Sudan's ruling military council and opposition leaders sign power-sharing accord after all-night talks to end crisis.
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Breaking News: Eric Garner’s Chokehold Death Will Not Lead to Federal Charges for NYPD Officer
TheGrio has launched a special series called #BlackonBlue to examine the relationship between law enforcement and African-Americans. Our reporters and videographers will investigate police brutality and corruption while also exploring local and national efforts to improve policing in our communities. Join the conversation, or share your own story, using the hashtag #BlackonBlue.
The Justice Department will not bring federal charges against a New York City police officer in the death of Eric Garner, ending a yearslong inquiry into a case that sharply divided officials and prompted national protests over excessive force by the police, according to two people briefed on the decision.
Federal prosecutors in Brooklyn intend to announce the decision not to bring civil rights or criminal charges on Tuesday morning, just one day before the fifth anniversary of Mr. Garner’s death. That is the deadline by which they would have to file some of the possible charges against the officer, Daniel Pantaleo.
The post Breaking News: Eric Garner’s Chokehold Death Will Not Lead to Federal Charges for NYPD Officer appeared first on theGrio.
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Lil Nas X riding high as ‘Old Town Road’ hits 15th week atop Billboard Chart
Lil Nas X is riding his horse down that old town road and all the way to the bank.
—Young Thug worried fellow MC Lil Nas X made a career mistake coming out—
The rapper’s viral hit song “Old Town Road” is the little chartbusting summer hit that remains at the number one spot on Billboard’s Hot 100 chart for the 15th week, The NY Daily News reports.
Back in March, Billboard said the song “does not embrace enough elements of today’s country music.”
“He was flat-out discriminated against when the song had a these country overtones, but it continues to be one of the strong, infectious songs of our time,” Chuck Creekmur, co-founder and CEO of allhiphop.com, told the Daily News on Monday.
“I find myself humming it all the time without hearing it.”
After much backlash with folks questioning if the song was truly taken down because it was a Black artist artfully mixing country and rap and carving out his own path, the single re-emerged on the chart with help from Billy Ray Cyrus spitting a few bars.
By its 13th week, Old Town Road had made history with its longevity on the chart longer than any other hip-hop record ever.
And when the Atlanta rapper came out as gay a few weeks during pride month, his song continued to surge.
Now that the song has hit it’s 15th week on Billboard, Lil Nas X has another notch on his belt beating out Mark Ronson and Bruno Mars (2015’s “Uptown Funk!”), Elton John (1997’s “Candle In The Wind”) and Whitney Houston (1992’s “I’ll Always Love You”) which all stood firm a lot the list for 14 consecutive weeks.
In one more week, if Old Town Road keeps riding high, it will beat out Mariah Carey and Boyz II Men’s 1995 hit “One Sweet Day” and 2017’s “Despacito” by Luis Fonsi & Daddy Yankee featuring Justin Bieber and it will be a first in the chart’s 61-year history.
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Trump renews racist assault against congresswomen, says other racists agree with him
Defiant in the face of widespread criticism, President Donald Trump renewed his belligerent call for four Democratic congresswomen of color to get out of the U.S. “right now,” cementing his position as the most willing U.S. leader in generations to stoke the discord that helped send him to the White House.
Content to gamble that a sizable chunk of the electorate embraces his tweets that have been widely denounced as racist , the president made clear that he has no qualms about exploiting racial divisions once again.
“It doesn’t concern me because many people agree with me,” Trump said Monday at the White House. “A lot of people love it, by the way.”
The episode served notice that Trump is willing to again rely on incendiary rhetoric on issues of race and immigration to preserve his political base in the leadup to the 2020 election.
There was near unanimous condemnation from Democrats for Trump’s comments and a rumble of discontent from a subset of Republicans — but notably not from the party’s congressional leaders.
Republican Sen. Mitt Romney of Utah, the party’s White House nominee in 2012 and now one of the president’s most vocal GOP critics, said Trump’s comments were “destructive, demeaning, and disunifying.”
