| Another Black life that mattered: A small town in Texas unites for justice for Jonathan Price after police kill 'an amazing person' Posted: 09 Oct 2020 10:24 AM PDT  Jonathan Price, a Black man, was killed by a white police officer after reportedly breaking up a domestic dispute on Oct. 3 in his hometown of Wolfe City, Texas. Many people within the small town are realizing that racism is not just a big-city issue, but a countrywide problem.
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| Supporter at right-wing 'Patriot Rally' shot dead after macing a TV security guard at Denver protest Posted: 11 Oct 2020 03:09 AM PDT  The incident, which was captured on camera by a photojournalist at the scene. Police said the security guard had no affiliation with antifa.
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| Surfboard, bits of wetsuit found after ‘monster’ shark attacks surfer in Australia Posted: 11 Oct 2020 07:55 AM PDT |
| Nurse who spoke at RNC arrested for shooting woman in the stomach Posted: 11 Oct 2020 05:46 AM PDT  Amy Ford, a West Virginia nurse who spoke at this year's Republican National Convention, was arrested on Saturday after shooting a woman in the stomach in her hometown. Ford, 39, who was identified as Amy Thorn in the court filing, was charged with malicious or unlawful assault after shooting a woman in her abdomen in Williamson, West Virginia. The victim has been identified by WSAZ -TV as Jonda Whitt.
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| Mexican president asks Pope Francis for conquest apology Posted: 10 Oct 2020 03:54 PM PDT  Mexico's president published an open letter to Pope Francis Saturday calling on the Roman Catholic Church to apologize for abuses of Indigenous peoples during the conquest of Mexico in the 1500s. In the letter, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador also asks the pope to lend Mexico ancient pre-Hispanic Mexican or colonial-era documents. "The Catholic Church, the Spanish monarchy and the Mexican government should make a public apology for the offensive atrocities that Indigenous people suffered," the letter states.
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| Republicans have packed the courts and openly 'brag about it,' top Senate Democrat complains Posted: 11 Oct 2020 08:50 AM PDT  The US Constitution does not specify how many federal judges there must be, including on the Supreme Court
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| 'The Big Burn' of 1910 transformed wildland firefighting. Will 2020 do the same? Posted: 11 Oct 2020 03:04 AM PDT  "Every acre of California can and will burn someday," a fire official said. "We need to embrace that and become resilient to it."
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| Southwest Airlines apologized to a woman who was blocked from boarding a flight because of her black halter top Posted: 10 Oct 2020 08:06 AM PDT  A Southwest Airlines employee blocked Kayla Eubanks from boarding a flight to Chicago for wearing what the employee called an inappropriate outfit.
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| Minneapolis Business at Site of George Floyd Killing Threatens to Sue City over ‘Autonomous Zone’ Posted: 10 Oct 2020 08:33 AM PDT  The owner of a grocery store at the site of the George Floyd killing in Minneapolis, Minn., has threatened to sue the mayor and city council over the establishment of an "autonomous zone" that the owner says is hurting businesses in the area, KTSP News reported on Thursday.Employees of the Cup Foods grocery store called police in May after Floyd allegedly attempted to use a counterfeit $20 bill during a purchase. The officers who responded have now been indicted for causing Floyd's death. The killing sparked massive riots in the city during which arsonists destroyed businesses as well as the city's third police precinct.Activists have barricaded an area of several blocks around Cup Foods for several weeks, turning the space into what is called an "autonomous zone." Seattle saw the establishment of an "autonomous zone" in June, but the area was evacuated following a series of shootings and an uptick in crime in the area.Now, the owner of Cup Foods, Mahmoud Abumayyaleh, is threatening to sue the city government due to what he says is an uptick in crime in the area of the store."After dark, the area is basically a lawless zone that is too dangerous to conduct business," the owner's attorney wrote in a letter to Mayor Jacob Frey and the Minneapolis City Council. "In fact, due to the city's barricades and refusal to provide law enforcement in the area, the city has created and is maintaining this lawless zone. This is unacceptable." The letter accused the city government of causing "significant financial losses" by refusing to send law enforcement to the area."We cannot sit idly by and watch crime increase with our eyes wide shut. That's dangerous," Jamar Nelson, a spokesperson for Abumayyaleh and a community activist, told KTSP. Nelson emphasized that crime has visibly gone up in the neighborhood, and that "for anybody to say otherwise is simply fooling themselves."Abumayyaleh has condemned the killing of Floyd repeatedly, calling it an "execution." However, in the wake of the incident, Abumayyaleh received death threats and commenters on social media threatened to burn his store down."There have been countless death threats," Nelson told the Sahan Journal in May. "They threatened to do harm to the store, and they threatened to do bodily harm to individuals in the store."
