It’s currently illegal in the city to wear a mask under a number of circumstances, notably to avoid identification while engaging in illegal activities. But the law, which dates back to 1982, also says mask-wearing is prohibited if the wearer intends to intimidate or threaten another person, or if they try to deprive someone of other rights guaranteed by law. Virginia has a similar law on the books, which was tested last month, when a single person was arrested during a large pro-gun demonstration in Richmond.
Still, there were no arrests at Saturday’s white nationalist demonstration, which was escorted by a contingent of D.C. police officers. And that could largely be because many anti-mask laws rest on shaky legal foundations, often testing the careful balancing act between public safety and the First Amendment. Is a mask a means to threaten someone, or simply a tool to protect someone’s identity when they have an unpopular opinion?
It isn’t an easy question to answer, says Doron Ezickson, vice president for the Mid-Atlantic and Midwest with the Anti-Defamation League.
“The D.C. law hinges on intent, whether the person wearing the hood or mask is intended to cause another person to fear for his or her personal safety. That element of intent is very important from a constitutional standpoint,” he says.
When the D.C. Council passed the law almost four decades ago, it did so specifically because of a reported uptick in Ku Klux Klan activity in the Maryland and Virginia suburbs around D.C., and a rise in incidents in the city itself. (The law also criminalized defacing public and private property with racist messages or images.)
“In April of 1982 both the Ohev Shalom Synagogue and the 19th Street Baptist Church were defaced with anti-Semitic graffiti, and during the same month a swastika was painted on Kesher Israel Synagogue,” explained a Council report on the bill. “More recently many of the public refuse receptacles in the District of Columbia have been seen with the word ‘nigger’ painted on them.”
Virginia’s anti-mask law has similar foundations.
But D.C. Council member Mary Cheh (D-Ward 3), who also is a constitutional law professor, says that what the KKK was known for doing differs from the activities of groups like Patriot Front today. While they may spring from the same general ideology, the means of expressing it have so far been different.
Some were veiled, others not, still more wrapped their faces in black-and-white checkered scarves. Most carried roses, Iraqi flags or signs defending their role in the regime change demonstrations.
They marched through a tunnel and spilled out into Tahrir Square, the epicentre of the youth-dominated movement in a country where vast regions remain socially conservative.
“We want to protect women’s role in the protests as we’re just like the men. There are efforts to kick us out of Tahrir but we’ll only come back stronger,” said Zainab Ahmad, a pharmacy student.
“Some people were inciting against us a few days ago, seeking to keep women at home or keep them quiet. But we turned out today in large numbers to prove to those people that their efforts will end in failure,” she said.
Ahmad appeared to be referring to controversial cleric Moqtada Sadr, a powerful figure who first backed the rallies when they erupted in October but who has since sought to discredit them.
On Saturday, the militiaman-turned-politician had alleged drug and alcohol use among the protesters and said it was immoral for men and women to mix there.
And a few moments before Thursday’s women’s march began, Sadr once again took to Twitter to slam the protests as being rife with “nudity, promiscuity, drunkenness, immorality, debauchery … and non-believers”.
In a strange turn, he said Iraq must not “turn into Chicago,” which he said was full of “moral looseness” including homosexuality, a claim that was immediately mocked online.
- ‘Freedom, revolution, feminism’ -
While the numbers in Tahrir have dwindled in recent weeks, many Iraqi youth say the past four months of rallies have helped break down widespread conservative social norms.
Men and women were seen holding hands in Tahrir and even camping out in the square together.
On Thursday, men linked arms to form a protective ring around the women as they marched for over an hour.
“Revolution is my name, male silence is the real shame!” they chanted, then adding “Freedom, revolution, feminism!”
The House Judiciary Committee hosted the hearing on sexual harassment and other forms of workplace discrimination within the federal court system which featured several former law clerks who said they were victimized by federal judges.
According to Courthouse News reporter Megan Mineiro, Jordan was initially in attendance but quickly left once the woman began sharing their stories—suggesting the testimony perhaps hit a bit too close to home.
The first speaker, Olivia Warren, previously clerked for now-dead Ninth Circuit Judge Stephen Reinhardt. She began her testimony by describing an offensive drawing that was left on her desk to welcome her to her first day of work in the illustrious chambers of America’s judicial system.
“The judge himself asked me whether or not the drawing was quote ‘accurate,’ with a look that indicated whether or not it resembled my own breasts,” Warren said.
