In addition, Torrance Police Chief Jeremiah
Hart said that he has relieved 13 other officers of their duty because of an
ongoing investigation into messages that he characterized as “racism and
hatred.”
Former officers Christopher Tomsic, 29, and
Cody Weldin, 28, were charged with one felony count each of vandalism and
conspiracy to commit vandalism, according to a statement from
the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office. Both men pleaded
not guilty to the charges, it said.
On January 27, 2020, Tomsic and Weldin were
allegedly among a group of officers responding to a police call regarding
stolen mail, the DA’s office said. The former officers were led to a vehicle
and allegedly ordered for it to be impounded to a tow yard, according to the
D.A.’s office. When the owner of the vehicle arrived to pick up the car, he
found a happy face spray-painted on the front passenger seat, a swastika symbol
spray-painted on the rear seat, and other items strewn throughout the vehicle,
the statement said.
The two men were terminated in March 2020, the
police chief said.
At a joint news conference with the police
chief, District Attorney George Gascón said the other Torrance officers who
were suspended were “exchanging racist, discriminatory, homophobic and
anti-Semitic messages.”
The District Attorney’s office has identified
hundreds of cases in which the officers were involved, he said, and they will
be reviewed that no other misconduct occurred.
“We have seen an increase in hate crimes,
not only in our own home town but around the country. And it’s
unacceptable,” Gascón said. “But it becomes doubly unacceptable when
we have the people that are sworn to protect all of us who engage in this
behavior.”
The two former officers are set to return to
court on October 4 for a preliminary hearing at the Foltz Criminal Justice
Center in Los Angeles, the DA’s office said.
CNN is attempting to reach Tomsic and Weldin’s
attorneys for comment.
Torrance is a city of around 143,000 people in the Los Angeles
metropolitan area. The Torrance Police Department currently employs 227 sworn
police officers and 128 civilian staff, according to its website.
Stutts spent nearly a month in the hospital battling the virus, but according to Anderson County GOP’s Dan Harvell, Stutts ultimately lost that battle.
Both Stutts and his wife were forced to go to the hospital when their oxygen levels dropped.
“The COVID has created double pneumonia in my lungs,” Stutts wrote in a Facebook post.
Wednesday, his family posted on Stutts’ Facebook page that he was having a hard time fighting the virus.
“Pressley had another rough night in the hospital,” the post said with a meme asking for “Prayers for Pressley” and his photo. “They are adjusting as needed to try to keep his levels stable. Most of the test results are the same (give or take) what they were yesterday.”
A supporter of former President Donald Trump, Stutts posted on his Facebook page in July he shared a post that cited Dr. Leana Wen saying that the unvaccinated are a threat to national security. The Palmer Report shared her comments adding that he believes anti-vaxxers should be forced to get constantly tested or stay at home.
In June, he shared photos of an anti-mask protest and celebrated when the legislature voted against mandating masks, vaccines and testing for state workers.
“People should be free to get the vaccines they want. Free not to get it. But what’s happening now is that there’s a discrimination starting to take place,” he told The Greenville News while at the protest.
“Great news from the SC legislature!!” he said. “Our friends in the House forced a vote yesterday on masks, vaccines, and tests. The first attempt failed, but they regrouped and passed it the 2nd time. Colleges that require the Covid vaccine will now be stripped of state money thru a budget proviso that passed, in the House. And, K-12 schools and colleges will be stripped of state money if they attempt to require masks or tests for Covid. A hard fought day, but a win for Liberty yesterday!”
The report also cited an earlier report that Stutts was a proponent for “freedom and liberty,” and thus believed no one should be forced to wear a mask and get vaccinated.
The Justice Department “deliberately targeted” supporters of the Black Lives Matter movement with harsh prosecutions at the “express direction” of former President Donald Trump and former Attorney General Bill Barr, according to a new report from the advocacy group Movement for Black Lives.