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| Most so-called “missing” ballots are simply unvoted ballots, Republican elections official says Posted: 09 Oct 2020 10:48 AM PDT  A prominent statistic cited by those concerned about election fraud — about millions of ballots that have supposedly gone missing over the last several years — is misleading and exaggerated, the top elections official in Washington state said in an interview.
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| Federal prosecutors did a dry run of family separations in Texas and found that children younger than 12 shouldn't be taken away from their parents Posted: 09 Oct 2020 10:53 PM PDT  In 2018, the Trump administration implemented a "zero-tolerance policy," program that separated kids as young as infants from their detained parents.
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| With his grandparents drifting away from the boat, he steps up to save them. He’s 11. Posted: 09 Oct 2020 04:24 PM PDT  A Hollywood couple and their 11-year-old grandson were rescued at sea Thursday by police, the U.S. Coast Guard and some commercial fishermen.
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| Australian navy ship tows unexploded bomb out to sea Posted: 10 Oct 2020 05:50 PM PDT  Australian navy divers have removed an unexploded 45-kilogram (100-pound) bomb on a reef off the southeastern coast and a ship towed it to deeper waters because it posed a "significant risk" to the public. The bomb was found by a fisherman on Elizabeth Reef near Lord Howe Island, about 550 kilometers (340 miles) off New South Wales state.
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| Kim throws down gauntlet with huge new ICBM: analysts Posted: 10 Oct 2020 09:03 PM PDT  The gargantuan new missile North Korea put on show at a military parade is an explicit threat to US defences and an implicit challenge to both the current and next American president, analysts say, warning Pyongyang could test the weapon next year.
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| State AG fires investigator accused of 'disrespectful' conduct over waitress's BLM pin Posted: 10 Oct 2020 12:40 PM PDT |
| Republicans express fears Donald Trump will lose presidential election Posted: 11 Oct 2020 12:10 AM PDT  Ted Cruz says he's afraid of 'bloodbath of Watergate proportions' as John Cornyn slams Trump for 'creating confusion' over CovidTed Cruz fears an election "bloodbath". His fellow top Republican senator Thom Tillis is talking in terms of a Joe Biden presidency. And even Mitch McConnell, the fiercely loyal Senate majority leader, won't go near the White House over Donald Trump's handling of coronavirus protocols.Individually, they could arguably be seen as off-the-cuff comments from Trump's allies attempting to rally support for the US president just days ahead of a general election that opinion polls increasingly show him losing.But collectively, along with pronouncements from several other Republicans appearing to distance themselves from Trump, his administration and its policies, it reflects growing concern inside the Republican party's top tier that 3 November could be a blowout win for Joe Biden and the Democrats."I think it could be a terrible election. I think we could lose the White House and both houses of Congress, that it could be a bloodbath of Watergate proportions," Cruz, the junior senator for Texas and former vocal critic of Trump, said in an interview on CNBC's Squawk Box on Friday."I am worried. It's volatile, it's highly volatile," he added, although he did say he also saw the possibility of Trump re-elected "with a big margin".Tillis, one of several Trump associates who contracted Covid-19 apparently at a super-spreader White House event two weeks ago, faces a tough fight for re-election as senator for North Carolina, and raised the prospect of a Trump defeat during a debate against Democratic challenger Cal Cunningham."The best check on a Biden presidency is for Republicans to have a majority in the senate," he said, inadvertently suggesting he thought a Democratic victory next month could be a done deal. "Checks and balances does resonate with North Carolina voters," he added.Elsewhere, Republican displeasure at Trump is becoming increasingly evident, especially among candidates locked in tight election races of their own.Martha McSally, the Arizona senator trailing the former Nasa astronaut Mark Kelly by a significant margin, attacked Trump for his repeated attacks on her predecessor, John McCain. "Quite frankly, it pisses me off when he does it," she said in a debate this week. The Texas senator John Cornyn slammed Trump this week for "creating confusion" over coronavirus and "letting his guard down" as the pandemic spread across the nation.McConnell's comments, meanwhile, about why he has not been to the White House for at least two months could be seen in a different context, given he is 78 and in the same at-risk demographic as the already infected president."My impression was that their approach to how to handle this is different from mine and what I suggested that we do in the Senate, which is to wear a mask and practice social distancing," he said.But dissent from the staunch Trump ally has been almost unheard of through the four years of the presidency. McConnell's words seem to reflect the threat that a nationwide backlash to Trump's pandemic handling poses to the Republican senate majority.