Far from backing down, Trump on Monday dug in on comments he had initially made a day earlier on Twitter that if lawmakers “hate our country,” they can go back to their “broken and crime-infested” countries. His remarks were directed at four congresswomen: Reps. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts and Rashida Tlaib of Michigan. All are American citizens and three of the four were born in the U.S.
“If you’re not happy in the U.S., if you’re complaining all the time, you can leave, you can leave right now,” he said.
The president’s words, which evoked the trope of telling black people to go back to Africa, may have been partly meant to widen the divides within the House Democratic caucus, which has been riven by internal debate over how best to oppose his policies. And while Trump’s attacks brought Democrats together in defense of their colleagues, his allies noted he was also having some success in making the controversial progressive lawmakers the face of their party.
The president questioned whether Democrats should “want to wrap” themselves around this group of four people as he recited a list of the quartet’s most controversial statements.
The four themselves fired back late Monday, condemning what they called “xenophobic bigoted remarks” from the Republican president and renewing calls for their party to begin impeachment proceedings.
Trump “does not know how to defend his policies and so what he does is attack us personally,” said Ocasio-Cortez.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who said Trump’s campaign slogan truly means he wants to “make America white again,” announced Monday that the House would vote on a resolution condemning his new comments . The resolution “strongly condemns President Donald Trump’s racist comments” and says they “have legitimized and increased fear and hatred of new Americans and people of color.”
The Senate’s top Democrat, Chuck Schumer of New York, said his party would also try to force a vote in the GOP-controlled chamber.
Trump, who won the presidency in 2016 in part by energizing disaffected voters with inflammatory racial rhetoric, made clear he has no intention of backing away from that strategy in 2020.
“The Dems were trying to distance themselves from the four ‘progressives,’ but now they are forced to embrace them,” he tweeted Monday afternoon. “That means they are endorsing Socialism, hate of Israel and the USA! Not good for the Democrats!”
Trump has faced few consequences for such attacks in the past. They typically earn him cycles of wall-to-wall media attention. He is wagering that his most steadfast supporters will be energized by the controversy as much, or if not more so, than the opposition.
“It’s possible I’m wrong,” Trump allowed Monday. “The voters will decide.”
The president has told aides that he was giving voice what many of his supporters believe — that they are tired of people, including immigrants, disrespecting their country, according to three Republicans close to the White House who were not authorized to speak publicly about private conversations.
Trump on Monday singled out Omar, in particular, accusing her of having “hatred” for Israel, and expressing “love” for “enemies like al-Qaida.”
“These are people that, in my opinion, hate our country,” he said.
Omar, in an interview, once laughed about how a college professor had spoken of al-Qaida with an intensity she said was not used to describe “America,” ”England” or “The Army.”
She addressed herself directly to Trump in a tweet, writing, “You are stoking white nationalism (because) you are angry that people like us are serving in Congress and fighting against your hate-filled agenda.”
Republicans largely trod carefully with their responses.
Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham, a close ally of the president who golfed with him over the weekend, advised him to “aim higher” during an appearance on “Fox & Friends,” even as he accused the four Democrats of being “anti-Semitic” and “anti-American.”
Marc Short, chief of staff to Vice President Mike Pence, said “I don’t think that the president’s intent in any way is racist,” pointing to Trump’s decision to choose Elaine Chao, who was born outside the country, as his transportation secretary.
Chao is one of the few minorities among the largely white and male aides in high-profile roles in Trump’s administration. She is the wife of Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell, who declined to comment Monday on Trump’s attacks.
The latest provocation came just two days after Trump inserted himself further into a rift between Pelosi and Ocasio-Cortez, offering an unsolicited defense of the Democratic speaker. Pelosi has been seeking to minimize Ocasio-Cortez’s influence in the House Democratic caucus in recent days, prompting the freshman lawmaker to accuse Pelosi of trying to marginalize women of color.
Trump told advisers later that he was pleased with his meddling, believing that dividing Democrats would be helpful to him, as would elevating any self-proclaimed socialists as a way to frighten voters to steer clear of their liberal politics, the Republicans said.
