“The federal government spent $660 billion more than it collected in tax revenue this March, the Department of Treasury said Monday, as the Biden administration’s stimulus package pushed the U.S. monthly deficit near record highs.
The U.S. spent $927 billion in March alone — more than double the level from March 2020 — a jump due primarily to the disbursal of tens of millions of $1,400 stimulus payments under Biden’s American Rescue Plan. Meanwhile, tax revenues stayed largely flat, with the government only collecting slightly more than last March.
The resulting deficit is the third largest ever in American history, Treasury officials said, eclipsed only by April and June of last year — when the U.S. authorized larger levels of emergency spending to head off the economic crisis caused by the pandemic. The monthly deficit had contracted relative to the summer months as federal spending expired and the U.S. economy began to heal. Many economists and lawmakers clamored for the additional spending as necessary to help the economy recovery from one of the worst shocks in decades, with millions of workers still out of a job.
U.S. budget deficit breached $3.1 trillion in 2020 as pandemic slammed economy
Over the first six months of the current fiscal year, the government’s budget deficit has reached $1.7 trillion, a massive sum for this early in the year. America’s annual deficit hit $3.1 trillion in 2020, an all-time high that far surpassed the previous record of $1.4 trillion, which came in 2009 during the depths of the Great Recession. Democrats and Republicans authorized much of the emergency spending last year as a way to try and stop an economic collapse. They are at odds, though, over spending levels in 2021.” Read more at Washington Post
“Daunte Wright, 20, died Sunday outside Minneapolis because a police officer inadvertently shot him with a pistol instead of a taser, local authorities said.
‘This appears to me, from what I viewed in the officer's reaction and distress immediately after, that this was an accidental discharge that resulted in the tragic death of Mr. Wright,’ Brooklyn Center Police Chief Tim Gannon told reporters.
The big picture: State and local officials planned to ramp up the National Guard's presence in anticipation of a potential second night of protests.
The Minnesota Twins postponed today's game against the Boston Red Sox out of respect for the ‘tragic events.’
The area will be under a 7pm CST curfew starting tonight.
Body camera video released by police shows Wright trying to get back into his car during an encounter with officers.
The officer was heard warning ‘I'll tase ya’ as she drew a firearm and pointed it at Wright.
She then shouted ‘taser! taser!’ before Wright recoiled and drove the car forward.
The officer then told fellow officers, ‘I shot him.’
In his remarks, Gannon said officers are trained to shout ‘taser!’ before using one. This warns both fellow officers and suspects that its use is imminent.
What's next: The officer has been placed on administrative leave during an independent investigation. The city's mayor has called for the officer to be fired, and Gannon pleaded for patience during the ongoing criminal investigation.” Read more at Axios
Data: Mapping Police Violence; Chart: Michelle McGhee/Axios
MINNEAPOLIS — “Prosecutors in the Derek Chauvin murder trial will formally rest their case Tuesday after capping two weeks of intense and often excruciating testimony with an appearance Monday from George Floyd’s younger brother, who tearfully recalled their childhood in poverty and his brother’s anguish at their mother’s death.
Philonise Floyd, 39, recounted growing up with George Floyd, whom he described as a father figure in a household where their single mother struggled to make ends meet. George Floyd ensured that his younger siblings were dressed for school, were out the door on time, and had eaten something — even though he ‘couldn’t cook.’
Philonise Floyd, called to the stand as a ‘spark of life’ witness to humanize George Floyd before a jury considering whether to punish the police officer charged with murder in his death, burst into tears when prosecutors displayed a photo of George Floyd and their mother.
Philonise Floyd said his brother was a "mama's boy" and had been devastated by her death. He told the jury that the last time he saw his brother alive was at her funeral in May 2018. Floyd, who had moved to Minnesota in 2017, did not make it back to Texas before her death. In a quiet, shaking voice, Philonise Floyd told the jury about seeing his brother crouched at her casket in grief.” Read more at Boston Globe
“Domestic terrorism incidents have soared to new highs in the United States, driven chiefly by white supremacist, anti-Muslim, and antigovernment extremists on the far right, according to a Washington Post analysis of data compiled by the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
The surge reflects a growing threat from homegrown terrorism not seen in a quarter-century, with right-wing extremist attacks and plots greatly eclipsing those from the far left and causing more deaths, the analysis shows.