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| Protesters want Kansas City police officer fired after kneeling on pregnant Black woman Posted: 09 Oct 2020 12:18 PM PDT  Bystander footage of Deja Stallings' arrest shows the officer kneeling on her back as the crowd yells to stop because she is pregnant.
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| Despite stumbles and disruptions, VP debate shows America's progress: Readers Posted: 09 Oct 2020 02:39 PM PDT  On debate stage, vice presidential candidate Kamala Harris showed beyond a doubt that she is ready to lead this nation.
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| How to watch October's spectacular Orionids meteor shower Posted: 10 Oct 2020 12:57 PM PDT  Skywatchers have the chance to see a spectacular meteor shower as Earth passes through the debris from Halley's Comet.
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| Thailand crash: Bus collides with train, killing 18 Posted: 11 Oct 2020 12:35 AM PDT  Passengers on the bus were on their way to celebrate the end of Buddhist Lent, police say.
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| South Carolina Senate debate replaced with interviews after Lindsey Graham ‘refuses Covid-19 test' Posted: 09 Oct 2020 02:59 PM PDT  Republican senator reportedly declines coronavirus test and attacks rival for demanding 'special treatment' as GOP under scrutiny for White House disease outbreak
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| COVID-19: How did Wisconsin become a hot spot? Yahoo News Explains Posted: 09 Oct 2020 12:22 PM PDT  As a majority of states are seeing a rise in new coronavirus infections, Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers has declared a new public health emergency for the Badger State. Over the past four weeks Wisconsin has seen a troubling spike in COVID-19 cases, with record-high daily reported cases that continue to rise. Yahoo News Medical Contributor Dr. Kavita Patel explains the reasons behind the sudden surge — and what can be done to curb it.
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| Meghan Markle says that the day of her now-famous candid interview, she was 'running a marathon' balancing mom and duchess responsibilities Posted: 10 Oct 2020 12:51 PM PDT  Meghan Markle joined Prince Harry for an exclusive interview on the "Teenager Therapy" podcast that aired Saturday for World Mental Health Day.
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| Floods claim five lives in Vietnam and two Cambodians Posted: 10 Oct 2020 05:27 AM PDT  Elderly residents and small children clung to inflatable tyres as soldiers and police used rope lines to get them to safety from rising floodwater on Saturday in Cambodia's western province of Battambang.
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| Photos show Hurricane Delta's aftermath as Louisiana suffers back-to-back storms Posted: 10 Oct 2020 02:59 PM PDT  See the aftermath of Hurricane Delta — downed wires, broken windows and intense flooding — throughout Louisiana.
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| Thousands will enter the 2022 visa lottery for a free green card. This advice could help Posted: 10 Oct 2020 12:04 PM PDT  This week, the U.S. government opened the entry period to participate in the Diversity Immigrant Visa Program for Fiscal Year 2022 (DV-2022), which ends on Nov. 10, 2020.
