On Thursday Nashville officials were about to press criminal charges against left-wing activist Justin Jones for alleged felony aggravated rioting — but later in the day they changed their minds.
A Twitter video showed a man during Saturday’s downtown riots jumping onto the hood of a police car while hundreds of protestors cheered him on. The man’s face is not visible to the camera. Seconds later a law enforcement officer tackled the man.
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Democratic Presidential Candidate Joe Biden put his foot in his mouth again on Thursday when he said that “10 to 15 percent” of Americans are “just not very good people.”
The former vice president made these comments while holding a town hall on Thursday night with black supporters, according to Fox News.
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Stocks are rushing higher in morning trading Friday after a much better-than-expected report on the U.S. job market gave Wall Street’s recent rally another shot of adrenaline.
The S&P 500 was up 2.2% after the government said that U.S. employers added 2.5 million workers to their payrolls last month. Economists were expecting them instead to slash another 8 million jobs amid the recession caused by the coronavirus and the shutdowns put in place to stem it.
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Alabama’s port city removed a statue of a Confederate naval officer early Friday after days of protests over the police killing of George Floyd, with the mayor saying the monument was a “potential distraction” to focusing on the city’s future.
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Nashville Mayor John Cooper says the city has no money to host the Republican National Convention (RNC) in Nashville during his COVID-19 news conference Thursday.
The issue of hosting the RNC came up earlier this week when the host state of North Carolina’s Governor Roy Cooper expressed public safety concerns about holding such a large-scale event during the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, reported The Washington Times.
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Lawful protest in the American political process isn’t the same as the lawless rioting, looting, and destruction of lives and property that became a threat to the public in the past week.
The death of a black man, George Floyd, at the hands of a white police officer May 25 in Minneapolis sparked widespread protests there and across America. Many of the demonstrations, despite the general lockdown and stay-at-home orders still in place during the coronavirus pandemic, have been peaceful.
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Maury County Mayor Andy Ogles asked Gov. Bill Lee to lift the COVID-19 restrictions in the county because they “are doing more harm than good.”
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If Americans who voted for President Trump ever felt compelled to explain themselves to their friends and neighbors, at this point there is no longer any need to justify a vote to reelect him in November. As a matter of fact, the reasons for reelecting President Trump and for handing control of Congress to the Republican Party could not be any clearer than they are right now.
As the nation spirals out of control and buildings burn in various American cities, Democrats in Congress are nowhere to be found. More astonishingly, members of the campaign staff for the Democrats’ presumptive nominee have contributed to a fund intended to help release the violent rioters who have been arrested.
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Phone data from about 400 activists in Michigan’s capital who protested coronavirus-related government orders was reportedly collected by a progressive advocacy group, but the same group has not collected similar data on George Floyd protesters.
The Committee to Protect Medicare and Affordable Care, under the direction of former Democratic congressional candidate Dr. Rob Davidson, used cell phone data generated by an application called VoteMap to track the movements of the rally’s attendees after they departed from the capital, according to The Detroit News.
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Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee on Thursday outlined new spending plans for state government that reflect significant revenue reductions due to the economic impact of COVID-19.
Department of Finance and Administration Commissioner Butch Eley presented state lawmakers with the revised budget plans for the current fiscal year, as well as FY 2020-21, which begins July 1, 2020, and a framework for the following fiscal year, 2021-22.
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A divided Senate voted along party lines Thursday to confirm President Donald Trump’s choice to head the Voice of America and other U.S. government-funded international broadcasters that have been the subject of harsh criticism from the White House.
Despite significant Democratic opposition and concerns over his fitness for the job, the Senate voted 53-38 to confirm Michael Pack to run the U.S. Agency for Global Media, which oversees VOA and its sister outlets including Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Radio Free Asia and the Cuba-oriented Radio and Television Marti.
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Two former associates of Michael Flynn have seized on the Justice Department’s motion to drop charges against the retired general to call for relief from charges that they illegally lobbied for the Turkish government.
Bijan Rafiekian, a former Flynn business partner, and Ekim Alptekin, a former Flynn client, claim to be collateral damage in the government’s investigation of Flynn, who pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI in December 2017.
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Several authors of a large study that raised safety concerns about malaria drugs for coronavirus patients have retracted the report, saying independent reviewers were not able to verify information that’s been widely questioned by other scientists.
Thursday’s retraction in the journal Lancet involved a May 22 report on hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine, drugs long used for preventing or treating malaria but whose safety and effectiveness for COVID-19 are unknown.
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Tennessee delivered unemployment payments to more than 314,000 people last week, as the number of new jobless claims continued to run much higher than normal during the response to the new coronavirus outbreak.
Stay-at-home orders from Gov. Bill Lee and city and county officials in mid-March led to business closures and hundreds of thousands of layoffs, as officials scrambled to stem the rise of COVID-19.
