Press secretary Kayleigh McEnany came to her press briefing on Monday prepared to defend President Trump’s assertion that “99 percent” of U.S. coronavirus cases are “totally harmless” with two charts that inadvertently disproved his claim.
In 1989, five Black and Hispanic teens were falsely accused of raping and nearly killing Trisha Meili, a white woman jogging in Central Park. Known collectively as the Central Park Five, Antron McCray, Kevin Richardson, Yusef Salaam, Raymond Santana and Korey Wise were convicted in two trials despite a lack of eyewitness testimony or DNA evidence and spent between six and 13 years in prison. Exonerated in 2002 after an investigation confirmed that a convicted murderer and rapist had committed the crime, the Central Park Five sued the city and state of New York, settling for millions.
School districts say they want to be more proactive in battling systemic racism, from hiring diverse teachers to desegregating schools. Is it enough?
On Tuesday, the Lincoln Project, a conservative political action committee formed in late 2019, released an ad titled “Whispers,” which suggests those in President Trump’s inner circle are secretly mocking him. This is the latest in a series of attack ads produced and distributed by the committee, whose members include George Conway, Steve Schmidt and other prominent Republicans who oppose Trump. Yahoo News has assembled a compilation of some of the Lincoln Project’s most controversial advertisements.
The Kremlin spokesman says that Moscow will respond to new UK sanctions against Russian citizens including a senior investigator and prison officials. Britain on Monday used a new legislation drafted in the memory of a killed Russian tax adviser to sanction 25 Russian nationals linked to prosecution and mistreatment of tax adviser Sergei Magnitsky as well as 20 Saudis involved in the murder of a journalist in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul. Dmitry Peskov, the Kremlin spokesman, told reporters on Tuesday that Moscow “can only lament such hostile steps.” “We will certainly rely on reciprocity and respond in the way that fits Russia’s interests,” he said. Alexander Bastrykin, Russia’s top investigator and a university friend of Vladimir Putin, is arguably the most senior official to have been slapped by the new sanctions and his name is likely to anger the Kremlin. As the head of the Investigative Committee, Mr Bastrykin is accused of covering up the mistreatment of Mr Magnitsky who died in prison after a year in pre-trial detention in 2009. A tax lawyer, Mr Magnitsky discovered a massive tax scam involving Russian tax authorities and ended up jailed by the same officials he had exposed. A Russian presidential commission concluded that he was beaten to death in prison. Most of the people on the sanctions list are lower-level officials and prison staff including two prison doctors who faced charges of negligence but were never convicted. All of them will now be subject to travel bans and asset freezes but it is not immediately clear if they have any property in Britain. The United States adopted the Magnitsky Act in 2012, targeting money of senior Russian officials kept in Western banks. Russia then responded with travel bans as well as a ban on American adoptions of Russian children. The Kremlin has outlawed institutions such as the British Council during previous diplomatic spats between the two countries, which does not leave Moscow much British property to target this time.
Cory Booker has won New Jersey's Democratic Senate primary. The incumbent Booker had faced Lawrence Hamm, who was running on Bernie Sanders' “Not Me. Us.” Booker arrived in the Senate in 2013 after serving as mayor of Newark.
Dubai has extradited "mrwoodbery" and "hushpuppi" to the US to face cyber fraud charges.
Betsy Schoeller said her Facebook comment about Vanessa Guillén was intended to provide a "voice" to the "culture of sexual harassment" women face.
Call me cynical, but I have a feeling the National Garden of American Heroes announced by President Trump on Friday will never get off — or into — the ground, even if he doesn’t put his son-in-law in charge of it. Establishing an official United States Hall of Fame will secure the reputations of Betsy Ross and Benjamin Franklin from the changing political winds, no less than the one in Cooperstown, N.Y., preserves for the ages the memories of Ted Williams and Roberto Clemente.