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| The Mercedes-Maybach S650 is the silliest car I've driven all year — but I can't argue with its incredible interior luxury Posted: 11 Oct 2020 07:26 AM PDT  The Maybach is an overpowered luxury mega-sled, but the back seat is sublime, an old-school limo crossed with a first-class airliner section.
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| Trump news: President attacks ‘unscientific lockdowns’ and slams Biden in White House speech Posted: 10 Oct 2020 02:24 PM PDT  Follow the latest updates
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| Hopes rise of Nagorno-Karabakh truce after Russian-brokered peace talks Posted: 09 Oct 2020 11:19 AM PDT  Hopes were rising for a truce on Friday after two weeks of fighting in the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh region, in the wake of high-level talks between Armenia and Azerbaijan. France, which along with Russia and the United States is part of a group mediating peace talks to end the flare-up of the long conflict between the two countries, said there was a chance of a breakthrough but it was far from certain. "We are moving towards a truce tonight or tomorrow but it's still fragile," President Emmanuel Macron's office said in a statement, although a belligerent address from Azerbaijan's president somewhat undermined the positive noises from the talks. Fierce clashes, described as the worst since the end of the conflict in the 1990s, have claimed hundreds of lives on both sides. The conflict has also highlighted Turkey's role as a new important power broker in the South Caucasus, and the peace talks began after a Russian invitation to the foreign ministers of Armenia and Azerbaijan, seen as a bid to reassert influence in the region. Vladimir Putin, the Russian president, said on Thursday that he had spoken to the leaders of both countries and called on them to negotiate the cessation of hostilities in order to exchange prisoners and the bodies of fallen troops. Fighting in Nagorno-Karabakh, a separatist, ethnically Armenian exclave within the internationally recognised borders of Azerbaijan, flared up at the end of September to become the worst outburst of hostilities since 1994 when a separatist war between ethnic Armenian forces and Azerbaijan troops ended.
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| Pride in America cannot only be certain brand of white man's pride Posted: 11 Oct 2020 08:35 AM PDT  The demand that we be proud to be American has long served as a weapon, even when the vision of what we should be proud of has been solely white.
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| Trump attacks moderator for second debate over deleted tweet Posted: 09 Oct 2020 10:08 AM PDT  The apparent request for advice from Scully's account came after the Oct. 15 town hall, which was to be moderated by Scully, was thrown into disarray.
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| California fire investigators seize utility equipment Posted: 09 Oct 2020 04:44 PM PDT  Fire investigators looking into what caused a wildfire that killed four people in far Northern California have taken possession of equipment belonging to Pacific Gas and Electric, the utility reported Friday. PG&E said in a filing with the Public Utilities Commission that investigators with the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection seized some of its electrical equipment near where the Zogg Fire started Sept. 27.
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| Dr Birx says Covid is now spreading in homes and she fears upticks in some of best-performing states Posted: 10 Oct 2020 08:56 AM PDT  'It's happening in homes and social occasions and people gathering and taking their masks off'
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| 2 Maine police officers were fired and charged over allegations they killed 11 porcupines with their batons Posted: 10 Oct 2020 05:35 PM PDT  Two Rockland police officers were reportedly charged with aggravated animal cruelty and night hunting after the incident was reported by a colleague.
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| Iraqi militias say they have halted anti-U.S. attacks Posted: 11 Oct 2020 05:10 AM PDT  An array of Iran-backed Iraqi militia groups have suspended rocket attacks on U.S. forces on condition that Iraq's government present a timetable for the withdrawal of American troops, one of the groups said on Sunday. A spokesman for Kataib Hezbollah, one of the most powerful Iran-backed militia groups in Iraq, said the groups were presenting no set deadline, but that if U.S. troops "insisted on staying" they would unleash much more violent attacks. Washington, which is slowly reducing its 5,000 troops in Iraq, threatened last month to shut its embassy unless the Iraqi government reins in Iran-aligned militias that have attacked U.S. interests with rockets and roadside bombs.
