issued by the White House task force in March. “You’re having crowds, and we recommend not to go in crowds. Physical distancing is impossible,” Fauci told Yahoo News, speaking from a National Institutes of Health boardroom (and thereby depriving the public of views into his much-discussed home office in Washington, D.C.).

“When people get animated, they get involved in the demonstration, they start chanting and shouting and screaming, very often they take their mask off,” Fauci said. In some cities, protest organizers distributed face masks and hand sanitizer to attendees; at the largest gatherings, in Washington and New York, most did seem to be wearing face coverings, which can greatly reduce the risk of virus transmission.

Just how much transmission the protests will produce will become evident in the weeks to come, but Fauci said that reported infections in the D.C. National Guard are an inauspicious sign.

A crowd of protesters in Brooklyn. (Erik McGregor/LightRocket via Getty Images)

The protests are hardly the only evidence that a lockdowned nation has grown restless. Earlier this week, President Trump announced that he would be holding his first campaign rally in three months in Tulsa, Okla., on June 19. Attendees will have to sign a waiver abdicating the right to file coronavirus-related suits.

An able politician who has served every president since Ronald Reagan — in whose administration he led the effort to fight HIV/AIDS — Fauci can be forthright and circumspect in the same sentence. A question about Trump’s campaign rallies brought out the latter quality.

“I don’t really want to comment on that,” he said. “It’s not productive.” The reticence seems rooted in the recognition that Trump would likely take any warning about rallies as a slight. Some of the president’s more conspiratorial supporters have long pushed him to dismiss Fauci, manufacturing stories about how the revered immunologist is actually a Democratic plant.

Staying in Trump’s good graces may mean having to stay silent on issues like the upcoming rallies, even though the president’s supporters skew older and, like the president himself, may be reluctant to wear face masks in public. Packing those supporters into an arena could be a public health disaster, as Fauci doubtlessly knows.

(On Friday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention “strongly” encouraged the wearing of face masks at high-attendance events, a comment that could in part be a reference to forthcoming Trump campaign rallies.)

Dr. Anthony Fauci, right, and President Trump in the Rose Garden of the White House. (Drew Angerer/Getty Images)

The president has been less focused on the public health aspect of the coronavirus pandemic than on its economic effects, which are bound to have ramifications for his reelection prospects. Fauci said that he had what he described as a “nice meeting” with Trump last week. “You don’t have to see the president every day for the president to be interested in it,” he argued, while at the same time acknowledging that Trump is “getting input” from “other components” of his administration.

Governors of both parties have been eager to reopen, with Republican-led states in the Southeast and Southwest generally moving faster than coastal states led by Democrats. But every state has reopened to some degree, and most are expected to continue to reopen, even as infection rates in many parts show a troubling rise.

Fauci has a message for states seeking to return to normal: “If you do it, don’t throw all caution to the wind,” he said, adding that governors should insist on face coverings and social distancing measures.

And he has a similar message for ordinary people exhausted by what the coronavirus has wrought. “I feel the same thing,” said Fauci, who was praised by some HIV/AIDS activists for his compassion in the 1980s, when many shunned and condemned victims of the disease. “I lock down when I am not doing duty as a health official,” he added. “And I’m cut off from all the kinds of social and interactions. I’d love to go to a movie. I’d love to sit down at my favorite restaurant. It’s tough.”

It’s toughest of all, he said, for the millions who have lost jobs as a result of the coronavirus pandemic.

Fauci continues to exercise, though the running is now sometimes speed-walking. On the continuing debate about whether runners should wear masks, Fauci understands why doing so is uncomfortable in the midst of physical exertion. “When you breathe in, it feels like you’re waterboarding yourself,” he joked.

Dr. Anthony Fauci at the White House. (Jabin Botsford/the Washington Post via Getty Images)

His solution for when he runs through the woodsy upper northwest section of Washington is a hybrid one. “When I see that there’s nobody within a hundred feet of me, I might take it down and breathe regularly,” he admitted.

