This week has seen one awful event after another, so quick in succession that one barely has time to recoil, register, and digest one before the next one hit. The death of Alton Sterling on Tuesday in Baton Rouge, Louisiana was followed on Wednesday by the death of Philando Castile in a suburb of Minneapolis-St. Paul, Minnesota. Both were black men killed by the police. Their deaths were caught on camera and caused widespread outrage. I have not watched the videos since I do not have the stomach to watch people die.
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Michael Segalov writes that both finalists to replace David Cameron for the leadership of the Conservative Party, Theresa May and Andrea Leadsom, have a record of opposing equal rights for gays.
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I will be volunteering with the Ohio ACLU during the Republican convention that begins on the 18th, monitoring the media coverage though I have not yet been told exactly what I will be doing. At a meeting some months ago to prepare, concerns were raised that the police might try to stop the public from recording their actions using their mobile phones. These citizen produced videos have altered the dynamic in police-public relations in that in the past, the statements of the police as to what happened were largely taken at face value but now we often have video and audio of the events as they unfold, sometimes even livestreamed, and this has often exposed the use of extreme and unnecessary and even deadly force, especially targeting people of color.
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To no one’s surprise Ted Cruz says that he has accepted Donald Trump’s invitation to speak at the Republican National Convention that begins on July 18, thus signaling that too has caved in to the Trump juggernaut.
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The long-awaited inquiry by Lord Chilcot into the UK decision to join with the US in waging the illegal way against Iraq has ended and its final report has been released. The investigation was started in 2009 to look into the decision that has resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people in the region and created anarchy and lawlessness that have become the breeding grounds for vicious and deadly groups like ISIS. The report offers a searing indictment of former prime minister Tony Blair and the entire way that the government made that fateful decision.
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There is more video on the immediate aftermath of the panic (that I wrote about yesterday) that ensued in a Cleveland suburb after police got 911 calls from the sister and father of a hotel desk clerk who had told them that a man in the hotel lobby in traditional Arab dress was using multiple disposable cell phones and pledging allegiance to ISIS.
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As Robert Mackey writes, the decision by the FBI to not prosecute Hillary Clinton for her use of a private email server is being celebrated by the Clinton camp even though the FBI says that she had been “extremely careless” in her treatment of classified material and had lied repeatedly about whether she had sent classified emails through her unclassified private server.
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Cleveland just witnessed a very strange and disturbing incident. Ahmed al-Menhali, a citizen of the United Arab Emirates, had come to Cleveland to take advantage of the medical facilities at the Cleveland Clinic and was checking into a suburban hotel when a police team armed with assault rifles stormed in and tackled him to the ground. They soon discovered that he was innocent but the man collapsed and was rushed to a nearby hospital.
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Nigel Farage, the leader of the UK Independence Party and a leading advocate of withdrawal from the EU, has suddenly resigned his party leadership, adding to the large list of people who have decided to take a lower profile following the Brexit vite.
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