Among the few GOP lawmakers commenting Monday, Rep. Pete Olson of Texas said Trump’s tweets were “not reflective of the values of the 1,000,000+ people” in his district. “We are proud to be the most diverse Congressional district in America. I urge our President immediately disavow his comments,” he wrote.
Several other Republicans went out of their way to say they were not condoning the views of the Democrats, while encouraging Trump to retract his comments.
Maine Sen. Susan Collins, who is up for re-election next year, said Trump’s tweet was “way over the line and he should take that down.”
Sen. Patrick Toomey of Pennsylvania said of the Democrats, “We should defeat their ideas on the merits, not on the basis of their ancestry.”
In an Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll from February 2017, half of Americans said the mixing of culture and values from around the world is an important part of America’s identity as a nation. Fewer — about a third — said the same of a culture established by early European immigrants.
But partisans in that poll were divided over these aspects of America’s identity. About two-thirds of Democrats but only about a third of Republicans thought the mixing of world cultures was important to the country’s identity. By comparison, nearly half of Republicans but just about a quarter of Democrats saw the culture of early European immigrants as important to the nation.
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Tennessee governor backtracks on Confederate proclamation honoring KKK leader after backlash
Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee changed course on Monday and declared he’s now in favor of amending a law that requires the state to honor Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest, an early leader of the Ku Klux Klan.
Lee tweeted on Monday he will work to change a decades-old statute requiring governors to sign a proclamation designating July 13 as “Nathan Bedford Forrest Day.”
“While it is my job as governor to enforce the law, I want Tennesseans to know where my heart is on this issue,” Lee, a Republican, said. “Our state’s history is rich, complex and in some cases painful. With this in mind, I will be working to change this law.”
Lee’s statement came days after he faced national backlash for not only signing the proclamation last week, but also declining to answer reporter questions if he thought the law should change. When pressed, Lee told reporters Thursday that he “hadn’t even looked at that law, other than knowing I needed to comply with it.”
High-profile Republicans and Democrats quickly criticized the signing, including Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, who called the law “wrong” and argued Tennessee “should not have an official day honoring (Forrest).”
At the same time, others also pointed out that Lee’s reluctance to address the proclamation was similar to his lack of action on what to do with the bust of Forrest currently sitting inside the Tennessee Statehouse.
Lee tweeted that he was speaking out in order to “clear the air on something that everyone’s been talking about.”
“I didn’t like it, and I want to explain why I didn’t like it and why I didn’t want to sign it,” Lee told WKRN-TV in interview Monday. “There are parts of our history that are painful, particularly to African Americans.”
Forrest, a Confederate cavalry general, amassed a fortune as a plantation owner and slave trader in Memphis before the Civil War.
He was in charge during the battle of Fort Pillow, where an estimated 300 African-American soldiers were massacred by Forrest’s men after surrendering. The massacre provoked outrage in the North and was one of the most bitterly disputed incidents in the Civil War.
State lawmakers voted to place Forrest’s bust in the Capitol more than a century after the Civil War ended.
“Nathan Bedford Forrest and his parts of life is part of painful history and why I, we need to look at changing law and I will work with legislators to do that,” Lee said.
According to the law in question, Tennessee governors must sign six proclamations throughout the year designating the following days of special observance: Robert E. Lee Day (January 19), Abraham Lincoln Day (February 12), Andrew Jackson Day (March 15), Confederate Decoration Day (June 3), Nathan Bedford Forrest Day (July 13) and Veterans’ Day (November 11).
The law encourages the governor to invite the public to observe each day in schools and churches. It does not, however, outline a penalty should the governor choose to not sign the proclamation.
Previous Democratic lawmaker attempts to change the law have been unsuccessful.
Earlier this year, Lee said he regretted attending and wearing a Confederate uniform during a fraternity “Old South” party while at Auburn University. Lee says he has come to see his participation in the event differently.
The post Tennessee governor backtracks on Confederate proclamation honoring KKK leader after backlash appeared first on theGrio.
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