Time once again for a post in which I link to stories that either didn’t make the cut for this week’s Friday Five, or broke after I composed the Friday Five, or are an update to a story I’ve linked to and ranted commented upon in a previous post. There was a whole lot of news that broke yesterday (in addition to the stuff I wrote about in the evening) so it’s taken me longer than I liked to figure out which ones to talk about.

First, some very sad news: Two Black Transgender Women Murdered Amid Nationwide Racial Justice Protests. In case you forgot what the protests are about: society far too often treat black lives as disposal. And here we are again.

Speaking of: Police body camera footage shows black man pleading ‘I can’t breathe’ during 2019 Oklahoma arrest. As the headline says, this is a case from over a year ago. A case the the officers have largely thus far escaped any consequences. The body cam footage is pretty damning. Will there actually be consequences now? I guess we can hope.

Immigrants stage a hunger strike for Black lives inside ICE detention facility. Remember that almost all of the immigrants are being illegally detained by the U.S. And all of them are being held in conditions that violate not just our laws, but also internal law. And the reason this is happening is because our current federal administration values people of color even less than the existing systemic racism of our society as a whole. These immigrants understand that their plight is intimately tied to all the forces that make the Black Lives Matter movement necessary.

Meanwhile, there is still a pandemic going on: Eastern Washington COVID-19 case counts continue to climb, especially in young people. And of course the communities that have been most resistant to any measures to limit transmission of the disease are where cases are spiking, now.

I’m only including this next article because it is an excellent example of writing a news story with absolutely no useful information: Why are Washington state’s coronavirus cases on the rise again?

On the other hand, apparently sometimes the Times remembers it’s a newspaper… Fox News runs digitally altered images in coverage of Seattle’s protests, Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone. It’s not just Fox News that is doing this. Local station, KOMO, has run fake pictures and false stories. It seems local stations in other markets that all happen to be owned by Sinclair (which in many ways is worse than Fox) are running this fake stories about what’s happened in Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood once the state police, national guard, and riot cops were pulled out. The police have not abandoned the neighborhood. They’ve reduced their presence to the number necessary to respond to 911 calls, that’s it. And people in the neighborhood are not locking people out or extorting people or even walking around armed.

What is happening? People have planted community vegetable gardens. They have set up a food coop. They are (at save social distances) singing, and playing music and just chilling. You know, being a neighborhood rather than a war zone. One former co-worker of mine who happens to live up there posted elsewhere, “It’s basically a street festival.”

There was one other topic I was going to include, but my rant on the single link got long enough that I think it needs a separate post. So I’m going to close this here.