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solarbirdDue to just being swamped with the Tulsa rally and the Friday Night Massacre coverage (which was a lot of work tbh) I'm not doing a Police Violence edition today. It will, of course, return.
Defund the police.
----- 1 -----
Daniel Dale
twitter.com/ddale8
20 June 2020
https://twitter.com/ddale8/status/1274389470578708480
This was not a rally. It was a speech (in Darby, Pennsylvania) on the pandemic and reopening, to which a small number of local officials and businesspeople were invited.
[EMBEDDED IMAGE: Trump tweet describing the social-distanced small-audience speech as "Joe Biden's rally"]
----- 2 -----
Gay refugee who fled homophobic South Africa says Ireland’s reviled asylum system ‘denies fundamental human rights’
Patrick Kelleher June 19, 2020
https://www.pinknews.co.uk/2020/06/19/direct-provision-ireland-asylum-lgbt-bulelani-mfaco-leo-varadkar/
When Bulelani Mfaco sought asylum in Ireland, he hoped a better life was waiting for him.
Back in South Africa, Mfaco was spat on and had stones thrown at him – all for the simple crime of being gay. He had to get out.
Life in Ireland should have given him the freedom to be himself. Instead, he has become one of many asylum seekers forced to live in an archaic and oppressive system known as “direct provision”.
What is direct provision?
Direct provision is Ireland’s system of accommodating asylum seekers. It was initially introduced as an “interim” system in 2000 to provide accommodation to refugees for six months while they waited for the state to make a decision on their claim.
The system was designed as a temporary measure, but it has proven anything but. In 2018, a report found that residents were spending an average of 23 months in direct provision, while 432 had been in the system for five years or more.
Some of these centres, which are scattered throughout the Republic of Ireland, are owned by the Irish state – but the majority are owned and operated by private companies who are paid by the government. According to the Irish Examiner, it is “a billion-euro industry” under which old hotels and B&Bs are co-opted to house refugees.
In these centres, families often live together in tiny rooms, while single people are forced to share bedrooms with complete strangers.
----- 3 -----
Eλf Sternberg
twitter.com/elfsternberg
20 June 2020
White and stupid is no way to go through life. This guy, by the way, has been identified as Homeland Security Services analyst Lee Jeffers.
[QUOTED TWEET]
Commissioner Omari Hardy
twitter.com/OmariJHardy
June 17, 2020
RETWEET until this man is identified!
He harassed a group of black teens in a gated community in the affluent Village of Wellington, here in my county.
According to him, "they didn't belong in this development."
According to the teens, he threatened to hit them w/ his car.
[EMBEDDED VIDEO AT LINK]
----- 4 -----
WUSA9
twitter.com/wusa9
20 June 2020
https://twitter.com/wusa9/status/1274182027072372736
BREAKING: D.C.'s only outdoor Confederate statue has been toppled, and is now burning on the ground. https://bit.ly/2Yj0CGp
[EMBEDDED IMAGE AT LINK]
----- 5 -----
Fact check: Trump falsely claims 'insurance reasons' prevented him from entering St. John's Church
By Daniel Dale, CNN
Updated 10:37 AM ET, Sat June 20, 2020
https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/20/politics/fact-check-trump-st-johns-church-photo-op-insurance/index.html
Washington (CNN)More than two weeks after his controversial photo-op outside a Washington, DC, church, President Donald Trump offered a new explanation last week for why he didn't enter St. John's Episcopal Church. In an interview with the Wall Street Journal on Wednesday Trump said there were "a lot of insurance reasons" for why he couldn't go in.
That isn't true.
Facts First: "There were no insurance reasons" why Trump could not have entered St. John's Church, Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde of the Episcopal Diocese of Washington told CNN on Friday. She said only a small room in the basement of the church, a nursery, had been damaged in a fire the day prior, and "the main sanctuary was not harmed at all."
Trump has faced criticism not only because police used force to clear peaceful protesters out of the way before the photo-op but because he merely brandished the Bible without opening it, offering a prayer, or going into the building.
