WHAT'S BREWING
U.S. ECONOMY ENTERED RECESSION IN FEBRUARY The U.S. economy entered a recession in February as the coronavirus struck the nation, ending the longest expansion on record. A group of economists said that employment, income and spending peaked in February and then fell sharply afterward as the viral outbreak shut down businesses across the country, marking the start of the downturn after nearly 11 full years of economic growth. [AP]
TOP EDITOR RESIGNS AFTER BROWNFACE OUTCRY The editor-in-chief of Bon Appétit magazine has stepped down after a photo of him wearing brownface resurfaced and several of the magazine’s few staffers of color publicly called on him to resign as a reckoning on diversity, inclusion and representation sweeps the media industry. Adam Rapoport announced his exit after freelance food journalist Tammie Teclemariam unearthed a 2013 Instagram photo of him wearing brownface for Halloween and perpetuating negative stereotypes about Latinx people. [HuffPost]
MAN WHO DROVE TRUCK INTO PROTESTERS SAYS HE'S A WHITE SUPREMACIST A Virginia man who drove his pickup truck into a crowd of anti-racism protesters on Sunday is a self-described white supremacist, prosecutors said. Harry H. Rogers, 36, has been charged with assault and battery, attempted malicious wounding and felony vandalism after witnesses in Richmond said he drove onto a median, revved his engine and drove into a crowd of protesters. One person was injured. [HuffPost]
CROSSFIT CEO'S FLOYD TWEETS PROMPT SPONSOR, GYM EXODUS Reebok and other fitness companies are cutting ties with CrossFit after its CEO, Greg Glassman, mocked the police killing of George Floyd and the coronavirus pandemic in tweets over the weekend. Glassman, responding to an Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation tweet calling racism a public health issue, tweeted back: “It’s Floyd-19.” Glassman’s follow-up tweet on Sunday didn’t help matters. “Your failed model quarantined us and now you’re going to model a solution to racism?” [HuffPost]
WHY THE U.S. NEEDS TO MAKE REPARATIONS NOW Defunding the police is just part of the structural reform needed to root out racism in the U.S., says Mehrsa Baradaran, a law professor at the University of California, Irvine. What’s truly needed is a big-picture rethink of U.S. policy at every level, she told HuffPost. In her 2017 book “The Color of Money,” Baradaran lays out how, over centuries, policymakers wrote Black Americans out of the economic system — and how policies blocking Black people from obtaining mortgages, land and credit created an immense wealth gap between Black and white Americans that persists to this day. [HuffPost]
DEVELOPING COUNTRIES THAT HAVE HANDLED COVID-19 BETTER THAN THE U.S. The United States, Italy, Spain, France and the United Kingdom contain just 7.5% of the world’s population — and two-thirds of its coronavirus death toll. The successes of the global south — comprising newly industrialized or developing countries — have gone mostly unnoticed. Last month, the World Bank reported that developing countries make up 85% of the global population but account for just 21% of COVID-19 deaths. In late May, the entire region of West Africa had recorded just 654 COVID-19 deaths, a figure some Western countries were racking up every day. [HuffPost] |
