Sunday, May 31, 2020
What is the product of a crisis multiplied by a crisis?
The official mortality count of the covid-19 outbreak in the United States swept toward a hundred thousand, while the economic toll had left forty million people out of work.
It was difficult to countenance how so much misery could come about so quickly.
But on Memorial Day we became video witnesses to the horrific death of George Floyd, at the hands of the Minneapolis Police Department. By Friday, the looted shops, the charred buildings and cars, the smoldering Third Precinct—these were evidence of what the world looks like when a crisis is cubed.
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It was difficult to countenance how so much misery could come about so quickly.
But on Memorial Day we became video witnesses to the horrific death of George Floyd, at the hands of the Minneapolis Police Department. By Friday, the looted shops, the charred buildings and cars, the smoldering Third Precinct—these were evidence of what the world looks like when a crisis is cubed.
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Saturday, May 30, 2020
Friday, May 29, 2020
The Death of George Floyd, in Context
Outside a nearby precinct house, police cars were pelted with rocks, and officers responded by firing tear gas. But, within twenty-four hours of the video coming to light, the Minneapolis Police Department fired the officer who had knelt on Floyd and three others who had been at the scene. Mayor Jacob Frey tweeted that the firings were “the right call,” but here, too, context matters. In November, 2015, police responding to calls of a dispute between a man and a woman in north Minneapolis fatally shot a twenty-four-year-old African-American man named Jamar Clark. Police and paramedics on the scene claimed that Clark had resisted arrest and had attempted to grab an officer’s gun; bystanders claimed that he was handcuffed and on the ground when the shot was fired. Clark’s death was followed by more than two weeks of demonstrations outside the Fourth Police Precinct in Minneapolis, led by Black Lives Matter; an attempt to disrupt holiday shopping at the Mall of America, in protest; and cascading contempt from black residents that, two years later, factored into Mayor Betsy Hodges losing her reëlection bid. In light of that history, Frey has been unequivocal about police culpability in Floyd’s death. “Being black in America should not be a death sentence,” he said on Tuesday.
The larger question, however, is whether the officers involved will face any legal consequences.
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Twitter’s Servers Burst Into Flames After Attempting to Fact-Check All of Trump’s Tweets
Servers belonging to the social-media platform Twitter burst into flames on Thursday, after the company attempted to fact-check all of Donald Trump’s tweets.
“We knew that fact-checking Trump’s tweets was going to put a strain on our system,” Jack Dorsey, the C.E.O. of Twitter, said. “We had no idea that it would result in columns of fire shooting forty feet into the air.”
Reportedly, an explosion in the server fact-checking Trump’s tweets about Joe Scarborough ignited a blaze that quickly spread to a server furiously vetting his tweets about Barack Obama.
Fire trucks rushed to Twitter headquarters to extinguish the inferno, which San Francisco officials called the largest fact-checking-related fire incident in the city’s history.
While no one was injured in the conflagration, Dorsey quietly shelved plans to fact-check all of Donald Trump, Jr.,’s tweets.
The Borowitz Report
The Borowitz Report
Thursday, May 28, 2020
Flora & Fauna by Helen Ahpornsiri
Professional athletes train in lockdown
Team GB gymnast Dominick Cunningham trains at a horse stable in Walsall, UK
Here are photos taken in May showing how some athletes have been maintaining their training routines.
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