----- 6 -----
What Lithuania can teach us about grappling with Confederate statues
By Dirk Olin
June 18, 2020 at 12:50 p.m. PDT
Dirk Olin is editorial director of the Institute for Sustainable Development.
The movement to remove statuary commemorating slaveholders and the Confederacy from the U.S. Capitol, Richmond, outside London and beyond has taken on new urgency.
History, responsibly curated, binds our present with our past. That assumes, however, a shared sense of the meaning of “our.”
History also takes many forms — written, oral, artistic. Each can be fraught with its own controversy. Fortunately, there is a way to acknowledge history without glorifying its horrors.
Those who argue for displaying these objects don’t have a defensible case for their moral value. Such monuments were created many years after the Civil War — underwritten by the United Daughters of the Confederacy, among others — as a kind of nostalgic defense of the “lost cause.” They also arose in reaction to increasing calls for civil rights for blacks. By and large, they celebrate leaders of white supremacy and treason.
It is hard to imagine much support for erecting a statue celebrating the likes of Benedict Arnold.
...
Grūtas Park (unofficially known as “Stalin’s World”) is a Lithuanian sculpture garden near Druskininkai, a little more than an hour outside Vilnius. It displays more than 80 statues that communists installed around Lithuania during the Soviet era, when the country was under the boot of the U.S.S.R.
After Lithuania regained its independence in 1991, the statues were toppled. Mushroom magnate Viliumas Malinauskas petitioned the government to reclaim the memorabilia and began work on the park in the late 1990s.
The park, which opened in 2001, includes a museum and is organized into spheres. In the “Totalitarian Sphere,” gigantic busts of Joseph Stalin and Vladimir Lenin are arrayed like so many disembodied heads from Easter Island. Gulag-style watchtowers loom over the bleak, if bucolic, setting. Barbed-wire installations are plentiful. Megaphones play recordings of the state-sanctioned music that blared an ominous soundtrack to residents of the occupied country. The park has a “Terror Sphere” and an “Occupation and Death Sphere,” among others.
The overall effect is sadly moving — and profoundly educational. Many Lithuanians patronize the park to show their children the realities of Soviet brutality.
----- 7 -----
Susan Simpson
twitter.com/TheViewFromLL2
20 June 2020
https://twitter.com/TheViewFromLL2/status/1273983838256074753
[THREAD. IT IS HORRIFYING. READ IT.]
In honor of Juneteenth, a brief story about the America that almost was.
I was at the Federal Archives once, searching for a very different document, when I came across a stack of papers titled "Joint Resolutions Proposing Amendments to the Constitution of the United States."
[THREAD CONTINUES AT LINK]
----- 8 -----
U.S. "not going to allow Russia and China to continue" increasing nuclear weapons stockpile, top negotiator says
By Pamela Falk
June 19, 2020
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/china-russia-nuclear-weapons-us-not-allow-increase-stockpile-negotiator-robert-wood-tells-cbs-news/
[EDITOR: ...and how do you propose to stop them?]
U.S. arms control talks with Russia, and perhaps China, are slated for Monday, June 22 in Vienna, just days after Secretary of State Mike Pompeo flew to Honolulu to meet with China's top diplomat Yang Jiechi at Hickam Air Force Base. The talks are aimed at bringing China into broader negotiations with Russia to limit all three countries' nuclear weapons stockpiles.
Concerns are mounting about Russian and Chinese interest in developing their nuclear arsenals. The talks come two months after a State Department report raised questions about their compliance with arms control, non-proliferation and disarmament agreements and commitments.
"China's overall nuclear stockpile is going to double over the next 10 years. That of course is a great concern," U.S. arms control negotiator Ambassador Robert A. Wood told CBS News.
----- 9 -----
Sloth Mom
twitter.com/CaseyExplosion
20 June 2020
https://twitter.com/CaseyExplosion/status/1274312964875718660
[THREAD]
Hey folks, today let's talk about the LGB Alliance and its goals, because whole they are quite nakedly a hate group, I don't think people appreciate just how sinister their aims actually are, or exactly why they were formed.