“When I see people coming — and there are people walking on the street — I put the mask back on. As soon as I pass them, and I’m alone again, I’ll take it down a little. I think that’s reasonable. You don’t have to have it on if there’s nobody around.”

What he won’t tolerate, however, are assertions that the coronavirus is not as serious as public health officials have made it out to be. That argument has been proffered by coronavirus skeptics like Alex Berenson, the former New York Times journalist whose embittered Twitter diatribes against lockdown measures have earned him frequent appearances on Fox News.

“How can you characterize it as anything other than denialism?” Fauci wondered of those who doubt the seriousness of the coronavirus pandemic, which has killed 423,000 people worldwide and is the worst viral outbreak since the 1918 influenza.

“To say that this is not a serious situation is just not facing reality,” said Fauci, a veteran not only of the HIV/AIDS fight, but also of the battles against Ebola, Zika and other infectious diseases.

He urged a decidedly unglamorous but effective practice: patience.

“Clearly, this is not going to just disappear spontaneously,” Fauci said of the coronavirus. “If this would go away, the way SARS did,” he continued, referring to the deadly respiratory disease that struck in 2003, “then we would just have to gut it out and then it’s going to be gone. But that’s not going to happen.”

It is difficult not to take that as a rebuke of Trump, who repeatedly claimed in the early stages of the pandemic that the virus would “go away.” So far, it has done no such thing.

But just moments later, Fauci evinced an optimism similar to Trump’s. “It is not inevitable that you’re going to have a resurgence. In other words, you may be able to tiptoe into normality.” The difference is that Fauci doesn’t think this normality will appear spontaneously. Instead, it will take discipline on the part of the public and preparation on the part of public health officials.

And so his ultimate message is that even after a difficult spring, now is hardly the time to declare that the coronavirus has been defeated.

“It’s not over yet,” Fauci warned.

Marches aren't enough. New York protest leaders have lasting change in mind.

Phil McCausland, NBC News•June 12, 2020


Hawk Newsome, the co-founder of Black Lives Matter of Greater New York, paced in the center of a circle of about a dozen activists Sunday. Those in the group, which included representatives from several different city advocacy groups, raised their fists in the air. A crowd of thousands waited expectantly 10 yards away.

This, Newsome said, was their moment to define what comes next.

The organizers were gathered a few blocks from Times Square in Manhattan, where they had planned to rally before the New York City Police Department cut off their route. Many nodded as Newsome lamented “activism tourists,” describing those who had stepped in and out of the movement since Eric Garner died in 2014, pleading for his life while a police officer held him in a chokehold.

“Everyone in this circle has stayed the course,” said Newsome, one of the most bellicose and public-facing Black organizers in the nation. “So now that the whole world is marching, it is our opportunity and our obligation to give them a plan — to give them demands.”


Newsome’s pump-up speech served as a precursor to a two-hour event that included speeches from academics, poets, organizers, musicians, social media influencers and a candidate for Congress, most of whom appeared to be in their early 20s. The actor and comedian Nick Cannon declared that he was “ready to put my life on the line for my people.”

But the focus of the event was its conclusion: a list of 24 policies and reforms, known as “The Blueprint,” that Black Lives Matter expects New York City and the state to incorporate. The reforms, which include everything from the “I Can’t Breathe” Act and disbanding police unions to education equity, affordable housing and reparations, were catalyzed in part by the sweeping backlash over the police custody death of George Floyd in Minneapolis.

The aims are to investigate police and invest in communities of color.

“We now have all 50 states paying attention,” Chelsea Miller, the founder of Freedom March NYC, said. “So now the question is how do we push even further past conversations about the police’s use of chokeholds and think about the system as a whole.”

Beyond providing a list of policies, the four-page document appears to have helped consolidate multiple New York protest organizations, led by young people, under a banner as they push for long-term political and policy changes.