The report detailed 326 criminal cases brought by federal prosecutors related to last year’s protests following the police killings of George Floyd in Minneapolis and Breonna Taylor in Louisville. Federal prosecutors aggressively sought jurisdiction over the cases even though in more than 92% of the cases there were equivalent state-level charges that could have been brought instead, according to a data analysis by the Creating Law Enforcement Accountability & Responsibility (CLEAR) clinic at the City University of New York School of Law. Federal prosecutions result in conviction at much higher rates than state charges and nearly 90% of federal charges filed against protesters carried stiffer penalties than equivalent state charges.
Federal prosecutors “exploited the expansive federal criminal code” to assert jurisdiction over cases that “bore no federal interest,” the report said. Prosecutors often cited federal jurisdiction in alleged offenses that happened near federal property, affected property that receives federal funding, or had some tenuous connection to interstate commerce. “The government greatly exaggerated the threat of violence” from protesters, the report said, noting that the “vast majority” of charges were for nonviolent offenses or restricted to property destruction.
Prosecutors in more than 25% of cases also “stacked” charges against defendants with multiple redundant charges stemming from the same act to increase potential sentences or coerce guilty pleas, the report said. The only two violent charges related to murder were brought against counter-protesters who were reportedly members of the far-right Boogaloo Bois.
“The empirical data and findings in this report largely corroborate what Black organizers have long known intellectually, intuitively, and from lived experience about the federal government’s disparate policing and prosecution of racial justice protests and related activity,” the report said, drawing comparisons between last year’s federal crackdown to how the federal government historically used Counterintelligence Program techniques to “disrupt the work of the Black Panther Party and other organizations fighting for Black liberation.”
“We want to really show how the U.S. government has continued to persecute the Black movement by surveillance, by criminalizing protests, and by using the criminal legal system to prevent people from protesting and punishing them for being engaged in protests by attempting to curtail their First Amendment rights,” Amara Enyia, the policy research coordinator for The Movement for Black Lives, told the Associated Press, which first reported the findings. “It is undeniable that racism plays a role. It is structurally built into the fabric of this country and its institutions, which is why it’s been so difficult to eradicate. It’s based on institutions that were designed around racism and around the devaluing of Black people and the devaluing of Black lives.”
A Republican legislator in Maine who lost his wife to COVID-19 last week appeared at a rally on Tuesday that featured a GOP colleague who compared the state’s Democratic governor to a Nazi doctor who performed deadly experiments on Jews during the Holocaust.
State Rep. Chris Johansen, who emerged in the early days of the pandemic as a fierce opponent of public health-related restrictions, joined a group of lawmakers at the event in Augusta. State Rep. Heidi Sampson delivered a speech to the crowd that baselessly accused Gov. Janet Mills, who has introduced a vaccine mandate for health-care workers, of operating a government campaign to test “experimental” vaccines on unknowing citizens.
She described Mills as the “reincarnated” Nazi doctor Josef Mengele, who performed deadly experiments on Jewish people in Auschwitz death camps during the Holocaust.
“Do I need to remind you of the late 1930s and into the 40s in Germany. And the experiments with Josef Mengele,” Sampson said according to a video from the event posted online. “What was it? A shot. And these were crimes against humanity. And what came out of that? The Nuremberg Code. The Nuremberg Trial. Informed consent is at the top and violating that is punishable by death.”
She also compared vaccine mandates to the Tuskegee syphilis experiment on Black men. Sampson did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Friday.
The rally came in response to a recent announcement that health-care workers would be required to get shots as part of a push to shore up vaccinations among state and federal employees and health-care workers with public-facing roles.
State Rep. Shelley Rudnicki, who recorded the rally on Facebook Live, told The Daily Beast on Friday that the event had been misunderstood and wasn’t so much anti-vaccines as it was a “pro-freedom” rally.
“The vaccine was just a culmination of everything,” Rudnicki contested. “It was a ‘right to choose’ rally.”