They want to replace Stonewall.
[NEXT]
If we take them at their word, is that by supporting trans people Stonewall is not fit for purpose and doesn't defend the rights of those who are "same sex attracted" (their words, not mine), so it needs to go, and be replaced with a group that will fight for LGB rights.
[NEXT]
This may seem ironic, considering how they just recently showed their entire ass by claiming it's not homophobic to be against marriage equality. This along with how they use terms like "same sex attraction" lays bare the homophobia within the so-called LGB rights group.
[THREAD CONTINUES AT LINK]
[SEE ALSO:
Revealed: Trump-linked US Christian ‘fundamentalists’ pour millions of ‘dark money’ into Europe, boosting the far right
MEPs call for action as openDemocracy analysis reveals ‘shocking’ flows of cash crossing the Atlantic to push ultra-conservative agendas.
27 March 2019
https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/5050/revealed-trump-linked-us-christian-fundamentalists-pour-millions-of-dark-money-into-europe-boosting-the-far-right/
US Christian right ‘fundamentalists’ linked to the Trump administration and Steve Bannon are among a dozen American groups that have poured at least $50 million of ‘dark money’ into Europe over the last decade, openDemocracy can reveal today.
Between them, these groups have backed ‘armies’ of ultra-conservative lawyers and political activists, as well as ‘family values’ campaigns against LGBT rights, sex education and abortion – and a number appear to have increasing links with Europe’s far right.
They are spending money on a scale “not previously imagined”, according to lawmakers and human rights advocates, who have called our findings “shocking”. Reacting to openDemocracy’s findings, a cross-party group of more than 40 MEPs has called on the EU’s transparency tsar Frans Timmermans to look into the influence of “US Christian fundamentalists… with the greatest urgency” ahead of May’s European Parliament elections.
Among the biggest spenders is a group whose chief counsel is also Donald Trump’s personal lawyer, Jay Sekulow. Another organisation has collaborated with a controversial Rome-based ‘institute’ backed by Steve Bannon. And a number of the groups are connected to the World Congress of Families: a network of ultra-conservative activists which has links to far-right politicians and movements in several European countries, including Italy, Hungary, Poland, Spain and Serbia.
None of these American groups discloses who its donors are – though at least two have links to famous conservative billionaires, such as the Koch brothers (who helped bankroll the Tea Party Movement) and the family of Trump’s education secretary.
]
----- 10 -----
Mike Pence Refuses to Say 'Black Lives Matter' in Juneteenth Interview
By Aila Slisco On 6/19/20
https://www.newsweek.com/mike-pence-refuses-say-black-lives-matter-juneteenth-interview-1512304
Vice President Mike Pence repeatedly refused to utter the phrase "Black lives matter" during an interview on Juneteenth, insisting on saying "all lives matter" instead.
Pence made the remarks during a Friday interview with Philadelphia ABC affiliate WPVI, after anchor Brian Taff asked the vice president if he would say the words "Black lives matter." Taff noted that "only really a handful of elected Republican leaders" have been willing to repeat the phrase amid ongoing demonstrations against racial injustice sparked by the death of George Floyd, an unarmed Black man who died in police custody.
"Let me just say that what happened to George Floyd was a tragedy," replied Pence. "We celebrate the fact that from the founding of this nation, we cherish the ideal that all, all of us are created equal and endowed by our creator with certain inalienable rights. And so, all lives matter in a very real sense."
Taff then pressed Pence on the issue, explaining that saying the phrase "is an acknowledgement that Black lives also matter at a time in this country when it appears that there's a segment of our society that doesn't agree." The vice president again refused to repeat the phrase.
"Well, I don't accept the fact, Brian, that there's a segment of American society that disagrees in the preciousness and importance of every human life," Pence said.
