| THE BIG STORY Teachers are organizing to protest school reopenings before the coronavirus is under control Remember the massive teacher protests and strikes in 2018? Teachers who organized that movement are planning new activism to protest how their states and school districts are handling the coronavirus.
Teachers across the country are frustrated by an absence of a coherent national plan from the Trump administration to keep teachers and students from spreading the coronavirus. Many have begun organizing protests against the government’s push for schools to reopen in the fall.
Organizers from education advocacy movements like Red for Ed, which sparked a national movement for more school funding and better pay for teachers in 2018 and 2019, are focusing on whether and when teachers and students should return to classrooms as coronavirus cases surge.
Meanwhile in individual school districts, educators are pressuring school boards to consider delaying the start of in-school instruction until the coronavirus outbreaks begin to subside in their communities.
Octavio Jones / Getty Images STAYING ON TOP OF THIS The Trump administration said it’s not expelling a group of immigrant children held in a hotel
Last week, the Associated Press reported that Immigration and Customs Enforcement was holding unaccompanied minors, some as young as 1, in hotels before quickly removing them without allowing them to go through the US's legal immigration system.
The report said a private contractor for ICE would take children to three hotels in Arizona and at the Texas–Mexico border before sending them to their home countries.
As a result of a lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union on behalf of the Texas Civil Rights Project, 17 immigrants detained at a Hampton Inn in McAllen, Texas, will instead be sent to a US refugee agency.
SNAPSHOTS Newly released video shows Austin police shooting an unarmed man. “I don't got no fucking gun, dog,” 42-year-old Michael Ramos told Austin police in the moments before he was shot to death.
Barack Obama and Joe Biden filmed calls with volunteers for a new phase of the quarantined campaign. Biden’s campaign, fresh off a viral video conversation with Obama, is trying to maximize whatever socially distant time the former president can give.
A Black family received a racist letter about their twin daughters after celebrating their graduation. The Sprouls received a note that read, in part, “It's time to take those hideous posters of that ugly fat black girl down off your house,” referring to signs celebrating the high school graduation of their twin daughters.
Statues of Christopher Columbus and Robert E. Lee were removed from Chicago and Richmond. In addition to the statue removal, Lee's name was also removed from a school in Virginia. The school was renamed for civil rights icon John Lewis, who died last week at the age of 80.
A crane removes the Christopher Columbus statue in Grant Park from its plinth, on Friday. Tyler Lariviere / AP TELLING THE WHOLE STORY The future of true crime will have to be different We’re talking more than ever about true crime. The genre is under the cultural microscope in a fresh way — particularly its ability to transform murder into mass entertainment.
But in the wake of the Black Lives Matter protests, true crime and its relationship to audiences will have to transform. Sarah Weinman writes “The scales have fallen from the eyes of true crime consumers. Murder and violence as entertainment was always difficult to stomach, but there was the hope...that the ethical thorniness could be counteracted, by centering victims and de-emphasizing traditional law-and-order narratives. It seems clear that true crime hasn’t gone nearly far enough.”
What might that look like? Weinman writes that it’s time to dig deeper and move far past true crime’s tendency to double as white middlebrow comfort food.
HANDSHAKES IN THE HAMPTONS People who attended the Chainsmokers “drive-in” concert swear it was safe and worthwhile The Chainsmokers held a “drive-in” concert in the Hamptons over the weekend.
First of all, that sentence is several nightmares strung together. Second of all, and more importantly, even though social media photos on the ground showed widespread distancing between people partying on their cars, other photos taken of the pit at night do not show clear markings of where and how crowds were controlled.
The internet was a little incredulous that people would risk it all for a Chainsmokers concert.
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