2 Cops Fired for Arrest That Left Mayor 'Horrified'
Police report says officers in Savannah, Ga., tied T-shirt over mouth of mistakenly arrested man

Two Georgia police officers tied a T-shirt over the mouth of a man who spit at them during an arrest, which led to their firings, a police report says. The district attorney for Chatham County plans to let a grand jury decide whether to bring criminal charges against former Savannah police Cpl. Daniel Kang and Sgt. Octavio Arango. Police Chief Roy Minter announced the firings Aug. 12, saying only that the officers had used force to arrest the wrong person in a search for a domestic violence suspect, per the AP. Details of the April arrest were contained in the incident report Arango filed, WSVH-FM reported. The report says the officers kicked down the door of an apartment to serve a warrant and encountered Darryl Faitele inside. Arango wrote in the report that he handcuffed Faitele, lying facedown on the floor, and noticed blood on the man's chin and shirt.

The report said Faitele then spit at the officers. Arango "forcefully shoved Faitele's face back" with a gloved hand and "forced his jaw closed," the report said. The officers then pulled Faitele's T-shirt over his face and tied another shirt over his mouth, according to the incident report. Minter said the man was taken into custody but never formally charged. He called the arrest a case of "mistaken identity." Savannah Mayor Van Johnson said he was "horrified" by the officers' actions. "When we have bad actors, or we have good actors that do bad things, we have to be quick enough to identify them and take the appropriate action," Johnson said. District Attorney Meg Heap said she plans to present the case to a grand jury in September.

https://www.newser.com/story/295620/2-cops-fired-for-arrest-that-left-mayor-horrified.html?utm_source=part&utm_medium=uol&utm_campaign=rss_top

Profs 'Terrified' by Order to Keep Quiet About Outbreak
The University of Alabama sent staffers an email

https://www.newser.com/story/295588/professors-told-to-keep-quiet-about-covid-19-outbreak.html

The University of Alabama is telling professors to keep quiet about a coronavirus outbreak afflicting the student body, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports. "Do not tell the rest of the class," administration officials wrote in an email, underlining the word "not." An online COVID-19 dashboard reports 1,368 known cases across the university system. "If the established rules for masks and physical distancing are followed in the classroom, then the risk of transmission from the positive student is minimal, and it is not necessary to inform the rest of the class they may have been in the same room as a positive classmate," the email goes on. "For privacy reasons, the instructor should not announce to the class that a student in the class tested positive, even anonymously."

But staffers appear unsettled by the order not to talk. "A lot of my colleagues and people I've talked to, they're terrified," an American studies professor tells the Daily Beast, which broke the story. "Every statement at least for the last month has been about this plan, they’ve got this plan. It makes it feel like a lot of this is for show, especially when they don’t want you to confirm it's not working." Oddly, the outbreak is no secret: The AP reported earlier this week about rising UofA cases and Tuscaloosa's plan to shutter city bars for two weeks. The Washington Post calls it "one of the largest coronavirus clusters reported at any academic institution" since the school year started. A university official says the outbreak is particularly high among sororities and fraternities.

He Shot the Elk on Saturday. It Killed Him the Next Day

An Oregon man managed to hit a bull elk while archery hunting on Saturday—and in a terrible twist, be killed by the animal the following day. The Statesman Journal reports Mark David, 66, was on private land near Tillamook when he shot the elk, but darkness set in before he was able to track it down. David, of Hillsboro, and the landowner set out shortly after 9am Sunday and did successfully locate the animal, and KOIN reports he then again wounded the elk with a bow, but it charged and gored him in the neck fatally despite the landowner's attempts to help him. The elk was subsequently killed; KATU reports that following the investigation the meat was donated to the Tillamook County Jail

https://www.newser.com/story/295625/hunter-killed-on-sunday-by-elk-he-shot-saturday.html?utm_source=part&utm_medium=uol&utm_campaign=rss_top

Data firm predicts election 'chaos' as Trump seems to win in a landslide before losing as more votes are counted

https://news.yahoo.com/data-firm-predicts-election-chaos-143620130.html

A data firm is bolstering the idea that Election Night is going to be a nightmare this year.

Hawkfish, the political data agency funded largely by Michael Bloomberg and contracting with Democratic candidates in the 2020 election, is predicting "chaos in America" once this year's presidential votes are in, Axios reports. "We believe that on Election Night, we are going to see Donald Trump in a stronger position than the reality actually is," Hawkfish CEO Josh Mendelsohn said, calling the phenomenon a "red mirage."