----- 11 -----
Kremlin: Putin concerned about arrangements with U.S. amid protests - IFX
20 June 2020
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-russia-usa-kremlin/kremlin-putin-concerned-about-arrangements-with-u-s-amid-protests-ifx-idUSKBN23R0J1
MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russian President Vladimir Putin is concerned about how much he can trust arrangements with U.S. President Donald Trump amid protests in the United States, the Interfax news agency quoted Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov as saying on Saturday.
U.S. and Russian envoys are due to discuss “mutually agreed topics related to the future of arms control” in Austria next week, the U.S. State Department has said. [nL1N2DX00N]
Referring to Trump, Peskov said Putin needs to understand that “agreements with his political counterpart can be trusted”.
There is a growing unpredictability in steps by Washington and this is worrying world capitals, Peskov was quoted as saying.
----- 12 -----
Garrett Haake
twitter.com/GarrettHaake
20 June 2020
https://twitter.com/GarrettHaake/status/1274377936511078400
It’s not even noon in Tulsa and police are arresting a peaceful protestor outside twitter.com/realDonaldTrump rally. twitter.com/BreakingChesky narrating live as police accuse her of trespassing for sitting quietly outside the arena with an “I can’t breathe” shirt on.
[EMBEDDED VIDEO AT LINK]
[EXTRA BACKGROUND: She had a rally ticket. But such tickets can be revoked]
[SEE ALSO THEAD:
Morgan Chesky
twitter.com/BreakingChesky
20 June 2020
https://twitter.com/BreakingChesky/status/1274385339902316544
Some additional context on this arrest outside Tulsa’s BOK Center.
The woman, who introduced herself as Tulsa resident Sheila Buck was allowed inside initial security gate before being told to step aside away from crowd.
]
Defund the police.
- This was not a Biden rally. [Trump lied about a photo, now all his minions are RTing it forever]
- Gay refugee who fled homophobic South Africa says Ireland’s reviled asylum system ‘denies fundamental human rights’
- Homeland Security Services analyst Lee Jeffers identified as man who harassed, threatened 15 year old black girls
- D.C.'s only outdoor Confederate statue has been toppled, and is now burning on the ground.
- Fact check: Trump falsely claims 'insurance reasons' prevented him from entering St. John's Church
- What Lithuania can teach us about grappling with Confederate statues
- In honor of Juneteenth, a brief story about the America that almost was. [HORRIFYING THREAD. READ IT.]
- U.S. "not going to allow Russia and China to continue" increasing nuclear weapons stockpile, top negotiator says
- The goal of the UK's "LGB Alliance" sockpuppet is to replace Stonewall, the actual primary queer rights group in the UK.
- Mike Pence Refuses to Say 'Black Lives Matter' in Juneteenth Interview
- Putin concerned about arrangements with U.S. amid protests
- It’s not even noon in Tulsa and police are arresting a peaceful protestor outside Trump rally
----- 1 -----
Daniel Dale
twitter.com/ddale8
20 June 2020
https://twitter.com/ddale8/status/1274389470578708480
This was not a rally. It was a speech (in Darby, Pennsylvania) on the pandemic and reopening, to which a small number of local officials and businesspeople were invited.
[EMBEDDED IMAGE: Trump tweet describing the social-distanced small-audience speech as "Joe Biden's rally"]
----- 2 -----
Gay refugee who fled homophobic South Africa says Ireland’s reviled asylum system ‘denies fundamental human rights’
Patrick Kelleher June 19, 2020
https://www.pinknews.co.uk/2020/06/19/direct-provision-ireland-asylum-lgbt-bulelani-mfaco-leo-varadkar/
When Bulelani Mfaco sought asylum in Ireland, he hoped a better life was waiting for him.
Back in South Africa, Mfaco was spat on and had stones thrown at him – all for the simple crime of being gay. He had to get out.
Life in Ireland should have given him the freedom to be himself. Instead, he has become one of many asylum seekers forced to live in an archaic and oppressive system known as “direct provision”.
What is direct provision?
Direct provision is Ireland’s system of accommodating asylum seekers. It was initially introduced as an “interim” system in 2000 to provide accommodation to refugees for six months while they waited for the state to make a decision on their claim.