There are numerous groups working across the city, many with similar policy goals but separate plans on how to achieve them.

Celebrities Support The Black Lives Matter Movement (Noam Galai / Getty Images)

“We’re trying to make sure we’re all on the same page,” said Joseph Martinez, a member of Warriors in the Garden, a college-age group in which he has focused on political and policy goals. “We’re all fighting for the same thing: We have different ideas about how to get there, but we’re always in contact and telling each other what we’re doing.”

The efforts of the numerous groups are generally concerted, said Martinez, who was recently arrested by the NYPD while protesting, but many organizations have shared their intention to submit their own proposals beyond “The Blueprint” provided by Black Lives Matter of Greater New York.

Full coverage of George Floyd’s death and protests around the country

Still many are working together to support candidates for office, educate marchers on policy, begin voter registration drives, raise money for personal protective equipment to protect against the pandemic, and meeting with each other and local politicians to navigate a way forward.

“We understand that we’re going to be here for a while, and so we really want to take this opportunity to create a world that is more in line with our goals,” said Carlos Polanco, a Dartmouth University student at the rally who works with Black Lives Matter and has helped lead a number of protests. “We believe in a world without police and mass incarceration, and so we’re trying to show, not just the number of people protesting, but also create a model of what our future can look like.”
‘This isn’t a rally. This is a revolution.’

Protest organizers aim to harness the energy of the movement now in New York City and create change at the local, state and national levels. While thousands have taken to the streets each day for two weeks under their young leadership, they are clear-eyed that marches alone won’t bring long-term sustained change.

Since the protests began, they successfully brought major New York City roadways to a standstill with a crush of people standing shoulder-to-shoulder. Organizers still have numerous political goals: getting people of color into positions of power — city councils, state legislatures and Congress — as well as removing President Donald Trump from office and replacing New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio either through his resignation or the election in 2021.

“The whole country is fighting white supremacy,” said Vidal Guzman, who has led marches and works as an organizer for JustLeadershipUSA, a group aimed at ending mass incarceration. “There’re three pillars to that: getting Trump out of office, reporting and locking up officers who are killing people, and then pulling together a policy package on the state and local level.”

The frustration with government inaction — especially from a mayor who appealed to communities of color — runs deep in the Black activist community in New York City, where many feel as though they receive lip service and performative gestures at most and only when there is clear pressure.

This week, many pointed to the mayor’s announcement that he would paint “Black Lives Matter” on one street in each of the boroughs. This stands in contrast to his lackluster response to the NYPD’s recent use of force against protesters or the long-term issues that organizers have seen within city and state governments.

In the past two weeks alone, as marches have gained steam, organizers also point to the mayor’s defense of the police when they penned protesters on the Manhattan Bridge for hours, the use of excessive force, like when an NYPD vehicle drove into a crowd of protesters, or the police’s removal of masks from those they arrest before putting them in crowded holding cells.

Image: Chivona Newsome, US-POLITICS-RACE-UNREST (Bryan R. Smith / AFP - Getty Images)
It’s this type of leadership that caused Chivona Newsome to mount a congressional campaign in the Bronx, she said. Newsome, Hawk’s sister and also a co-founder of Black Lives Matter of Greater New York, said politicians have the ability to make changes immediately if they choose to address the issues.

Chivona Newsome, who told the crowd Sunday that “This isn’t a rally: This is a revolution,” said that it shouldn’t take being elected to bring these concepts to policymakers.

“Legislation is the most important thing to protect our people, to get the justice that we want, because without it, we will be denied,” Newsome said. “The policies we’re introducing are not what I’m promising once I get to Congress in January 2021, they’re what we’re demanding from people who are in office now.”
Educating a new group of protesters

Organizers realize that the adoption of these reforms will require educating the “activism tourists” that Hawk Newsome lamented.