The number of all domestic terrorism incidents in the data peaked in 2020.
Since 2015, right-wing extremists have been involved in 267 plots or attacks and 91 fatalities, the data show. At the same time, attacks and plots ascribed to far-left views accounted for 66 incidents leading to 19 deaths.” Read more at Boston Globe
[Update: Virginia attorney general opens investigation into Windsor Police Department.] A police officer in Virginia who confronted a uniformed Black Army medic at gunpoint and doused him with pepper spray during a traffic stop, an exchange captured on video, has been fired, officials said on Sunday.
The officer, Joe Gutierrez, was terminated for his role in the Dec. 5 encounter involving Caron Nazario, a second lieutenant in the U.S. Army Medical Corps, the town of Windsor, Va., said in a statement posted on its website.
Officials said an internal investigation had determined that Mr. Gutierrez’s actions were not consistent with the department’s policies. They did not provide further details on when Mr. Gutierrez had been fired.
Body camera footage of the encounter has drawn widespread attention and criticism of Mr. Gutierrez, as well as another officer who was also involved in the traffic stop. Both officers were sued on April 2 in U.S. District Court in Norfolk, Va., by Lieutenant Nazario, who has accused the officers of using excessive force and violating his constitutional rights.” Read more at New York Times
“The CDC is calling on Michigan to ‘close things down’ to stop a new surge, and director Rochelle Walensky said the state can't vaccinate its way out of a spike.” Read more at Axios
“President Biden used a virtual meeting with corporate leaders about a global shortage of semiconductors to push Monday for his $2.3 trillion infrastructure plan, telling them that the United States should be the world’s computer chip leader.
‘We need to build the infrastructure of today, not repair the one of yesterday,’ he told the group of 19 executives from the technology, chip, and automotive industries. ‘China and the rest of the world is not waiting and there’s no reason why Americans should wait.’
He said the country hasn’t made big investments to stay ahead of global competitors, and it needs to step up its game.
Biden made an appearance at the meeting between administration officials and company leaders held to discuss developing a stronger US computer chip supply chain. The meeting came as the global chip shortage continued to plague a wide array of industries.
Chief executives of AT&T, Dell, Ford, General Motors, Stellantis (formerly Fiat Chrysler), Intel, Northrop Grumman, and others were scheduled to attend.” Read more at Boston Globe
“Republicans have been proclaiming for several years now that they have become the party of the working class, and with some justification. Working-class voters have indeed been marching into the party.
There has been a problem, though. Many of these voters became Republicans for cultural reasons, turned off by Democrats’ drift leftward on social issues. But their new party, the GOP, didn’t have much in the way of actual economic policies to appeal to them.
In fact, quite the opposite: For ideological reasons, many conservative Republicans opposed the kinds of government programs to benefit working-class families that Democrats have long championed. To some extent, working-class voters had arrived in a party that at times appeared somewhere between indifferent and hostile to their economic needs.
Now, that is changing. Starting a couple of years ago, and increasingly since the coronavirus economic downturn, there has been a sprouting of new-wave conservative proposals designed to help working-class families, even if those plans required ditching traditional free-market economics and concerns about budget deficits.
A few examples:
— Sen. Marco Rubio, who four years ago held up the Republicans’ big tax-cut package until it included an increase in the child tax credit, now has proposed, along with Sen. Mike Lee, expanding the child tax credit to levels even more generous than the child allowance President Biden and the Democrats put in their new coronavirus stimulus law.
— Sen. Mitt Romney has proposed a guaranteed monthly government cash benefit for families, starting mid-pregnancy and extending until children are 18.
—American Compass, an organization of young, conservative economic thinkers, has proposed a similar benefit, but one tied to work by capping the benefit at the level of income earned the prior year.