The system was designed as a temporary measure, but it has proven anything but. In 2018, a report found that residents were spending an average of 23 months in direct provision, while 432 had been in the system for five years or more.
Some of these centres, which are scattered throughout the Republic of Ireland, are owned by the Irish state – but the majority are owned and operated by private companies who are paid by the government. According to the Irish Examiner, it is “a billion-euro industry” under which old hotels and B&Bs are co-opted to house refugees.
In these centres, families often live together in tiny rooms, while single people are forced to share bedrooms with complete strangers.
----- 3 -----
Eλf Sternberg
twitter.com/elfsternberg
20 June 2020
White and stupid is no way to go through life. This guy, by the way, has been identified as Homeland Security Services analyst Lee Jeffers.
[QUOTED TWEET]
Commissioner Omari Hardy
twitter.com/OmariJHardy
June 17, 2020
RETWEET until this man is identified!
He harassed a group of black teens in a gated community in the affluent Village of Wellington, here in my county.
According to him, "they didn't belong in this development."
According to the teens, he threatened to hit them w/ his car.
[EMBEDDED VIDEO AT LINK]
----- 4 -----
WUSA9
twitter.com/wusa9
20 June 2020
https://twitter.com/wusa9/status/1274182027072372736
BREAKING: D.C.'s only outdoor Confederate statue has been toppled, and is now burning on the ground. https://bit.ly/2Yj0CGp
[EMBEDDED IMAGE AT LINK]
----- 5 -----
Fact check: Trump falsely claims 'insurance reasons' prevented him from entering St. John's Church
By Daniel Dale, CNN
Updated 10:37 AM ET, Sat June 20, 2020
https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/20/politics/fact-check-trump-st-johns-church-photo-op-insurance/index.html
Washington (CNN)More than two weeks after his controversial photo-op outside a Washington, DC, church, President Donald Trump offered a new explanation last week for why he didn't enter St. John's Episcopal Church. In an interview with the Wall Street Journal on Wednesday Trump said there were "a lot of insurance reasons" for why he couldn't go in.
That isn't true.
Facts First: "There were no insurance reasons" why Trump could not have entered St. John's Church, Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde of the Episcopal Diocese of Washington told CNN on Friday. She said only a small room in the basement of the church, a nursery, had been damaged in a fire the day prior, and "the main sanctuary was not harmed at all."
Trump has faced criticism not only because police used force to clear peaceful protesters out of the way before the photo-op but because he merely brandished the Bible without opening it, offering a prayer, or going into the building.
----- 6 -----
What Lithuania can teach us about grappling with Confederate statues
By Dirk Olin
June 18, 2020 at 12:50 p.m. PDT
Dirk Olin is editorial director of the Institute for Sustainable Development.
The movement to remove statuary commemorating slaveholders and the Confederacy from the U.S. Capitol, Richmond, outside London and beyond has taken on new urgency.
History, responsibly curated, binds our present with our past. That assumes, however, a shared sense of the meaning of “our.”
History also takes many forms — written, oral, artistic. Each can be fraught with its own controversy. Fortunately, there is a way to acknowledge history without glorifying its horrors.
Those who argue for displaying these objects don’t have a defensible case for their moral value. Such monuments were created many years after the Civil War — underwritten by the United Daughters of the Confederacy, among others — as a kind of nostalgic defense of the “lost cause.” They also arose in reaction to increasing calls for civil rights for blacks. By and large, they celebrate leaders of white supremacy and treason.
It is hard to imagine much support for erecting a statue celebrating the likes of Benedict Arnold.
...
Grūtas Park (unofficially known as “Stalin’s World”) is a Lithuanian sculpture garden near Druskininkai, a little more than an hour outside Vilnius. It displays more than 80 statues that communists installed around Lithuania during the Soviet era, when the country was under the boot of the U.S.S.R.
After Lithuania regained its independence in 1991, the statues were toppled. Mushroom magnate Viliumas Malinauskas petitioned the government to reclaim the memorabilia and began work on the park in the late 1990s.