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| Is There a Place for the President of the Confederacy? Posted: 09 Oct 2020 12:15 PM PDT  FAIRVIEW, Ky. -- Drive down Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Way in western Kentucky, past Martin Luther King Jr. Elementary School and take a right onto Jefferson Davis Highway, and a gray spike will begin to rise in the air.This obelisk -- once described as an "immobile thrust of concrete" rising from "poverty grass" by U.S. poet laureate Robert Penn Warren -- marks the birth site of the lone president of the Confederacy, Jefferson Davis. Two-thirds the size of the Washington Monument, it was completed in 1924 and was once meant to be the crown jewel of a highway through the South that would ferry auto tourists from one Confederate monument to another. Despite Kentucky having stayed in the Union, Davis' birth site is now a 19-acre state park that includes picnic grounds, a museum dedicated to his life and an elevator that runs to the top of the 351-foot obelisk.That museum will soon have a new exhibit. In June, as Confederate monuments were being torn down across the country in the wake of protests over George Floyd's killing and Breonna Taylor's, in Louisville, the Kentucky Historic Properties Advisory Commission voted 11-1 to immediately remove a 12-foot marble statue of Davis from the Kentucky Capitol rotunda in Frankfort and send it across the state to the museum at the Davis birth site in Fairview.A similar debate has been underway in Congress. In July the House of Representatives voted to remove statues honoring Confederate figures, including one of Davis, from the U.S. Capitol. "It's time to sweep away the last vestiges of Jim Crow and the dehumanizing of individuals because of the color of their skin," House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, Democrat of Maryland, said at a news conference. But Sen. Mitch McConnell, the Kentucky Republican and majority leader, is not expected to allow a vote in the Senate. He has called the push to remove the Confederate monuments in Washington an attempt to "airbrush the Capitol."President Donald Trump, who threatened to punish state and local governments that fail to protect them from destruction or vandalism, has defended "our beautiful" Confederate statues, proposing a grandiose statue park that will likely never be built. Caught between calls to remove statues from public view and to leave them up, officials from Florida to Indiana and from Virginia to Texas have increasingly sought to put them in existing museums they claim will give disputed monuments "context."But those museums often do not have the resources to change generations-old history narratives, leaving states and towns wondering if they should invest more taxpayer dollars in new museums or leave the statues as they are -- and hope a lack of advertising and funding discourages people from visiting them. The effort to bring Jefferson Davis home to Fairview shows just how fraught navigating that conflict is.Around Fairview, a city of under 200, there is no consensus about what should be done with Confederate monuments and the history they represent. For generations, students from the area were brought on field trips to the Davis birth site to have lunch at its picnic grounds and ride the elevator up the obelisk. Shaneika Brooks, 42, a former welder, was one of those schoolchildren. She only realized Davis' commitment to maintaining slavery when she was older and has avoided it ever since. Now she and others worry that moving the Kentucky Capitol monument could reignite old tensions."We have enough history here with racism," she said in an interview at a park in neighboring Hopkinsville, where she now lives. "Don't bring it here because somebody else doesn't want it and don't want to deal with that problem. We don't want the problems either."Brooks grew up in Todd County and was on the varsity track and field team, wearing the gray and red colors of the Todd County Central High School Rebels. When she was in high school in the '90s, there was another period of tension over Confederate symbols. In 1995, 19-year-old Michael Westerman, who was white, was pursued and fatally shot over the weekend of Martin Luther King Jr. Day by a group of Black teenagers. Westerman had been flying a Confederate flag from his truck; one of the teenagers claimed at trial that he yelled a racial slur at them.Westerman was from Todd County, and Brooks went to high school with the teenagers involved. Two of them were sentenced to life in prison, and the murder was followed by a surge in Ku Klux Klan activity in the area. A memorial for Westerman was held at the Davis obelisk.Though decades have now passed since the murder, Brooks believes little has changed in Todd County, where her daughters faced discrimination in school. Brooks says her older daughter confronted verbal harassment from teachers and students, and her younger daughter, who is biracial, was switched from honors classes to special education when the administration learned that her mother was Black. In response Brooks moved her family to Hopkinsville. (The Todd County school district superintendent, Mark Thomas, denied that such events occurred.)Brooks sees a straight line between past and present injustices. "The superiority comes from Jefferson Davis and the monument," she said. "To them that's their superhero cape. As long as they have that they feel safe to behave how they behave." Brooks acknowledges that there have been few local calls against bringing the monument from the Kentucky Capitol. "There is not a lot of Black people to cause a ruckus, so it is the perfect place to put that monument," she said.The obelisk was originally conceived in 1907 by the so-called Orphan Brigade -- Kentuckians who volunteered to fight for the Confederacy when this border state opted to stay in the Union. They were responding to the construction of a federal birth site park in Kentucky dedicated to another famous native son, Abraham Lincoln. As the veterans died off, the United Daughters of the Confederacy took over the project in 1921 as they supported efforts across the country to downplay the role of slavery in the Confederacy and promote the "Lost Cause," what Karen Cox, a professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, calls "a narrative created by white Southerners to deal with defeat by creating an alternative history."The statue of Davis put up in the Kentucky rotunda by the Daughters of the Confederacy in 1936 was part of those efforts that focused as much on justifying Jim Crow as on remembering the past.In the western part of the state, with funds running low, the Fairview obelisk was ultimately completed by the state of Kentucky in 1924. Before the site's unveiling as a public park, the Ku Klux Klan was allowed to burn a large cross atop the obelisk.In the decades that followed, the park became a popular spot for school field trips and events glorifying the Confederacy. Patrick Lewis, 34, grew up going to the park in the '90s on Jefferson Davis Day, which marks Davis' birthday. The event, which has not taken place for the past two years, included a Little Miss Confederacy beauty pageant on the steps of the obelisk, and reenactments of Civil War battles that the Confederacy always won. Participants would join together and sing "Happy Birthday" to Davis."At the time it just seemed like regional pride, like rooting for the home team," Lewis said.But there were moments even as a child when that pride didn't sit well with him. One such moment came the winter after the Westerman murder, when he asked two boys in his sixth-grade class what they had gotten for Christmas and they told him their mothers had sewn them Ku Klux Klan robes. Another moment came on Jefferson Davis Day in 1994, when, during a Civil War reenactment, the Confederate Army took the Union soldiers prisoner and mock executed them one by one. "I realized for some people it was more than just rooting for the home team," Lewis said.His views continued to change in 2002 when he went to the same Transylvania University in Lexington, Kentucky, where Jefferson Davis attended. With a campus debate raging about a monument to Davis that was eventually moved to a remote part of the library, he began to question some of the ideas he had grown up with. "It grounded debate, just like Confederate monuments now are doing for the country," he said.But it was reading the founding documents of the Confederacy as a history major that ended any doubt for him about what the Confederacy stood for. "The Confederate project was to create a republic that enshrined slavery and white supremacy in its constitution," he said.Many had a similar moment of realization in 2017 when white nationalists rallied around a statue of Robert E. Lee slated for removal in Charlottesville, Virginia, and one participant killed a counterprotester. Since then, white Americans have increasingly recognized these monuments' racist past.It also marked the year Lewis returned to Fairview, after receiving a doctorate in history, as the leader of a post-Charlottesville state project to deal with the more controversial parts of the Jefferson Davis museum. He oversaw the removal of Confederate flags from the gift shop, provided new tour texts for guides and had a portrait of Nathan Bedford Forrest, a Confederate general and the first Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, moved to the adjacent office. But the most important element was preparing new interpretive panels intended to provide context.Most of the museum focuses on Davis' career before the Civil War -- as a veteran and U.S. senator -- and his life after it. But where Lewis' new panel would explain the history of the Davises as enslavers, there is now only a blank wall. No funds were made available to print the panels. Lewis now believes the project was only ever meant to give Matt Bevin, then the Republican governor, the appearance of action as the nation reeled from events in Charlottesville. When the statue of Davis, currently being kept