—Sen. Josh Hawley has proposed a ‘blue-collar bonus,’ paid out directly through an automatic, advanceable tax credit tied to hours worked.
—Sen. Tom Cotton has co-sponsored, along with Mr. Romney, a plan to raise the minimum wage and index it to inflation, as long as the increase is tied to a new E-Verify system to keep undocumented people out of the workforce.
In many respects, this movement is shattering traditional conservative economic positions. Mr. Cotton, for example, last year introduced a piece of legislation ambitiously titled the American Foundries Act of 2020, which instructed the Commerce Department to provide direct federal support to help American companies develop and produce semiconductors.
Such an approach smacks of “industrial policy,” an idea conservatives have traditionally loathed. They saw industrial policy as inefficient government intervention in the marketplace and an unwise selection of private-company winners and losers in that marketplace. But Mr. Cotton and a bipartisan group of co-sponsors framed their support for the semiconductor industry as a national-security imperative, needed to ensure that China can’t hold America hostage by dominating a critical supply chain.” Read more at Wall Street Journal
“A student was killed after firing on police at a high school in Knoxville, Tenn., authorities said. An officer was also injured in the shootout.
Knoxville Police Department officers responded to a report of someone possibly armed at Austin-East Magnet High School on Monday afternoon, the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation said. Officers found the suspect in a school bathroom and entered when he refused their commands to come out.
The student fired a gun, and one officer returned fire, TBI Director David Rausch said at a news conference. One officer was hit in the exchange and taken to a hospital for treatment, authorities said. The student was pronounced dead at the scene.
‘This wasn’t a school shooting, this was an officer-involved shooting inside of a school. Much different,’ Mr. Rausch said. ‘The student hadn’t done anything with the firearm until the officers engaged. So it’s not a school shooting.’
The Tennessee Bureau of Investigation is leading the investigation, which is common for officer-involved shootings, according to police.
By late Monday afternoon, the school building had been secured, and students who weren’t involved in the incident were released to their families, Bob Thomas, superintendent of Knox County Schools, said on Twitter. Police said a reunification site had been set up at a baseball field behind the school.” Read more at Wall Street Journal
“The beginning of the end of Britain’s lockdown — one of the longest and most stringent in the world — came with a pint at a pub.
Just past the stroke of midnight on Monday, a few select establishments in England served their first drinks since being forced to close in January, and more than a year after the first of three national lockdowns was imposed to limit the spread of the coronavirus.
Later in the morning, thousands of gyms, salons, and retail stores opened their doors for the first time in months, bringing a frisson of life to streets long frozen in a state of suspended animation.” Read more at Boston Globe
“Chris Magnus of Tucson, Ariz., has always been an unusual police chief.
He publicly criticized the anti-immigration policies of the Trump administration. He appeared to surprise his own mayor when he abruptly offered his resignation after releasing a video of a man who died in police custody. He was recognized nationally as the man in uniform hoisting a ‘Black Lives Matter’ sign at a protest.
President Biden is now preparing to nominate Chief Magnus to be the commissioner of Customs and Border Protection, signaling an intent to bring a seismic cultural shift to an agency at the center of some of the more contentious policies of President Donald J. Trump, particularly the separation of thousands of migrant children from their families. Chief Magnus will be expected to make good on Mr. Biden’s campaign pledge to increase oversight at the sprawling agency, one 60 times larger than the department of roughly 800 officers he led in Tucson.
If confirmed, Chief Magnus, who is gay and married to the former chief of staff to the mayor of Richmond, Calif., where he worked as the police chief, would also step into one of the Biden administration’s most politically divisive challenges: how to handle a record number of children and teenagers along the border that the administration has so far failed to release from detention facilities.” Read more at New York Times
“President Biden is nominating a former Obama-era official to oversee major white-collar, narcotics and cybercrime investigations at the U.S. Justice Department.
The White House on Monday said it would nominate Kenneth Polite, who served as U.S. attorney in New Orleans under President Barack Obama, to serve as the assistant attorney general in charge of the Justice Department’s criminal division.