Warriors in the Garden, the group organized by college students in New York City, said it is actively working to register those at its protests to vote, holding marches explicitly designed for school-aged children and their parents and expanding a digital campaign via Instagram and TikTok to engage younger people and educate them about the issues. In time, they plan to endorse candidates and are focused on emphasizing the importance of local elections.

Education, multiple members of the group said, is key to undermining systemic racism and oppression, particularly if they want to make the next generation better.

Download the NBC News app for full coverage and alerts on this story

“We have the kids at the end of the day,” said Livia Rose Johnson, 20, a marketing student at Sarah Lawrence College who is helping lead the Warriors. “Gen-Z is listening, and we recognize that. So while we are sending people to do marches today, the big pivot is from protests on the streets to digital protesting. We want to get louder than the same 5,000 to 10,000 people we have marching every day.”

But some organizers are also attempting to force the city to reckon with its values in physical ways, as well. The hope is that changing the physical shape of New York City and its prominent monuments will cause people to educate themselves.

In 2017, Glenn Cantave began asking New York City to reexamine its monuments, specifically ones with ties to white supremacy or violence against communities of color. Cantave, the head of Movers and Shakers NYC, said his pleas fell on deaf ears — even his specific request about the statue of Christopher Columbus in Manhattan’s Columbus Circle.
Image: Glenn Cantave, Celebrities Support The Black Lives Matter Movement (Noam Galai / Getty Images)

Amid the demonstrations, he said, it’s hard to ignore that protesters have beheaded a statue of Columbus in Boston and a group in Richmond tore down another sculpture before throwing it into a lake.

Feeling ignored by the city government, Cantave is using the digital space to educate future organizers and communities of color about their own history.

He is now in the late stages of developing an app that creates digital models of Black and brown heroes of history to help teach kids at home, an activity he pursues between helping organize street protests and raising money to buy personal protective equipment to safeguard protesters against the coronavirus.

“This is a work around because these institutions are refusing to highlight those narratives,” said Cantave, who has helped pass out 10,000 KN95 masks across the five boroughs this past week. “This allows people to do it at home, transform your space into a learning space and make it fun.”

“But this isn’t about optics,” he added, “this is about power and getting the information in people's heads, so they think differently when they go vote.”

Starbucks bows to 'boycott' pressure, will let staff wear Black Lives Matter gear

GEAR THAT STARBUCKS IS PRODUCING

Julia La Roche Correspondent, Yahoo Finance•June 12, 2020

Starbucks (SBUX) announced on Friday it would allow employees to wear apparel in support of the Black Lives Matter movement, bowing to an intense social media campaign even as the company moves to crank out over 250,000 specialty shirts of its own.

This week, Starbucks was hit with online backlash and renewed calls for a boycott, following reports that it has banned employees from wearing pins and t-shirts at work in support of Black Lives Matter protests.

However, the reason for the policy is pretty technical, despite accusations to the contrary. To address the issue, Starbucks is planning to crank out hundreds of thousands of apparel items in support of a movement demanding change — but will also let its employees wear their own gear immediately.

“As we talked about earlier this week, we’re designing new t-shirts with the graphic below to demonstrate our allyship and show we stand together in unity,” Starbucks executives wrote in a letter to employees entitled “Standing together against racial injustice.”

The note added: “Until these arrive, we’ve heard you want to show your support, so just be you. Wear your BLM pin or t-shirt. We are so proud of your passionate support of our common humanity. We trust you to do what’s right while never forgetting Starbucks is a welcoming third place where all are treated with dignity and respect.”

'Designed for partners, by partners, our Starbucks Black Partner Network and allies created the t-shirt to recognize the historic significance of this time. Together, we’re saying: Black Lives Matter and it’s going to take ALL of us, working together, to affect change,' Starbucks executives wrote in a memo on Friday.

The company’s ban on personal apparel wasn’t specifically crafted for Black Lives Matter, nor did it recently take effect. Instead, a long-standing dress-code among Starbucks employees — known internally as “partners” — states that clothing accessories need to be company-issued, and can’t “advocate a political, religious or personal issue.”

