President Trump on Wednesday renewed his attacks on CNN’s Don Lemon, one of the moderators of the Democratic debate, calling him “the dumbest man on television” and suggesting he was “too dumb” to understand that he should ask fair questions.

Trump’s ire, directed at an African American TV host whose intelligence he has publicly questioned before, appeared prompted by Lemon’s assertion at Tuesday’s debate in Detroit that Trump is pursuing “a reelection strategy based in part on racial division.”

Lemon’s questioning of the Democratic candidates came in the wake of relentless attacks in recent weeks by Trump on House Oversight Committee Chairman Elijah E. Cummings (D-Md.), an African American, and four liberal minority congresswomen known on Capitol Hill as “the Squad.”

“CNN’s Don Lemon, the dumbest man on television, insinuated last night while asking a debate ‘question’ that I was a racist, when in fact I am ‘the least racist person in the world,’ ” Trump wrote on Twitter. “Perhaps someone should explain to Don that he is supposed to be neutral, unbiased & fair, or is he too dumb (stupid} to understand that.”

Trump, who frequently accuses CNN of biased coverage, added: “No wonder that CNN’s ratings (MSNBC’s also) have gone down the tubes - and will stay there until they bring credibility back to the newsroom. Don’t hold your breath!”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-renews-attacks-on-intelligence-of-cnns-don-lemon-one-of-the-democratic-debate-moderators/2019/07/31/0192a6cc-b382-11e9-8949-5f36ff92706e_story.html?utm_term=.7e6dbdafd521

Assault charge dropped against 10-year-old boy who injured classmate in dodgeball-like game
"It is my earnest hope that both sides will come back to the table to work out a solution that benefits both of these children," a Michigan prosecutor said.

A Michigan prosecutor dismissed an assault charge against a 10-year-old boy who injured a classmate with a ball during a game students were playing at recess.

Cameishi Triplett Lindley said in a Facebook fundraising post last week that her son, Bryce, was suspended from Eriksson Elementary School in Canton Township, Michigan, and then charged with aggravated assault over the April 29 incident.

Wayne County Prosecutor Kym L. Worthy said in a statement Wednesday that although the charge is "certainly sustainable," the case is being dismissed.

"I have no doubt that both families involved love their children and want the best for them. But I do think that there is a better way to go forward at this time," she said in a statement.

"It is my earnest hope that both sides will come back to the table to work out a solution that benefits both of these children."
The incident happened when students were playing a game called tips, according to Lindley's Facebook post. Tips is similar to dodgeball. but instead of throwing the ball at each other, children toss the ball into the air and then jump up and catch it.

Lindley said the ball thrown by her son hit another boy and allegedly resulted in the boy, who is 9 years old, suffering a concussion. According to a police report obtained by WXYZ in Detroit, the boy was hit in the face with the ball.

The injured boy's mother, who did not want to be identified, told the outlet that her son has a medical condition that makes head injuries dangerous. She said her son suffered a black eye and had a bruise on his nose from being hit.

Prosecutors said that the incident between Lindley's son and the other boy happened after the students had stopped playing the game. Lindley's son allegedly "took the ball and intentionally threw it with force" at the other boy, Worthy said in a statement Wednesday.

The charge against Lindley's son was dismissed one day before he was due in court.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/nbcblk/assault-charge-dropped-against-10-year-old-boy-over-injury-n1037181

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/07/30/simple-math-that-should-keep-republicans-up-night/?utm_term=.da1326f8f5a9

The simple math that should keep Republicans up at night
The most common age of Hispanics in America is 11. For whites? 58.

Two demographic trends are expected to reshape the United States over the next 30 years. One is that the average age of Americans will creep steadily upward. The other is that the density of white Americans as a percentage of the population will slip steadily downward.

On Tuesday, we got a vivid reminder of the existence of those two trends, courtesy of analysis from the Pew Research Center. Pew’s Katherine Schaeffer looked at Census Bureau age data by race and ethnicity and came to a startling realization.

The most common age in the United States is 27, a function of the population boom that marked the millennial generation and of the natural effects of the baby boomers getting older. But that most-common age is not the same across racial or ethnic groups. Among black Americans, the most common age is 27, as it is for nonwhite Americans overall. The most common age among whites?

Fifty-eight.

and dancing to their tune.

Trump’s latest live-tweeting binge shows how Fox News sets his agenda

https://www.vox.com/2019/7/30/20747141/trump-fox-news-presidency-elijah-cummings

President Donald Trump has access to some of the finest intelligence professionals in the world. He could seek policy guidance and input from the foremost experts. And yet time and time again, the Fox News and Fox Business channels end up setting his administration’s agenda.