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Live from Music Row Thursday morning on The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy – broadcast on Nashville’s Talk Radio 98.3 and 1510 WLAC weekdays from 5:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. – host Leahy welcomed former Vanderbilt University professor and all-star panelist Dr. Carol M. Swain to the studio.
At the top of the third hour, Leahy and Swain discussed reparations and how one could calculate that with many people who are descendants of immigrants from other black countries . Swain added that she didn’t think reparations were the answer and thought it would only worsen race relations in America.
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Black leaders in North Dakota’s largest city pleaded for calm Thursday in the face of violent threats to disrupt a gathering in memory of George Floyd and advertised the event as a celebration, not a protest.
The OneFargo event is scheduled Friday afternoon at a downtown Fargo park. Organizers had planned to march from Island Park to City Hall for a sit-in, but have scrapped that idea after social media threats surfaced to burn down the city offices and commit other violent acts.
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Tennessee’s highest court declined Thursday to take up an appeal of a lawsuit challenging the legality of a school voucher program that would let parents use public tax dollars for private school tuition.
Voucher supporters had hoped the Tennessee Supreme Court would reach down and take up the case after an appellate court set an Aug. 5 hearing to review the case.
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In a series of tweets, President Donald Trump said the Republican National Convention will look at states other than North Carolina to host August’s event, blaming Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper.
Cooper and North Carolina officials had been going back and forth with Republican officials over safety concerns regarding hosting a convention during the coronavirus pandemic.
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A judge set bail at $750,000 apiece Thursday for three fired Minneapolis police officers charged with aiding and abetting in the killing of George Floyd, as a memorial service took place just blocks away.
Tou Thao, Thomas Lane and J. Alexander Kueng made their first appearances in Hennepin County District Court as friends, relatives and celebrities gathered to memorialize Floyd at a nearby Bible college.
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The Tennessee House passed a resolution Thursday inviting the Republican National Committee to host its August convention in Nashville.
The resolution was passed after President Donald Trump announced earlier this week that he would be pulling the convention from Charlotte, North Carolina, whose Democratic governor refused to guarantee a full-scale convention amid the coronavirus pandemic.
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The Hennepin County Medical Examiner released a full autopsy Wednesday in the case of George Floyd, an unarmed black man who was allegedly murdered by Minneapolis police officers on Memorial Day.
The 20-page report was released with the permission of Floyd’s family and determined that Floyd’s heart stopped while being restrained by officers. A summary of the findings released earlier this week listed the “manner of death” as a homicide, but the coroner’s office said that a manner of death classification is “a statutory function of the medical examiner.”
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Even as Gov. Tim Walz allows more sectors of the economy to open, Minnesota unemployment ticked upward to 439,550 total claims in the week ending May 30, compared to 417,084 claims the prior week ending May 23.
All told, 22,466 new unemployment claims were filed in the state last week, a drop of 4,745 claims from the 27,211 claims initiated the prior week, an 18.5 percent week-over-week decrease.
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Gov. Gretchen Whitmer was seen protesting the death of George Floyd on Thursday in Highland Park with hundreds of other people in a way that appeared to break social distancing practices, despite voicing concerns in recent weeks about similar demonstrations spreading coronavirus.
Tiffany Brown, a spokesperson for the governor, denied that Whitmer had violated the executive order issues on Monday. The order, which moved Michigan into phase four of the MI Safe Start plan, says that people should remain six feet apart at public gatherings and that gatherings should consist of 100 people or fewer.
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Michigan Rising Action is calling for Gov. Gretchen Whitmer to “put politics aside and focus on Michigan.”
In an opinion published on May 30 in The Detroit News, Tori Sachs, the executive director for Michigan Rising Action, argued that Whitmer should shift her focus from politics and “raising her national profile” back to the state of Michigan.
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A class-action lawsuit was filed this week against the leaders of the Minneapolis Police Department, the Minnesota State Patrol, and the Minnesota Department of Public Safety for their “attacks” on journalists during last week’s riots.
“The press is under assault in our City. Over the past week, the Minneapolis Police and the Minnesota State Patrol have tear-gassed, pepper-sprayed, shot in the face with rubber bullets, arrested without cause, and threatened journalists at gunpoint, all after these journalists identified themselves and were otherwise clearly engaged in their reporting duties,” states the lawsuit.
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For the first time since mid-March, the number of Ohioans filing jobless claims has gone under 40,000, the Ohio Department of Jobs and Family Services (ODJFS) numbers showed.
For the week ending on May 30, more than 34,000 people asked the government for assistance. This marks the sixth consecutive week that unemployment claims have been under 100,000. Also, this is the ninth consecutive week that unemployment claims have gone down.
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As Gov. Gretchen Whitmer allows more sectors of the economy to open, Michigan unemployment claims dropped to 956,418 in the week ending May 30, compared to 985,294 claims the prior week ending May 23.
Those numbers are the lowest unemployment figures in Michigan since the beginning of measures to contain the coronavirus were initiated in late March.
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