Charges filed against four in connection with George Floyd’s death

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Sometimes, there aren’t numbers to crunch. The Marshall Project asked every state and the federal government for data on the race of inmates who were diagnosed with or died due to covid-19. Most state prison agencies, 42 in all, and the Federal Bureau of Prisons didn’t provide the data.
Vice President Mike Pence’s chief of staff, Marc Short, owns stock worth up to $1.6 million in companies involved with the Trump administration’s pandemic response.

Yesterday, former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin was charged with second-degree murder in connection with Floyd’s death. Three other former officers, who were present during Floyd’s death and later fired along with Chauvin, were charged with aiding and abetting a second-degree murder.
Floyd’s death led to protests across the country, from small and mid-sized communities, including my hometown of Amarillo, Texas, to big cities and the nation’s capital, where about 1,300 active-duty troops were sent in response.
Since last weekend, journalists across the country have faced attacks, harassment and arrest while covering the protests. The US Press Freedom Tracker has tracked more than 200 press freedom violations, including arrests and attacks against journalists, most of which were committed by police.
But Amanda Darrach argued in the Columbia Journalism Review that journalists shouldn’t focus on their own victimhood. “The presumption is that we’re being targeted, because being targeted means we’re important,” she writes. “The simple truth is that in a crowd, journalists are not separate. We’re not protected. We’re subject to the same soup of adrenalin, and rage, and terror as anyone else.”
The Drug Enforcement Administration was given the authority to conduct covert surveillance on protestors.

From Oklahoma Watch: Yesterday, Oklahoma reversed a decision to remove a slew of online data that shed light on where covid-19 is spreading.
The Anchorage Daily News and ProPublica earned a Pulitzer Prize for their series on sexual violence in Alaska, but their work isn’t over. Their next joint project is a profile series compiled after conversations with hundreds of sexual assault survivors. The team described it as “a collaborative reporting process, not just between our newsrooms, but also with those we were writing about.”
During Memorial Day weekend, photos circulated of a crowded pool party at Missouri’s Lake of the Ozarks. Last week, the Springfield News-Leader reported that a person who went to the reservoir that weekend had tested positive for covid-19 and may have been infectious during the trip.

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– Mollie Bryant