A string of tweets he posted Monday night and Tuesday morning confirms it. Across a 14-hour span, Trump tweeted about topics as varied as his one-sided feud with the city of Baltimore and the Chinese economy — a confusing conglomeration, except that the tweetstorm clearly came in response to content he was watching on his favorite television stations.

These days, Trump — who claimed less than two years ago that “I don’t get to watch much television ... primarily because of documents” — isn’t even trying to hide it.

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Hannity’s show was immediately followed by Laura Ingraham’s — and Trump was watching that too. At 10:46 pm, the president posted a tweet amplifying commentary a woman that Fox News identified as a “Baltimore resident advocate” offered on Ingraham’s show defending Trump’s attacks on Baltimore.

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Trump got up on Tuesday and continued watching Fox. His first tweet of the day amplified a Fox & Friends news brief about two Somali refugees who were reportedly arrested in Arizona and have been accused of providing material support for ISIS. (One of the Democratic congresswomen of color Trump has been attacking, Rep. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, is a Somali refugee.)

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Trump then changed the channel from Fox News to Fox Business — but not before he posted a tweet explicitly promoting Fox & Friends over its morning cable news competition on MSNBC.

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Over the next half-hour, Trump posted two tweets quoting and responding to interviews from Maria Bartiromo’s Fox Business show, including one in which Sen. John Barrasso (R-WY) promoted an infrastructure bill.

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Trump seems to think Fox News is reality. It’s not.
It’s not hard to sync up the president’s tweets with the cable news he’s watching, and yet Trump wants Americans to believe he has his finger on the pulse of the country.

Some students thought that he strained logic in order to defend men. “In Dershowitz’s view, men who are accused of rape, there has got to be a defense,” one female student from the 1991 class recalled. “He had convoluted ways of thinking about how men could misinterpret lack of consent. And it wasn’t relegated to when we were speaking about a rape case. Wherever we were on the syllabus, he would bring it up.”

William Kennedy Smith, a nephew of John F. Kennedy, had recently been accused of raping a woman on a Kennedy family estate, and Dershowitz frequently spoke to the media about the case. (Smith argued that the sex was consensual, and he was later acquitted.) In class, according to a second female student, who is now the chief executive of a nonprofit, “he would talk about Smith and the woman frolicking in the waves, ripping off their clothes.” Midway through the semester, “a woman raised her hand and said, essentially, O.K., enough rape examples! There are women in this class who have been raped. Can we move on to something else?”

“His hair just caught on fire,” Murph Willcott, a male student who was in the class during the confrontation, recalled. “He seemed to take that as a challenge to his authority, and he made it clear he was going to teach what he wanted to teach.”

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/08/05/alan-dershowitz-devils-advocate?currentPage=all

long long article about dershowitz's life

According to a report in the New York Times, White House officials held a frantic meeting on Monday attempting to figure out a way to rein in Donald Trump’s increasing use of overt racist rhetoric — but that no one was sure how to tell him.

After a weekend of attacks on Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-MD), the Times reports “Several White House officials expressed agreement during a senior staff meeting on Monday morning that the president’s attacks were a bad move.”

According to sources, the members of the meeting arrived at their conclusion but “they were uncertain who could intervene with him — or if anyone would even dare try.”

No one in the White House would admit that the president’s attacks on Cummings — and now on MSNBC personality Al Sharpton — were part of a grand plan, saying Trump’s was ramping up his Twitter raging purely on impulse.

The report notes, White House officials have concluded, “that any political benefit he might derive by revving up his conservative, largely white base could be offset by alienating more moderate voters in the suburbs of states like Wisconsin and Michigan that he needs to win a second term.”

https://www.alternet.org/2019/07/white-house-aides-panicked-trumps-descent-into-overt-racism-is-about-to-blow-up-in-his-face-report/

The 33-year-old had spent nine years in a juvenile prison for carrying out the mass shooting at Jonesboro Westside Middle School with fellow student Mitchell Johnson, who was then 13, on March 24, 1998.

At the time, it was one of the deadliest U.S. school shooting in modern history. The shooting at Colorado’s Columbine High School, which left 15 people dead ― including the two gunmen ― took place a year later. Prior to the Westside Middle School shooting, two other school shootings ― the Stockton, California, schoolyard shooting in 1989 and the University of Iowa shooting in 1991 ― each left six dead, including the shooters.

