Category Archives: US
Kenosha cop who shot Jacob Blake in the back faces no charges
Rusten Sheskey, the police officer in Kenosha County, Wisconsin, who shot Jacob Blake sparking off days of protests which led to white supremacist vigilante Kyle Rittenhouse shooting dead two BLM protesters, will not be charged with any crime.
The news was announced by Kenosha County district attorney Michael Graveley. The announcement was greeted with dismay by Blake family members.
“This decision failed not only Jacob and his family but the community that protested and demanded justice,” said the family’s lawyer, Ben Crump.
The white policeman who shot Blake several times in the back after attending a domestic incident with other officers, has left Blake semi-paralysed and he will never walk again.
Expected protests on Tuesday, many businesses had been boarded up and National Guardsmen were stationed at the court house.
Sheskey has been on administartive leave since the shooting, on full pay. So while he has been on holiday, another Black family has been grieving as a result of racist police violence in the US.
Rittenhouse was arraignment today also, and pleaded not guilty to the six charges against him, which included first degree intentional homicide.
In the protests that turned into an anti-police uprising, the armed Rittenhouse, who was 17 at the time, was seen colluding with police and even after he killed two protesters was able to depart the scene with no intervention from the police.
Breonna Taylor statue smashed but $25k raised for bronze replacement
In a little less than two weeks after the installation of the memorial statue to Breonna Tayor, racists vandals have attacked and smashed it.
The memorial was sculpted by white artist Leo Carson, taking him several months to complete the work.
Breonna – an emergency room medical technician – was killed by police in Louisville Kentucky upon exercising a so-called “no knock” warrant in March 2020.
The bust took pride of place near Oakland town hall, California.
Protests to demand justice for Breonna took place all over the world, including in the UK.
Say Her Name: Breonna Taylor
This latest act of racist vandalism sadly follows similar incidents across the US, notably in Washington DC when Trump supporters and fascist from the Proud Boys racists street gang sought out and destroyed memorials to other African American individuals killed by police officers.
Leo Carston said of the attack: “I built it to support the Black Lives Matter movement, but that also makes it a target for racist aggression.”
Since the attack took place, $25,000 has been raised to fund a bronze replacement The original was made from less sturdy clay with ceramic finish.
Donate today: Breonna Taylor statue gofundme page
Three Breonna cops now fired but still walking free
In other news, of the three officers involved in the killing of Breonna, one has been fired (detective Brett Hankison) and another two are slated for termination – Detective Myles Cosgrove (one of the shooters) and Detective Joshua Jaynes (who got the search warrant from the judge).
None of the police have been charged with the actual killing of Breonna. Hankison was found guilty of wanton endangerment because one of his bullets entered a neighbouring apartment.
Proud Boys thugs attempted lynching led to stabbing incident
A Black man – Phillip Johnson – has been arrested and charged with assault with a dangerous weapon for allegedly stabbing four people, thought to be members of the fascist Proud Boys street gang.
The incident happened on the Trump supporters’ protests in Washington DC at the weekend.
Turns out the fracas outside Harry’s Bar where the fascists thugs were meeting was an attempted lynching, judging by the New York Times report of the demonstration.
The Times reports that a number of the violent far-right gang had gathered at the bar and spotted a black man dressed in black and decide to attack him, even after three Trump supporters implored them to leave him alone.
The pack attacked and start beating the lone black man, ounching and kicking him.
Johnson managed to get free of the mob twice:
The NYT report continues: “At that point, the man pulled out a knife and began slashing with it as more demonstrators piled onto him. The man broke free twice, but was then grabbed and beaten again. Police officers intervened after the man was face down on the ground. Several protesters yelled that the man had a knife and had stabbed someone. The man’s face was swollen and bloodied when police officers picked him up.”
The paper says that minutes before the attack on Johnson, the fascists had targeted two black churches – the United Methodist Church (established in 1836) and the Metropolitan African Methodist Episcopal Church, ripping down BLM flags outside the places of worship and burning them.