The park, which opened in 2001, includes a museum and is organized into spheres. In the “Totalitarian Sphere,” gigantic busts of Joseph Stalin and Vladimir Lenin are arrayed like so many disembodied heads from Easter Island. Gulag-style watchtowers loom over the bleak, if bucolic, setting. Barbed-wire installations are plentiful. Megaphones play recordings of the state-sanctioned music that blared an ominous soundtrack to residents of the occupied country. The park has a “Terror Sphere” and an “Occupation and Death Sphere,” among others.
The overall effect is sadly moving — and profoundly educational. Many Lithuanians patronize the park to show their children the realities of Soviet brutality.
----- 7 -----
Susan Simpson
twitter.com/TheViewFromLL2
20 June 2020
https://twitter.com/TheViewFromLL2/status/1273983838256074753
[THREAD. IT IS HORRIFYING. READ IT.]
In honor of Juneteenth, a brief story about the America that almost was.
I was at the Federal Archives once, searching for a very different document, when I came across a stack of papers titled "Joint Resolutions Proposing Amendments to the Constitution of the United States."
[THREAD CONTINUES AT LINK]
----- 8 -----
U.S. "not going to allow Russia and China to continue" increasing nuclear weapons stockpile, top negotiator says
By Pamela Falk
June 19, 2020
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/china-russia-nuclear-weapons-us-not-allow-increase-stockpile-negotiator-robert-wood-tells-cbs-news/
[EDITOR: ...and how do you propose to stop them?]
U.S. arms control talks with Russia, and perhaps China, are slated for Monday, June 22 in Vienna, just days after Secretary of State Mike Pompeo flew to Honolulu to meet with China's top diplomat Yang Jiechi at Hickam Air Force Base. The talks are aimed at bringing China into broader negotiations with Russia to limit all three countries' nuclear weapons stockpiles.
Concerns are mounting about Russian and Chinese interest in developing their nuclear arsenals. The talks come two months after a State Department report raised questions about their compliance with arms control, non-proliferation and disarmament agreements and commitments.
"China's overall nuclear stockpile is going to double over the next 10 years. That of course is a great concern," U.S. arms control negotiator Ambassador Robert A. Wood told CBS News.
----- 9 -----
Sloth Mom
twitter.com/CaseyExplosion
20 June 2020
https://twitter.com/CaseyExplosion/status/1274312964875718660
[THREAD]
Hey folks, today let's talk about the LGB Alliance and its goals, because whole they are quite nakedly a hate group, I don't think people appreciate just how sinister their aims actually are, or exactly why they were formed.
They want to replace Stonewall.
[NEXT]
If we take them at their word, is that by supporting trans people Stonewall is not fit for purpose and doesn't defend the rights of those who are "same sex attracted" (their words, not mine), so it needs to go, and be replaced with a group that will fight for LGB rights.
[NEXT]
This may seem ironic, considering how they just recently showed their entire ass by claiming it's not homophobic to be against marriage equality. This along with how they use terms like "same sex attraction" lays bare the homophobia within the so-called LGB rights group.
[THREAD CONTINUES AT LINK]
[SEE ALSO:
Revealed: Trump-linked US Christian ‘fundamentalists’ pour millions of ‘dark money’ into Europe, boosting the far right
MEPs call for action as openDemocracy analysis reveals ‘shocking’ flows of cash crossing the Atlantic to push ultra-conservative agendas.
27 March 2019
https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/5050/revealed-trump-linked-us-christian-fundamentalists-pour-millions-of-dark-money-into-europe-boosting-the-far-right/
US Christian right ‘fundamentalists’ linked to the Trump administration and Steve Bannon are among a dozen American groups that have poured at least $50 million of ‘dark money’ into Europe over the last decade, openDemocracy can reveal today.
Between them, these groups have backed ‘armies’ of ultra-conservative lawyers and political activists, as well as ‘family values’ campaigns against LGBT rights, sex education and abortion – and a number appear to have increasing links with Europe’s far right.
