Grand jury audio details raid that killed Breonna Taylor
LOUISVILLE, Ky. — Police said they knocked and announced themselves for a minute or more before bursting into Breonna Taylor’s apartment, but her boyfriend said he did not hear officers identify themselves, according to Kentucky grand jury recordings released Friday. In the hail of gunfire that ensued, the 26-year-old Black woman was killed.
The dramatic and sometimes conflicting accounts of the March 13 raid are key to a case that has fueled nationwide protests against police brutality and systemic racism. When police came through the door using a battering ram, Taylor’s boyfriend, Kenneth Walker, fired once. He acknowledges that he may not have heard police identify themselves because of where he was in the apartment. If he’d heard them, “it changes the whole situation because there’s nothing for us to be scared of.”
The fear and confusion that played out after midnight at Taylor’s Louisville home was detailed in 15 hours of audio recordings made public in a rare release. While the recordings added rich detail about what happened as police fired 32 shots in the last moments of Taylor’s life, nothing on them appeared to change the fundamental narrative that was previously made public.
The recordings also do not include any discussion of potential criminal action on the part of the officers who shot Taylor because Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron determined beforehand that they had acted in self-defense. As a result, he did not seek charges against police in her killing — a recommendation the grand jury followed.
Grand jury proceedings are typically kept secret, but a court ruled that they should be released after the jury’s decision last week angered many in Louisville and around the country and set off renewed protests. One of the jurors also sued to make the proceedings public. The material does not include juror deliberations or prosecutor recommendations and statements, none of which were recorded, according to Cameron’s office.
Judge: Census violated order; demands mass text to workers
ORLANDO, Fla. — A federal judge ordered the Census Bureau to text every 2020 census worker by Friday, letting them know the head count of every U.S. resident is continuing through the end of the month and not ending next week, as the agency previously had announced in violation of her court order.
The new order issued late Thursday by U.S. District Lucy Koh in San Jose, California, instructed the Census Bureau to send out a mass text saying an Oct. 5 target data for finishing the nation’s head count is not in effect and that people can still answer the questionnaire and census takers can still knock on doors through Oct. 31.
The judge also ordered Census Bureau director Steven Dillingham to file a declaration with the court by the start of next week confirming his agency was following a preliminary injunction she had issued last week.
From wire sources
Besides deciding how many congressional seats and Electoral College votes each state gets, the census also determines how $1.5 trillion in federal spending is distributed annually. Among other things, that spending includes highway funding and money for health care and education.
Judge Koh wrote in Thursday’s decision that the Census Bureau and Commerce Department, which oversees the agency, had violated her injunction “in several ways.” She threatened them with sanctions or contempt proceedings if they violated the injunction again.
An abundance of risk, not caution, before Trump’s diagnosis
WASHINGTON — Standing well apart on the debate stage, President Donald Trump and his Democratic opponent Joe Biden looked out at an odd sight — one section of the room dutifully in masks, the other section flagrantly without.
The mostly bare-faced contingent was made up of Trump’s VIP guests, who had flouted the rules by removing their masks once inside the hall despite the best efforts of the debate’s health advisers from the Cleveland Clinic to keep everyone safe. It was a conspicuous act of rebellion, reflecting divisions writ large across the country.
But what Trump calls the “invisible enemy” was spreading — before the debate, during it, after it, or some combination — and now it has spread to him.
No one knows how, when or from whom Trump became infected. Nor is it established who, if anyone, has contracted the disease from him. But to retrace some of his steps over the last week is to see risk at multiple turns and an abundance of opportunity for infection.
This was the case day after day and right up until a few hours before his positive diagnosis, as he took a contingent to New Jersey for a fund-raiser with the White House knowing he’d been close to someone sick with COVID-19.
Trump’s virus hospitalization rocks final stage of campaign
An election year already defined by a cascade of national crises descended further into chaos Friday, with President Donald Trump quarantined at a military hospital with the coronavirus after consistently playing down the threat.
Democratic challenger Joe Biden took down his attack ads and pressed a bipartisan message in battleground Michigan after he and his wife tested negative.
“This cannot be a partisan moment. It must be an American moment. We have to come together as a nation,” Biden declared at a speech in Grand Rapids, warning that the virus “is not going away automatically.”
While Biden vowed to continue his cautious approach to campaigning during the pandemic, the president’s diagnosis injected even greater uncertainty into an election already plagued by crises that have exploded under Trump’s watch: the pandemic, devastating economic fallout and sweeping civil unrest. With millions of Americans already voting, the country on Friday entered uncharted territory that threatened to rattle global markets and political debates around the world.
The development focuses the campaign right where Biden has put his emphasis for months — and where Republicans don’t want it: on Trump’s uneven response to a pandemic that has killed more than 205,000 people in the U.S. And for the short term, it’s grounded Trump under quarantine at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, denying him the large public rallies that fuel his campaign just a month before the election.
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Misinformation spikes as Trump confirms COVID-19 diagnosis
CHICAGO — News Friday that President Donald Trump and first lady Melania Trump had tested positive for COVID-19 sparked an explosion of rumors, misinformation and conspiracy theories that in a matter of hours littered the social media feeds of many Americans.
Tweets shared thousands of times claimed Democrats might have somehow intentionally infected the president with the coronavirus during the debates. Others speculated in Facebook posts that maybe the president was faking his illness. And the news also ignited constant conjecture among QAnon followers, who peddle a baseless belief that Trump is a warrior against a secret network of government officials and celebrities that they falsely claim is running a child trafficking ring.
In the final weeks of the presidential campaign, Trump’s COVID-19 diagnosis was swept into an online vortex of coronavirus misinformation and the falsehoods swirling around this polarizing election. Trump himself has driven much of that confusion and distrust on the campaign trail, from his presidential podium and his Twitter account, where he’s made wrong claims about widespread voter fraud or hawked unproven cures for the coronavirus, such as hydroxychloroquine.
“This is both a political crisis weeks before the election and also a health crisis; it’s a perfect storm,” said Alexandra Cirone, an assistant professor at Cornell University who studies the effect of misinformation on government.
Facebook said Friday that it immediately began monitoring misinformation around the president’s diagnosis and had started applying fact checks to some false posts.