That's presumably because Trump will win — "potentially in a landslide" — Election Day's more quickly tallied in-person votes, "but lose a week later" as absentee ballots are counted, Axios describes. Trump is already stoking mistrust surrounding absentee and mail-in ballots, adding fuel to this potentially chaotic fire.

Acosta had asked a White House official why there was apparently no effort to implement social distancing measures for the audience at the speech. The official's response?


"Everybody is going to catch this thing eventually," the official reportedly said.

It's a staggering comment, for a variety of reasons. The most obvious is that everyone won't catch the novel coronavirus eventually, ideally; the point of developing a vaccine is to keep that from happening. What's more, even if there were no vaccine, there's a big difference between people catching it now and catching it in a year or two when there might be better therapeutic treatments or potentially a cure. It's like shrugging at people getting infections before the invention of penicillin.


But this was also one comment from one official, and it was not something that we could simply ascribe to the administration overall as a deliberate strategy.

Until Monday morning, when The Washington Post reported that something along these lines is gaining acceptance among White House leadership.

"One of President Trump's top medical advisers is urging the White House to embrace a controversial 'herd immunity' strategy to combat the pandemic, which would entail allowing the coronavirus to spread through most of the population to quickly build resistance to the virus, while taking steps to protect those in nursing homes and other vulnerable populations, according to five people familiar with the discussions," The Post's Yasmeen Abutaleb and Josh Dawsey report. "The administration has already begun to implement some policies along these lines, according to current and former officials as well as experts, particularly with regard to testing."



https://www.sfgate.com/opinion/article/Trump-leans-into-his-180-000-deaths-is-a-15527367.php

Trump’s Gender Gap Risks Becoming Chasm, Adding to Campaign Woes

Republicans pulled out all the stops at their convention to persuade female voters that President Donald Trump cares about their interests, even pledging to put a woman on the moon. But polls show that Trump is losing ground as women’s concerns about him intensify.

The gender gap that Trump barely overcame to win in 2016 has grown wider. Polling this summer shows that female voters not only object to his persona, but also to his preference for a heavy, militaristic response to racial-justice protesters.


While Republicans traditionally face a gender gap in presidential elections, “the magnitude of that difference is larger this time with Trump,” said Susan Carroll, a senior scholar at the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University. “He definitely has quite a problem with women voters -- and any Republican has some problem with women voters relative to men -- but he has a much bigger problem.”

Throughout the Republican National Convention last week, woman after woman took the podium to describe Trump’s compassion, empathy and protective nature, and urged viewers to believe that behind the scenes, Trump is far different from what the country sees every day. His press secretary, Kayleigh McEnany, recalled how he frequently asked about her new baby, and first lady Melania Trump said he was anguished over the rising human toll of the coronavirus.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/trumps-gender-gap-risks-becoming-chasm-adding-to-campaign-woes/ar-BB18xC2x?ocid=uxbndlbing

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8680521/Arkansas-sheriff-resigns-recording-leaks-calling-girlfriend-n-lover.html

Sheriff Todd Wright of Arkansas County quit his post effective immediately on Friday after a sick audio recording surfaced on social media
The recording was apparently made months earlier

Wright reportedly became upset that his girlfriend Desiree Middlebrooks had spoken a black grocery store worker

Wright called his partner a ‘n***** lover’, later adding in a rage ‘Why you got to holler at f***ing n*****s’ when I’m around?’


A special Quorum Court meeting was held Friday morning at the Arkansas County Courthouse to discuss Wright’s behavior and to urge his resignation

In the leaked recording, Wright is heard using the n-word nine times in a rage

Wright blamed his behavior on the devil, saying he isn’t racist and was angry with Middlebrooks because he had missed a funeral of his black friend

https://twitter.com/MontyBoa99/status/1300328182382571521

https://civiqs.com/results/approve_president_trump?annotations=true&uncertainty=true&zoomIn=true&gender=Female

Trump is using an age-old tactic of white supremacists called “acceleration.” Rubin quotes
@BrookingsInst
: This phenomenon — reveling in violence from racial divisions they stoke — is part of the white supremacist playbook, specifically the phenomenon known as “accelerationism.”

https://twitter.com/JoyAnnReid/status/1300207813453586432

https://twitter.com/JoyAnnReid/status/1300207822370729984

https://twitter.com/JoyAnnReid/status/1300207826820890624

https://twitter.com/JoyAnnReid/status/1300207832755834886

https://twitter.com/JoyAnnReid/status/1300207835079467011