Mr. Polite, a partner at the law firm Morgan, Lewis & Bockius LLP, didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
If confirmed by the Senate, Mr. Polite would oversee a number of high-profile sections of the Justice Department, including those investigating corporate misconduct such as foreign bribery, money laundering and healthcare fraud.” Read more at Wall Street Journal
“Britt Reid, the former outside linebackers coach of the Kansas City Chiefs and the son of the head coach Andy Reid, was charged Monday with one count of driving while intoxicated when he crashed into two cars, leaving a child seriously injured. The collision occurred just days before the Chiefs played in the Super Bowl in February.
If Reid, 35, is convicted of the charge, a felony, he faces up to seven years in prison. The legal action could also increase scrutiny on the Chiefs’ workplace. Reid crashed about a mile from the team’s complex at Arrowhead Stadium in Kansas City, Mo., and according to the charging document, Reid told police officers responding to the collision that he had just left work before it happened.
On Feb. 4 at about 9 p.m., Reid crashed his truck into two cars that were pulled over on a highway entrance ramp. One of the vehicles had stalled, and the driver called a cousin for help.
Shortly before the crash Reid was driving 83.9 miles per hours in a 65 m.p.h. zone, according to the charging document. Because the shoulder of the entrance ramp was narrow, the vehicles were sticking a foot or two out into the roadway. Reid told officers that he had been glancing over his shoulder preparing to merge before he struck the cars, and that he had not seen the first vehicle because its lights were off.
The driver of the first car told the police that he had activated his hazard lights, but that they might have gone dead because the car’s battery was weak.
Officers responding to the crash wrote in a statement that Reid smelled of alcohol and that his eyes were bloodshot. His blood alcohol concentration two hours after the crash was .113, the statement said. The legal limit to operate a motor vehicle in Missouri is .08.
The effects of the crash were catastrophic. A 5-year-old girl in the second car that was struck sustained a severe traumatic brain injury, brain contusions and subdural hematomas, among other injuries. According to a crowd fund-raising campaign started for the girl, she remained in the hospital at least seven weeks after the crash. An adult who was in the same car had a concussion and facial lacerations.” Read more at New York Times
“Microsoft is buying Nuance Communications, a software company that focuses on speech recognition through AI, in an all-cash transaction valued at $19.7 billion.” Read more at Axios
“More Georgia fallout: Will Smith and director Antoine Fuqua are moving their upcoming film production, ‘Emancipation,’ out of Georgia in response to the state's new voting restrictions.” Read more at Axios
“After a year where Black Lives Matter demonstrations saw Americans begin to re-address and rethink racial inequality in the nation, a pushback from predominantly Republican lawmakers is on the horizon, with 29 states in the US moving to introduce draconian anti-protest laws.
Florida is the most recent state to bring in legislation which critics say would crack down on demonstrations, infringe free speech rights and potentially disproportionately target people of color, while other states have pursued anti-protest bills which could even prevent those convicted from receiving public benefits.
Republicans in Florida’s house of representatives passed the controversial Combating Violence, Disorder, and Looting and Law Enforcement Protection Act at the end of March. The law would increase penalties for participating in broadly defined “violent” protests – the vast majority of Black Lives Matter protests have been peaceful – and make it a felony to deface monuments if damage is more than $200.
That bill is likely to pass the Florida senate – and be signed into law by the governor – in the coming weeks, with Republican politicians in many other states pursuing similar legislation.
In January Mike DeWine, the governor of Ohio, signed a new law which would increase penalties for protests near ‘critical infrastructure’, while a bill similar to the Florida legislation was passed by the state senate in Kentucky last month.
In Oklahoma, lawyers are working on legislation which would introduce prohibitive penalties for protesters blocking traffic, taking part in broadly defined “unlawful assemblies”, and introduce new restrictions on protests taking place near the state capitol.
There are 71 laws pending at the state and federal level which would impinge on Americans’ right to protest, according to the International Center for Not-For-Profit Law, in 29 states.