The pastor of the United Methodist Church, Rev. Dr. Ianther M. Mills, described the scene as reminiscent of a cross burning in the Deep South:
“We are a resilient people who have trusted in God through slavery and the Underground Railroad, Jim Crow and the Civil Rights movement,” she said, “and now as we face an apparent rise in white supremacy.”
Brandon Bernard executed – Trump lines up 4 more black men for murder
Brandon Bernard was murdered by the barabaric US government last night.
Bernard was in prison for the alleged killing of two people in 1999 when he was 18 years old.
This is the first Federal execution to take place for 17 years and the first during the period of a lame duck presidency for 130 years.
Four more black men are being fast-tracked for state murder by the Trump administration.
This is the same Trump who has been encouraging violence against his political opponents and praised a white supremacist youth – Kyle Rittenhouse –who shot dead a BLM protester.
Bernard’s attorney called the execution “a stain on America’s criminal justice system.”
“Brandon made one terrible mistake at age 18,” said the lawyer, Robert C. Owen. “But he did not kill anyone, and he never stopped feeling shame and profound remorse for his actions in the crime that took the lives of Todd and Stacie Bagley. And he spent the rest of his life sincerely trying to show, as he put it, that he ‘was not that person.'”
Million MAGA March losers fail to mobilise for fuhrer Trump
updated 10:00 GMT 15 November 2020
The million maga march is a flop – official! The Trump diehards haven’t quite managed the million they had claimed would be in attendance.
Instead, there was a rag-bag showing more like in the hundreds, not even the thousands.
Trump, who didn’t exactly do a lot of work for the people in his four years as president, is doing even less now.
Indeed, it was when he was on the way to play golf at one of his nearby courses that his cavalcade ran into a gaggle of his enthusiastically deranged supporters who swarmed his car.
Some of his fans were impressed by his apperance; others not so much. This from the Washington Post at the scene in DC:
“He drove right past me. I saw him. He waved right past me,” one man said, squatting to collect himself.
A group of women huddled around their phone, looking at a video they took of Trump’s appearance.
“He looked fake,” one said. “I’m still shaking.”
Among those that turned out were the fascist thugs that otherwise go by the name of the Proud Boys.
Here you can see the Nazi thugs initiating a new member of the tribe (try not to laugh):
They couldn’t find any black people to beat up on and looked rather disconsulate (turns out the cowards waited until nightfall to do that).
As usual at gatherings of the Trump meat-heads, there were no masks in evidence on Freedom Plaza, so the covid virus was certainly having a good day out.
After they had finished with the bonding thing, the Proud Boy thugs started rioting, pretty much on the order of Trump:
Fascist-enabler Trump didn’t hold back on Twitter with his call for violence, in what the Huffington Post described as a ‘stunningly vicious post’:
ANTIFA SCUM ran for the hills today when they tried attacking the people at the Trump Rally, because those people aggressively fought back. Antifa waited until tonight, when 99% were gone, to attack innocent #MAGA People. DC Police, get going — do your job and don’t hold back!!!
Million MAGA March of racists ‘heartwarming’ says Trump
Trump called the gathering of the far right and various hangers on “heartwarming”, as you would expect of the fascist enabler.
But the Trump well-wishers are not having the streets to themselves – far from it.
BLM and anti-fascist counter-protesters showed up early and made sure ‘LOSER’ signs were in view for the arriving ‘millions’.
There’s no sign yet of Alex Jones and his gang of militia terrorists who said on Thursday they would be showing up today.
Meanwhile, the TikTok generation is raining on Trump’s parade again. The #millionmagamarch hashtag has been taken over by the youth of America, with a proliferation of pancakes (Biden flipped four states, Trump none) to make the point about who actually won the election.
The MAGA crowd earlier in the day ripped down BLM memorials to Black men mudered by police. Those memorials have largely since been repaired, as the smell of buring MAGA flags fills the air:
