All Posts Tagged as 'Unity'

Donald Trump has mocked Joe Biden for 'coming out of the basement earlier than his hoped', after polls showed the president ahead in key battleground states.

Biden will campaign on Monday in Pennsylvania - a swing state vital for victory

In a series of Sunday evening tweets, the president celebrated recent polling, which suggests he is on course to defeat his Democrat rival.

Jacob Blake's sister delivered a powerful speech at the March on Washington's 57th anniversary rally where she ordered Black America to 'stand up' and fight, but urged the public to avoid 'violence and chaos'.

Letetra Widman took the stand at the Lincoln Memorial, where Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his historic, 'I Have a Dream' speech in 1963, and said, 'We will not be a footstool to oppression.'

'Black America, I hold you accountable. You must stand, you must fight, but not was violence and chaos. Learn to love yourself black people. Unify,' Widman said.

Deshauntis stepped outside and surveyed the scene in his hometown. In the aftermath of days of protests over the police shooting of a Black man, dozens of people had come to paint the city’s boarded-up downtown in bright, colorful murals. A man was singing folk music. A local church was handing out big cups of free strawberry lemonade.

"I see the effort," Deshauntis said, tightly. He added, "I don’t really see a lot of Black people out here."

And the murals — they didn’t say “Black Lives Matter.” The message across all of downtown Kenosha, where some buildings had been scorched during the protests and others reduced to still-smoking rubble, was about love. That’s what people were painting almost everywhere: “Love is the answer.”

“I support the protests,” John, who like other people interviewed for this story asked not to have his last name used, told BuzzFeed News. “I do not support the violence and the anarchy.”

He pointed, though, to the words “No Justice, No Peace,” a common rallying cry of the Black Lives Matter movement. “I totally disagree with this,” he said. “That’s not the way it goes. Justice and peace I agree with, but when it’s worded this way, that is not the way to handle it. Otherwise we’ll continue to have anarchy.”

With California firefighters strapped for resources, residents have organized to put out flames themselves in a large swath of land burning south of San Francisco, defending their homes despite orders to evacuate and pleas by officials to get out of danger.

They are going in despite California’s firefighting agency repeatedly warning people that it’s not safe and actually illegal to go into evacuated areas, and they can hinder official efforts to stop the flames. The former head of the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection said the effort near a cluster of wildfires around the city of Santa Cruz is larger and more organized than he recalls in previous blazes.

“People are frustrated with the lack of resources available. People are always going to try to sneak back in, but it sounds like this is growing to a new level,” said Ken Pimlott, who retired as director of the Cal Fire in 2018. “I haven’t seen people re-engage to this scale, particularly with the level of organization.”

Joe Biden condemned the 'needless violence' in Kenosha, Wisconsin in the wake of police shooting Jacob Blake and said Wednesday he had spoken with members of Blake's family.

'Protesting brutality is a right and absolutely necessary, but burning down communities is not protest, it's needless violence,' Biden said. 'Violence that endangers lives, violence that guts businesses and shutters businesses that serve the community, that's wrong.'

The Democratic presidential nominee said he had spoken with Blake's mother, father and sister, and quoted his mother Julia Jackson in the short video Biden posted to Twitter.

The arson, looting and rioting have died down, but we’re still a long way from cultural normalcy in the US of A. (That A is for antagonism). One strange new feature of the culture is the abject, I-hurl-myself-at-your-feet-and-spit-on-myself apology in which celebrities demand everyone sit up and pay attention while they tell us how sorry they are about some nonsense infraction they committed years ago.

The Black Lives Matter movement is hotter than any movie star right now, so even white movie stars crave a piece of it. They loudly shout about the racial virtue they possess that no one asked about in the first place. For instance, Ryan Reynolds. Why did he feel the need to apologize this week for having his wedding to Blake Lively on a “plantation”?

Barack Obama used to live in a house — a large, white one — that was originally built with slave labor. Did he apologize, or marvel at how things have changed for the better? This entire country is built on ground where bad stuff once happened.

Later in the week a black actress, Zoe Saldana, apologized for playing a black singer, Nina Simone, in a movie nobody saw four years ago.

As if a Covid-19 pandemic wasn’t bad enough, the headlines suggest America is in the middle of a new wave of homicides — from New York City to Chicago to Minneapolis.

The data backs up the headlines, suggesting that homicide numbers are significantly higher in at least some major US cities. But it’s not clear if this is part of a nationwide phenomenon, or if it’s something isolated to urban centers, because we don’t have good data outside the large cities. To make matters more confusing, other types of crime, including violent crime overall, appear to have decreased in many of the same cities.

Still, there’s enough in the three data sets to draw some conclusions: At least in major US cities, homicides are up overall this summer — in some cases, significantly higher. But other kinds of crime, including violent crime overall, aren’t up and may actually have decreased so far this year. There was also a brief spike in burglaries in major cities starting in late May, an increase that was so brief and contained to specific cities that experts told me it was likely due to riots and looting surrounding some Black Lives Matter protests.

Beyond the pandemic, police are going to have more trouble fighting crime — including any current or future spikes — if large segments of the community don’t trust them. That’s where police reform comes into play. It’s a complicated topic, separate from a possible spike in violence this year. But, in short, experts say police should, at a minimum, show the communities they serve that they understand the concerns, acknowledge mistakes, and will change how officers are deployed and targeted.

Otherwise, there’s a good chance that protests against police will flare up, just as they did from 2014 to 2016 and have again this summer. If protests lead to more violence — whether by leading to depolicing, or sowing and exposing distrust in law enforcement — that’s going to create public safety problems.

If someone had suggested five months ago that we would be seeing more than 3 million cases and 135,000 COVID-19 deaths in the U.S. by mid-July, I wouldn’t have believed it.

But now it’s distinctly possible that, five months from now, half of all Americans could have been infected with SARS-CoV-2, and more than 800,000 Americans may die in this extraordinary outbreak. That is what many of our most prominent public-health experts now expect.

Scholars disagree about the meaning of this couplet. Some read the words as a reference to escaped slaves fighting alongside the British, who promised to grant freedom to Black soldiers in exchange for their service. Historian Jason Johnson has called “The Star-Spangled Banner” “a diss track to Black people who had the audacity to fight for their freedom.” Marc Ferris, the author of “Star-Spangled Banner: The Unlikely Story of America’s National Anthem,” has written that Key was likely using the term “slave” more loosely, to describe “all of the monarch’s loyal subjects, including British troops — as contrasted with free patriot Americans.” Others argue that this context is academic: The only part of the poem that anyone knows, that anyone ever sings, is the first stanza, the one that begins “O say, can you see.”

But there are also arguments against “The Star-Spangled Banner” on aesthetic grounds, criticisms that have dogged the anthem for decades. For one thing, it’s not an especially American song. Its lyrics are ornate and Anglophile, with syntax that frustrates the efforts of normal human Americans to follow along — to deduce who or what, exactly, is gleaming and streaming.

Two Disney World fanatics who live-streamed their trip to the Orlando theme park's reopening over the weekend are receiving intense backlash for vacationing amid a pandemic and continuing to explore the park after one fell ill.

YouTuber Tonya Blakey, known as That Crazy Disney Lady to her 9,500 subscribers, streamed over 10 hours of footage of her trip to the Magic Kingdom on Friday and Saturday. In the videos, she and her friend, Robin, wandered the grounds, rode Splash Mountain, and experienced a brief health scare.

Staffers at the Santa Monica fast food restaurant retaliated after Angela Martinez Gómez died after being reportedly made to work a week even while displaying symptoms. Picketers, as well as the complaint, claimed that the company did not provide staff with protective gear.

One manager at the branch at 1919 Pico Boulevard allegedly blamed the death of Gómez, 42, of Oaxaca, Mexico, on hormone injections, KTLA5 reported.

Managers made Gómez carry on working for a week even while she spluttered, took frequent bathroom breaks and was visibly ill, the complaint said, before leaving her June 26 shift early.