When asked about a trend of comparisons being made between vaccine cards and Jews being forced to carry the Star of David during the Holocaust, she said: “I think what a lot of people are saying is, asking for people’s papers, and that’s what it comes down to.”
According to the Bangor Daily News, neither Chris Johansen nor his wife Cindy, who served as corresponding secretary for the Aroostook County Republicans, had been vaccinated against COVID when she first began describing her symptoms on Facebook last month.
While there is little evidence of her death on the Facebook page of Aroostook County Republicans, the Aroostook County Democrats posted a condolence message on Facebook on Aug. 15. Her death was later confirmed to The Daily Beast by a spokesperson for the Maine Republican Party.
Pressley Stutts, a Republican leader in South Carolina who fought COVID-19 vaccination efforts, died on Thursday of the coronavirus after a weekslong battle, including six days spent on a ventilator, The Greenville News reported.
Stutts, a 64-year-old veteran, frequently shared conspiracy theories about the virus, the vaccines and the 2020 election on Facebook, including in posts made from his ICU bed.
Stutts served as an executive committee member of the Greenville County Republican Party and the leader of the Greenville Tea Party. He protested Vice President Kamala Harris when she visited the area in June to promote vaccination and called the effort an “ungodly initiative.”
Stutts also praised a state effort to strip funding from schools that imposed mask mandates or testing requirements, and was angry about $10 gift card incentives for vaccination, writing to his 5,000 followers: “Do not sell your body nor your soul no matter the asking price.”
On Aug. 1 ― the day he went into the ICU ― Stutts insisted he had “always contended that COVID was very real” and called it “a deadly bio-weapon perpetrated upon the people of the world by enemies foreign, and perhaps domestic.”
He also posted conspiracytheories about the virus online. Last year, he dismissed masks as an “illusion,” claimed in December that there had been no increase in deaths in 2020, and said, “the American public has been gaslighted by the medical industrial complex.”
The sources say there were 2,259 requests for ambulances from patients recuperating at home during the week from August 9 to 15. The figure was up 591 from a week earlier.
The sources say 1,414, or 63 percent, of the patients were not taken to medical institutions.
They say this was because paramedics could not find hospitals that could admit patients, and in many cases public healthcare officials determined that home recuperation should be continued.
The sources also say that among 845 cases of hospitalization, it took three to five hours for patients to arrive at hospitals in 159 cases and more than five hours in 121 cases.
Tokyo Fire Department officials say they are struggling to respond to a growing number of requests for ambulances, and that they will do all they can in cooperation with relevant bodies.
Gov. Kate Brown on Thursday moved to effectively strike down a 30-year-old Oregon law exempting health care workers from vaccination requirements, prompting immediate pushback from the state’s nurses’ union.
Brown announced that state agencies would mandate COVID-19 vaccinations for health care workers and all employees in public schools no earlier than Oct. 18. Her policy, which mirrors a mandate announced yesterday by Washingon Gov. Jay Inslee, allows no workarounds such as weekly COVID testing. Doctors, nurses and teachers must get vaccinated or lose their jobs.
“There are those who will disagree with the actions I’m taking today,” Brown said in a press conference. “But school is starting across the state. COVID-19 poses a threat to our kids. Our kids need to be protected, and they need to be in school. And that’s why I’m willing to take the heat for this decision.”
The governor’s announcement comes as Oregon faces a critical shortage of staffed hospital beds amid the surge of the Delta variant. On Wednesday, the Oregon Health Authority announced hospitals had just 7% of staffed beds still available, and 6% of staffed ICU beds.
In the past week, new COVID-19 hospitalizations more than doubled: 546 the week of Aug. 9, compared with 224 the week prior. In Southern Oregon, where the Delta variant is most rampant, some hospitals have run out of beds entirely.