According to a weekly update sent to baristas obtained by BuzzFeed News, store managers recently asked Starbucks leadership about employee requests to wear pins or t-shirts supporting Black Lives Matter. The memo pointed to Starbucks’ dress code, which states:

“Partners may only wear buttons or pins issued to the partner by Starbucks for special recognition or for advertising a Starbucks-sponsored event or promotion; and one reasonably sized and placed button or pin that identifies a particular labor organization or partner’s support for that organization, except if it interferes with safety or threatens to harm customer relations or otherwise unreasonably interferes with Starbucks public image. Pins must be securely fastened. Partners are not permitted to wear buttons or pins that advocate a political, religious or personal issue.”

According to the bulletin, Starbucks’ head of diversity and inclusion accused “agitators who misconstrue the fundamental principles of the Black Lives Matter movement — and in certain circumstances, intentionally repurpose them to amplify divisiveness.”

A spokesperson told Yahoo Finance in an email that “Black lives matter, and Starbucks is committed to doing our part in ending system racism. We respect all of our partners’ opinions and beliefs, and encourage them to bring their whole selves to work while adhering to our dress code policy with a commitment to create a safe and welcoming Third Place environment for all.”
250,000 t-shirts underway

Barista Sarah Dacuno, left, is embraced by assistant manager Lindsey Pringle outside the Pike Place Market Starbucks, commonly referred to as the original Starbucks, as they prepare to close it for the day Tuesday, May 29, 2018, in Seattle. The first Starbucks cafe was located nearby in the early 1970's. Starbucks closed more than 8,000 stores nationwide on Tuesday to conduct anti-bias training, the next of many steps the company is taking to try to restore its tarnished image as a hangout where all are welcome. (AP Photo/Elaine Thompson)

According to BuzzFeed, some Starbucks partners expressed disappointment that Black Lives Matter attire isn’t permitted at work under the dress code. Those quoted in the article specifically pointed out that many employees wear buttons for LGBTQ rights, which were issued by Starbucks.

Yet Starbucks collaborates with its diverse partner networks — which include a range of groups that cut across racial, ethnic and gender lines — to create company-approved merchandise like t-shirts, buttons, and pins. For example, on Fridays, partners were permitted to wear their R.E.D. (remember everyone deployed) t-shirts in recognition of military service members.

Last year, ahead of the 50th anniversary for the Stonewall Riots, Starbucks worked with its LGBTQ partner network, the Pride Alliance, to create a special t-shirt for its U.S. partners that could be worn at work.

“Collaborating with the Partner Network on this limited-edition t-shirt gave us an opportunity to amplify our LGBTQ partners’ voices, bring LGBTQ partners and allies together, and show up in a way that is unique to Starbucks,” according to an internal Starbucks memo sent this week seen by Yahoo Finance.

In that memo, Starbucks said it’s working with its Black Partner Network to produce a t-shirt for all of its baristas that will speak out against systemic racism, and emphasize the company’s “role and responsibility to not be bystanders.”

The process could wrap up within days, Starbucks said, which would produce over 250,000 shirts promoting an anti-racism message.

Starbucks said it has “a similar opportunity,” as it did with the 50th anniversary of Stonewall, to “lend our collective voice in support of our Black partners, customers and communities in this historic moment in time.” The company added that it was “in it for the long haul and this will be our way of showing our support for the movement.”

In the note, Starbucks also encouraged partners to sign up for its systemic racism and bias course. The company is also holding conversations around police reform, the meaning of Juneteenth, and is promoting Bryan Stevenson’s film, “Just Mercy,” that’s screening across multiple platforms.

Starbucks also said, “participating in local rallies, supporting the Black Partner network, participating in the many forms of civic engagement, and volunteering with local organizations are all ways we can affect real and meaningful change.”


Julia La Roche is a Correspondent at Yahoo Finance. Follow her on Twitter.