Both Golden and Johnson were tried as juveniles and found guilty of five counts of murder and ordered to be held until they turned 21. After their release, they were referred to as the only two mass school shooters who were alive and walking free.

Both went on to have additional brushes with the law over firearms, however.

In 2008, a little more than a year after his release, Golden was caught applying for a firearm in Arkansas using his since-changed legal name, Drew Douglas Grant. The application was denied after his fingerprints used in a background check revealed his criminal past, which forbade him from owning or possessing a firearm. Arkansas State Police also accused him of lying about his address on his application.

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/crash-kills-school-shooter-andrew-golden_n_5d3dfd05e4b0ef792e0e1db6

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INDEPENDENCE COUNTY, AR — One of the 1998 Jonesboro Arkansas school rampage shooters has died in a car accident.

Andrew Golden had been living in Cape Girardeau County, Missouri under the name Drew Grant.

He was 11 years old at the time of the shooting which killed five and injured 10. He was released from prison on his 21st birthday in 2007.

The car crash happened late Saturday night near Cave City, Arkansas.

The Arkansas State Police report says 59-year-old Daniel Petty drove across the road and hit Golden/Grant head-on. ASP says Petty died in the crash.

ASP also says 59-year-old Kathy Tanner was in the car with Petty and was injured.

https://www.wpsdlocal6.com/2019/07/28/jonesboro-westside-school-shooter-dies-in-car-crash-in-cave-city-ar/

Police say 29-year-old Stephanie Grant and a small child were in the car with Golden/Grant.

Tanner, Grant, and the child were all taken to a medical center for their injuries.


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Golden, who changed his name to Drew Grant, was 11 when he helped carry out what was then one of the deadliest U.S. school shootings.

?cache=cvmqyzqona&ops=scalefit_720_noupscale

https://www.wpsdlocal6.com/2019/07/28/jonesboro-westside-school-shooter-dies-in-car-crash-in-cave-city-ar/

Getting Out of Jail After Dark Can Be Dangerous—and Sometimes Deadly
Nighttime is the worst possible time to release inmates. So why do so many jails do it?

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It’s not unusual for jails large and small to release inmates after dark or in the early hours of the morning. For many people released before daybreak, the hours that follow are difficult, dangerous, and sometimes deadly. Many hit the streets without phones, money, a ride, or knowledge of local public transportation, if it’s still running. They may be struggling with addiction or mental health issues; some have no place to go. In Los Angeles, men and women let out at night often find their way to nearby Skid Row. Chicago’s Cook County Jail releases people into a dangerous neighborhood after dark. (Discharged inmates often head to a local Popeyes for sanctuary.) “It’s hard to think of a more counterproductive, self-defeating measure if we want people to succeed when they get out of jail than releasing them in the middle of the night,” says David Fathi, director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s prison project.

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Eight months before I encountered Leah, Jessica St. Louis was released from Santa Rita at 1:25 a.m. on a Saturday. The 26-year-old had been picked up on minor charges before, and almost every time she was set free, “she ends up at our place,” says Benita Turner, her foster mother. Turner lives 20 minutes from the jail, but on the morning of July 28, 2018, neither St. Louis nor the jail called her. St. Louis set off alone with nothing but a transit ticket issued by the jail. The trains wouldn’t start running for several hours. She was found outside the station before daybreak, dead from an overdose of heroin laced with fentanyl, according to the county coroner’s office.

Turner still has questions about how her foster daughter died—where she found drugs in the early morning or got the money to pay for them. “We will never know the answer to that,” says Sergeant Ray Kelly, the spokes­person for the Alameda County Sheriff’s Office, which runs Santa Rita Jail. Studies show that inmates’ risk of dying is highest in the two weeks following release from jail or prison; overdoses are the most frequent cause of death. “We’ve had people leave jail and then get home and go back on drugs and overdose and die, I’m sure,” Kelly says. (The jail does hand out naloxone, a drug that reverses opioid overdoses, but only to inmates with a prescription.) If Santa Rita had discharged St. Louis at 7 a.m., would it have changed anything? “I don’t know that the hour of the night would have made a difference,” Kelly says.

Santa Rita usually lets out 50 to 100 inmates between 4:30 p.m. and 4:30 a.m. every day. Some have just posted bail. A few have been arrested late in the day for a misdemeanor like public drunkenness and let go with a citation. Those who have received a release order from a judge earlier in the day may wait in holding cells for hours while jail employees confirm their release and handle their paperwork. The process freezes three times a day during head count. Ditto if there’s a fight or other emergency.

https://www.motherjones.com/crime-justice/2019/07/left-in-the-dark/