The Oregon Nurses Association, which has consistently opposed a vaccine requirement for its members, said Thursday that Brown’s decision would only worsen the staffing shortage—because some nurses would quit rather than get a shot.
“We also know that some health care workers are deeply opposed to vaccine mandates; so deeply that some will leave the profession before accepting a mandate,” the union wrote. “Today’s decision to mandate vaccinations for health care workers may ultimately exacerbate an already dangerous staffing crisis in hospitals across the state.”
To follow through on her announcement, Brown will need to overrule an Oregon law, passed in 1989, that exempts health care workers, among others, from workplace requirements for vaccinations. That law says that employers can’t require vaccinations, except by a state or federal order. WW examined that law in detail last month.
Critically ill patients in the state this week outnumbered the total number of staffed ICU beds available, with a major surge in south Alabama pushing hospitals to their limits. The Alabama Department of Public Health confirmed this week it requested federal aid, with at least one rural Alabama hospital requesting FEMA staff to help run patient units.
“Our hospital is packed. Our ICU beds have been full for two weeks at least,” said Douglas Brewer, CEO at Whitfield Regional Hospital in rural Demopolis, Alabama.
Whitfield this week requested staffing help from FEMA to run an eight-bed “step down” unit that is currently open but unable to be used as the hospital’s staff is stretched beyond capacity.
“As fast as we empty one bed, we have another patient come from another hospital to fill it,” Whitfield said. “It’s a devastating time right now. I think most hospitals will tell you we’re seeing it get worse by the hour right now. Not just in the need of beds but how sick the patients are. This is really hard because these are younger patients. Not that it’s easy to see older patients, but when you see a (young patient) who just had a baby on a ventilator, it tends to sober you pretty quickly.”
ADPH this week confirmed it submitted two requests to FEMA for intravenous therapy teams and resources, in addition to federal staff. Assessments have also been made at eight hospitals for Disaster Medical Assistance Teams, which are comprehensive medical units that can be deployed quickly during a disaster or other large scale event. DMAT teams are currently in use in Mississippi, where at least one major hospital has been forced to set up field units in a parking garage to handle an onslaught of COVID-19 patients.
ADPH declined to provide additional information on Wednesday about where Alabama might be considering deploying federal aid in the state. FEMA directed The Montgomery Advertiser’s questions back to the state. State Health Officer Dr. Scott Harris said late Thursday he expects to release further details in the coming days.
Alabama Hospital Association Director Dr. Don Williamson earlier this week said federal resources have been considered for the state’s monoclonal antibody infusion centers to free up staff for local hospitals.
If the U.S. government was caught up short by the dramatic denouement of its 20-year war in Afghanistan, viewers of the three major networks must have been taken entirely by surprise.
Out of a combined 14,000-plus minutes of the national evening news broadcast on CBS, ABC, and NBC last year, a grand total of five minutes were devoted to Afghanistan, according to Andrew Tyndall, editor of the authoritative Tyndall Report, which has monitored and coded the networks’ nightly news each weekday since 1988.
Those five minutes, which covered the February 2020 Doha agreement between the United States and the Taliban, marked a 19-year low for Afghanistan coverage on the three networks’ newscasts. They compared to a high of 940 minutes the networks devoted to Afghanistan in 2001, all of it following 9/11 and the subsequent U.S. intervention, as shown below.
While the pathetic amount of coverage of the conflict last year can be partially explained by the virtually total dominance of the news agenda by the COVID-19 pandemic, the three networks devoted a total of only 362 minutes to Afghanistan in the preceding five years, or just two hours of coverage per network, or an average of only 24 minutes per network per year.
“The network nightly newscasts have not been on a war footing in their coverage of Afghanistan since 2014,” Tyndall wrote on his blog Thursday, referring to the last year of the surge of troops initiated by Obama in his first term). “For the last seven years they have treated the role of the military there as an afterthought, essentially a routine exercise in training and support, generating little excitement, no noticeable jeopardy and few headlines.”
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