Vera Eidelman, staff attorney with the ACLU’s Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project, said there have been ‘waves’ of anti-protests bills introduced at state-level since late 2016, but not on this scale.
‘This year it’s proceeding at the clip of a tsunami,’ Eidelman said. ‘It’s not just waves anymore. It’s different both in terms of numbers and in terms of the breadth of the bills.’
In 2017, amid a swell of anti-Trump activism, more than 30 anti-protest bills were introduced, prompting the UN’s Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights to complain to the US state department, while legislation was also introduced in response to demonstrations against the Dakota access pipeline.
In 2021, it’s the widespread Black Lives Matter protests of previous summer that seem to have prompted the anti-protest backlash.
‘It’s disappointing but not terribly surprising, because we had a really powerful and expressive summer of protest,’ Eidelman said.
‘And as we have seen consistently in the last five or so years, legislators have chosen to respond to protests spilling out, people expressing themselves, by trying to silence those people, rather than trying to engage with their messages.’
Many of the bills working their way through state legislatures share common provisions, whether creating vague and ill-defined new crimes, or increasing penalties on already illegal conduct.
Not all of the bills will be passed into law, ‘but even the fact that they’re introduced is a serious problem’, Eidelman said.
‘Not only do these bills seek to impose monetary and criminal penalties, but there are also provisions in a number of states that would bar people from public employment, public benefits, and public office,’ Eidelman said.
‘Which I think is really dangerous and troubling, especially during Covid when people are really requiring things like public benefits.’
Barring demonstrators convicted under draconian protest laws would prevent people like John Lewis, the late Florida congressman and civil rights activist, from holding public office, and potentially prevent people who become engaged in politics through protest from seeking election.
Since the death of George Floyd on 25 May 2020, 95 bills that would restrict the right to peacefully assemble and protest have been introduced across the country, said Elly Page, a senior legal adviser at the International Center for not-for-profit law.
‘This is an extremely concerning attack on a core constitutional right – one that is fundamental to democratic participation and that has been critical to social progress throughout our country’s history,’ Page said in an email.
‘The legislation itself makes clear who is targeted, too. Since the start of last summer’s protests, which have taken place primarily in the streets, we have seen 15 bills that eliminate repercussions for a driver who runs over a protester, and nearly 50 bills that heighten the criminal penalty for blocking traffic.
Again, despite the overwhelmingly peaceful nature of last summer’s protests, we have seen almost 60 bills that would expand states’ already-overbroad ‘anti-riot’ laws or increase the riot-related penalties that could be levied on peaceful protesters.’
In many states the anti-protest laws have been pushed by Republican state senators or representatives, but in Florida, it is the state’s governor, Ron DeSantis, who has taken the lead.
DeSantis, a Trump-esque Republican who is said to be eyeing a 2024 presidential run, announced the ‘Combating Violence’ bill himself in September 2020, before urging Florida’s GOP-controlled house and senate to pass it.
DeSantis’s bill looks likely to be in place by the summer, in time to crack down on any protests of the type seen last year, despite emotional objections from some Florida Democrats.
‘This bill was written in response to peaceful protests this past summer that were focused on the support of those that believe Black lives matter. This is not a bill that has any other group in mind other than Black lives,’ Angie Nixon, a Florida state representative, told Orlando Weekly.
‘This bill is designed to keep us in check, to keep us fearful, to scare us from speaking out about the fact that Black lives matter.’” Read more at The Guardian
“Myanmar’s ruling military squared off against its opponents in the courts, the streets, and the countryside Monday, showing no sign of relenting in its crackdown against those opposed to February’s coup.
Aung San Suu Kyi, who led the elected government toppled in the military takeover, was accused of a fresh criminal charge when she appeared by video link before a judge in the capital Naypyitaw on Monday, according to her lawyers.
Suu Kyi was accused of breaching a law intended to control the spread of the coronavirus, the second such charge against her under the same law. She is already facing charges of illegally importing walkie-talkies, unlicensed use of them, inciting public unrest, and breaking the official secrets act.” Read more at Boston Globe
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