They are spending money on a scale “not previously imagined”, according to lawmakers and human rights advocates, who have called our findings “shocking”. Reacting to openDemocracy’s findings, a cross-party group of more than 40 MEPs has called on the EU’s transparency tsar Frans Timmermans to look into the influence of “US Christian fundamentalists… with the greatest urgency” ahead of May’s European Parliament elections.
Among the biggest spenders is a group whose chief counsel is also Donald Trump’s personal lawyer, Jay Sekulow. Another organisation has collaborated with a controversial Rome-based ‘institute’ backed by Steve Bannon. And a number of the groups are connected to the World Congress of Families: a network of ultra-conservative activists which has links to far-right politicians and movements in several European countries, including Italy, Hungary, Poland, Spain and Serbia.
None of these American groups discloses who its donors are – though at least two have links to famous conservative billionaires, such as the Koch brothers (who helped bankroll the Tea Party Movement) and the family of Trump’s education secretary.
]
----- 10 -----
Mike Pence Refuses to Say 'Black Lives Matter' in Juneteenth Interview
By Aila Slisco On 6/19/20
https://www.newsweek.com/mike-pence-refuses-say-black-lives-matter-juneteenth-interview-1512304
Vice President Mike Pence repeatedly refused to utter the phrase "Black lives matter" during an interview on Juneteenth, insisting on saying "all lives matter" instead.
Pence made the remarks during a Friday interview with Philadelphia ABC affiliate WPVI, after anchor Brian Taff asked the vice president if he would say the words "Black lives matter." Taff noted that "only really a handful of elected Republican leaders" have been willing to repeat the phrase amid ongoing demonstrations against racial injustice sparked by the death of George Floyd, an unarmed Black man who died in police custody.
"Let me just say that what happened to George Floyd was a tragedy," replied Pence. "We celebrate the fact that from the founding of this nation, we cherish the ideal that all, all of us are created equal and endowed by our creator with certain inalienable rights. And so, all lives matter in a very real sense."
Taff then pressed Pence on the issue, explaining that saying the phrase "is an acknowledgement that Black lives also matter at a time in this country when it appears that there's a segment of our society that doesn't agree." The vice president again refused to repeat the phrase.
"Well, I don't accept the fact, Brian, that there's a segment of American society that disagrees in the preciousness and importance of every human life," Pence said.
----- 11 -----
Kremlin: Putin concerned about arrangements with U.S. amid protests - IFX
20 June 2020
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-russia-usa-kremlin/kremlin-putin-concerned-about-arrangements-with-u-s-amid-protests-ifx-idUSKBN23R0J1
MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russian President Vladimir Putin is concerned about how much he can trust arrangements with U.S. President Donald Trump amid protests in the United States, the Interfax news agency quoted Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov as saying on Saturday.
U.S. and Russian envoys are due to discuss “mutually agreed topics related to the future of arms control” in Austria next week, the U.S. State Department has said. [nL1N2DX00N]
Referring to Trump, Peskov said Putin needs to understand that “agreements with his political counterpart can be trusted”.
There is a growing unpredictability in steps by Washington and this is worrying world capitals, Peskov was quoted as saying.
----- 12 -----
Garrett Haake
twitter.com/GarrettHaake
20 June 2020
https://twitter.com/GarrettHaake/status/1274377936511078400
It’s not even noon in Tulsa and police are arresting a peaceful protestor outside twitter.com/realDonaldTrump rally. twitter.com/BreakingChesky narrating live as police accuse her of trespassing for sitting quietly outside the arena with an “I can’t breathe” shirt on.
[EMBEDDED VIDEO AT LINK]
[EXTRA BACKGROUND: She had a rally ticket. But such tickets can be revoked]
[SEE ALSO THEAD:
Morgan Chesky
twitter.com/BreakingChesky
20 June 2020
https://twitter.com/BreakingChesky/status/1274385339902316544
Some additional context on this arrest outside Tulsa’s BOK Center.
The woman, who introduced herself as Tulsa resident Sheila Buck was allowed inside initial security gate before being told to step aside away from crowd.
]