at an undisclosed location for its safety, finally arrives, there will be little new context for it.Some visitors to Fairview might wonder why Kentucky has a museum and a state House statue dedicated to Davis at all. The Confederate leader left the state when he was still a toddler and grew up in Mississippi, which he represented in the U.S. Senate as well as the House before the Civil War.Though Kentucky originally tried to stay neutral in the war, in 1861 Unionist candidates won nine of the state's 10 congressional seats and absolute majorities in both houses of the state Legislature. Pro-Confederate Kentuckians then created their own rival assembly, which voted for secession.The area around Fairview was once pro-Union. But according to Lewis, it was after the war that Kentuckians rushed to embrace the Confederacy out of fear of what the postwar racial order would bring. "Kentuckians imagined themselves as the last remaining spokespeople with political power for a defeated South," he said.A common refrain today among supporters of Confederate monuments is that they represent history and not racism. Brenda Guise drove with her husband, Dave, from Stephenville, Texas, to see the obelisk. "We are trying to see these things before someone doesn't let us see them anymore," said Guise, a Navy veteran and a member of the Daughters of the Confederacy. She and her husband were driving to Utica, Kentucky, to pick up a monument of a Confederate soldier they had made to put up in their yard, convinced that only Confederate monuments on private property could be protected.Support for Confederate figures can also come from unexpected places. Ron Sydnor, who is the former manager of the Davis birth site, is Black and remains an engaging defender of Davis in the region. "There is a dichotomy to Jefferson Davis," he said in the office of the museum. "He was president of the Confederacy on the one hand and on the other a revered statesman of the U.S. He went to West Point and was a veteran of the Mexican American War."Sydnor believes bringing the statue from Frankfort will increase park visitorship. But even if more people come, it will have to continue to be supported by taxpayer dollars. A 2018 Smithsonian investigation found that in the last decade, taxpayers spent at least $40 million on statues, homes, parks, museums, libraries, cemeteries and heritage organizations associated with the Confederacy.The Jefferson Davis birth site has a state-funded budget of $236,000 in fiscal year 2019, with an additional $363,000 allocated to repair the broken elevator up the obelisk. Park officials say that amount is too small for an overhaul of the museum -- but it is already too large for critics."To know that to take down and move the Jefferson Davis to Fairview cost $225,000 -- and the park itself has an over $200,000 annual budget -- is a slap in the face," said Zirconia Alleyne, editor-in-chief of The Kentucky New Era, who is from Hopkinsville and used to cover Jefferson Davis Day at the park. "Do I need to go visit a monument to have context for who someone was? I think we could just read about them. A statue is exalting a figure. I think that does more than tell the history."These questions about the role the state should play in Confederate memory have left politicians across the country struggling to determine what should be done with monuments. In Richmond, Virginia, city officials are currently collecting solicitations for the Confederate monuments removed from Monument Avenue, including one of Jefferson Davis. Proposals have been received from established institutions as well as individuals who hope to put the statues in their yards. No decisions have yet been made, but according to the Richmond City Council chief of staff, Lawrence Anderson, who is leading the process, "the intent in taking down the statues is not to build a Monument Avenue somewhere else."Some experts say the debate around them is more important than the monuments themselves. "A monument is just a thing. It only is important as long as people are willing to remember," said Mabel Wilson, a professor at Columbia University who was a member of the architectural team that designed the Memorial to Enslaved African American Laborers at the University of Virginia, which opened in August. She believes engaging people in a discussion can do more to change people's views than simply removing statues.In an attempt to support that dialogue, on Monday the Mellon Foundation announced the $250 million Monument Project to fund the relocation and contextualization of monuments, and to build new monuments commemorating more diverse contributions. Soon more controversial monuments may be moving, but for now most of the discussions remain local.Donavan Pinner, 22, recently returned to the area after graduating from Morehouse College. "It is my wish someone will make a resolution in the state Legislature to cut the budget for Fairview," he said.A preacher since he was 16, Pinner says he doesn't believe in spending so much energy on the future of