“I am not here to condemn Judge Reinhardt,” Warren noted—before later remarking upon the swirl of conflicting emotions she felt at his memorial service. “The juxtaposition of my anger and my grief and my shame was impossible to bear. The harassment had ceased.”
Warren said she chose to speak up only now, however, because the fear of retaliation was finally gone.
“My fear of retaliation is lessened because Judge Reinhardt is no longer on the bench,” she said. “My courage is bolstered by the brave women who have come before me.”
She also described the deceased judge’s disgusting behavior in lurid detail—but punctuated her testimony with a message of hope:
Scientists have found evidence for a mysterious “ghost population” of ancient humans that lived in Africa about half a million years ago and whose genes live on in people today.
Traces of the unknown ancestor emerged when researchers analysed genomes from west African populations and found that up to a fifth of their DNA appeared to have come from the missing relatives.
Geneticists suspect that the ancestors of modern west Africans interbred with the yet-to-be-discovered archaic humans tens of thousands of years ago, much as ancient Europeans once mated with Neanderthals.
“In the west Africans we looked at, all have ancestry from this unknown archaic population,” said Sriram Sankararaman, a computational biologist who led the research at the University of California in Los Angeles.
Unlike today, the world was once home to many related species or subspecies of human. And when they stumbled upon one another, mating was not out of the question. As a result, modern Europeans carry a smattering of Neanderthal genes, while indigenous Australians, Polynesians and Melanesians carry genes from Denisovans, another group of archaic humans.
Previous studies have hinted that other ancient humansonce roamed Africa, but without any fossils or DNA to pore over, researchers have struggled to learn more about them.
Arun Durvasula and Sankararaman obtained 405 genomes from four west African populations and used statistical techniques to work out whether an influx of genes from interbreeding was likely to have happened in the distant past. The analysis suggested that it had in every case.
The scientists went on to scour the African genomes for chunks of DNA that looked different to modern human genes. This allowed them to pull out sequences that most probably came from an ancient relative. By comparing these with genes from Neanderthals and Denisovans, they concluded that the DNA had to come from an unknown group of archaic humans.
“They seem to have made a pretty substantial impact on the genomes of the present day individuals we studied,” Sankararaman said. “They account for 2% to 19% of their genetic ancestry.” The four populations studied came from three countries: two from Nigeria, and one each from Sierra Leone and the Gambia.
The findings are far from definitive, but according to the scientists’ best estimates, the ghost population split from the ancestors of Neanderthals and modern humans between 360,000 and 1m years ago. The group of perhaps 20,000 individuals then bred with the ancestors of modern west Africans at some point in the past 124,000 years.
The surveillance footage shows Rodriguez in apparent distress, naked and hallucinating.
She is seen at one point undressing, at times crawling and appearing to vomit, and banging on the door. Rodriguez was found dead in her cell after about four days of alleged neglect.
“I’d describe it as a window into hell,” the family’s attorney Nate Bingham told CBS News’ Nikki Battiste.
The ordeal began when her husband placed a 911 call in 2017 wanting to seek medical help for Rodriguez.
In the emergency call, originally placed in Spanish, he described her as “having a psychiatric problem and isn’t behaving normal,” and went on to say “she’s being violent and has already hit me twice, and I need a medic.”
Instead, police arrived and carried Rodriguez into the Washington state jail known as “SCORE.”
“My mother had never been arrested,” Jose Marte, Rodriguez’ oldest son said. He acknowledged that she had been diagnosed with a mental disorder in the past.
The Rodriguez’s lawyer Nate Bingham claimed the facility’s staff was unable to communicate with Rodriguez during her incarceration because she was so mentally ill.
“When someone is so mentally ill that they can’t communicate, then that’s a sign of a really big problem,” he said.
The family’s lawsuit states Rodriguez eventually died from “an easily diagnosable and treatable metabolic condition called ketoacidosis,” and they said she had previously been diagnosed and treated for bipolar disorder.
Jose Marte said his family is now filing the suit “to bring justice to what has happened,” and to shine a light on “these type of situations that are happening in these jail systems.”
“I feel like all of this could have been prevented,” he said.
In a statement to CBS News, the jail facility extended its “condolences to all involved…” and said “since this incident, our employees have received comprehensive training in crisis intervention.” It also pointed out that the police department found “no malicious criminal act contributed to her death.”