monuments. In his sermons he regularly mentions the Black Lives Matter movement and calls for his congregants to take action. "Our focus should be on removing living monuments like Mitch McConnell and people like that from office who continue to do the systematic oppressive work that enables cases like Breonna Taylor's to be silent," he said.Pinner was never taken to the Jefferson Davis birth site when he was in school -- according to park officials those trips all but stopped in recent decades because of slashed school budgets, rather than a changed view of Davis -- yet he admits the monument is hard to forget. The towering Jefferson Davis obelisk continues to be a landmark for him in the flat Kentucky countryside."You can't avoid it," Pinner said. "Whenever I come back I know I am close to home when I see it."This article originally appeared in The New York Times.(C) 2020 The New York Times Company
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| Will the Atlantic basin churn out yet another storm this week? Posted: 11 Oct 2020 07:33 AM PDT  As Delta's rain spreads across the eastern United States, AccuWeather meteorologists are turning their attention to a tropical wave cruising across the tropical Atlantic this week. As of Sunday morning, the tropical wave was centered around 1,200 miles east of the Windward Islands and was moving to the west. Satellite imagery revealed that the feature was producing disorganized shower and thunderstorm activity and had yet to form a circulation center at the low levels of the atmosphere, an indication of strengthening. This satellite image of the tropical Atlantic shows the tropical disturbance well to the east of the Lesser Antilles on Sunday morning, Oct. 11, 2020. (CIRA/RAMMB) "This tropical wave will move to the west-northwest into the middle of the week," AccuWeather Senior Meteorologist Mike Doll said. "It will reach the Lesser Antilles Wednesday, then the far eastern Caribbean by Thursday," Doll said. CLICK HERE FOR THE FREE ACCUWEATHER APP A track into the Caribbean would bring areas of tropical downpours and gusty winds to the Lesser Antilles, and if the storm is able to strengthen, it could bring stronger wind gusts to the region. However, forecasters say there are a couple of hurdles for this wave to overcome before it can develop -- one being strong westerly wind shear. Wind shear is the increase in wind speed with altitude as well as the change in wind direction from one location to another. Strong wind shear can prevent tropical waves from fully developing. In addition, pockets of dry air across the tropical Atlantic could get embedded into the wave, decreasing shower and thunderstorm activity and lessening the risk for tropical development. "As a result, the chance of this feature developing into a tropical system is low," Doll said. Elsewhere in the Atlantic basin, there are no other areas currently being monitored for tropical activity, but forecasters say there is still a ways to go before one can call it quits on the 2020 Atlantic hurricane season. Thus far, there have been 25 named storms in the Atlantic basin. AccuWeather meteorologists predict that 2020 will tie the previous seasonal record set with a total of 28 named storms now projected. The record-setting 28 named storms was set during the historic 2005 hurricane season which churned out powerhouse hurricanes Katrina, Rita and Wilma. That season was also the only other year in which Greek letters had to be used, with storms Alpha to Zeta being named. This year, more storms are likely to be given Greek letters for names in the coming weeks and perhaps even into December, beyond the official end of the Atlantic hurricane season on Nov. 30. The next two storms that reach tropical storm strength, which is when sustained wind speeds reach 39 mph, will be given the names Epsilon and Zeta. Keep checking back on AccuWeather.com and stay tuned to the AccuWeather Network on DirecTV, Frontier and Verizon Fios.
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| Biden-Harris hay bale display in Massachusetts set on fire 24 hours after it was finished Posted: 10 Oct 2020 02:01 PM PDT  'It's actually hard to believe anyone who says they love this country would do this,' the owner of the farm said.
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| The Supreme Court is helping Republicans suppress voters. Make it bigger to fix democracy. Posted: 10 Oct 2020 06:25 AM PDT  Nothing would destroy the legitimacy of this court faster than another Bush v. Gore-style robbery perpetrated by Barrett and two other Trump justices.
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| Sen. Tammy Duckworth was once told to pump breast milk in an airport toilet stall. Now she has unlocked funding to put lactation rooms in all of America's airports. Posted: 10 Oct 2020 05:03 AM PDT  The senator's Friendly Airports for Mothers Improvement Act lets airports large and small use federal funds to install clean, private lactation areas.
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