A police chief in Massachusetts joined a large crowd of protesters by lying face down on the pavement Saturday amid increased tensions between law enforcement and demonstrators throughout the U.S. following the death of George Floyd.

Urged by the chanting of several hundred people during the Black Lives Matter demonstration, Webster Police Chief Michael Shaw participated and laid face down on the pavement for over eight minutes, as the crowd was heard yelling: "Thank you chief. Thank you chief."

"It's not enough, but it's a start!" one demonstrator also shouted towards the end of the symbolic act, according to the Telegram & Gazette.

Media figures and politicians alike have downplayed the violence and looting occurring throughout the United States following the death of George Floyd.

Activists have set cars ablaze, looted and pillaged businesses, and protested against police in cities across the nation over the death of Floyd, a black man who died after a police officer knelt on his neck for several minutes.

The police officer, Derek Chauvin, has been fired and charged with murder and manslaughter.

Murders and shootings in the Big Apple skyrocketed last week compared to the same period last year, law enforcement sources said.

From last Monday to Sunday night, there were 13 murders in the city, compared to five killings during the same week last year, sources said.

The city reported 40 shootings last week — the most in a week since 2015. In the same time period in 2019, there were 24 shootings, sources said.

"#BlackLivesMatter," tweeted Mashable editor Chris Taylor last week. "The #StarWars trilogies show how a democracy becomes a police state with stormtroopers, how fascism oppresses opponents, and how fascism [supporters] rise again after its defeat. Step up, Lucasfilm."

Taylor, the author of How Star Wars Conquered the Universe: The Past, Present, and Future of a Multibillion Dollar Franchise, eventually deleted the tweet after it became the subject of widespread mockery. But you can see why he thought that Lucasfilm, a cash-cow subsidiary of Walt Disney Studios, might bend to his wishes. Amidst the climate of outrage that has prevailed since the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis Police officer Derek Chauvin on May 25th, numerous companies have publicly denounced racism and social injustice — often reaping much praise as a result. On May 30th, for instance, Netflix tweeted out "To be silent is to be complicit. Black lives matter. We have a platform, and we have a duty to our Black members, employees, creators and talent to speak up." It now has more than a million likes.

Several thousand Israelis have taken to the streets of Tel Aviv to protest the regime's highly controversial scheme to annex parts of the occupied Palestinian territory, warning that the move would lead to permanent apartheid.

The rally took place at Tel Aviv's Rabin Square on Saturday evening under the banner of "No to annexation, no to occupation, yes to peace and democracy" under the watchful eyes of security forces.

Police initially sought to block the demonstration over the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic but backtracked after meeting with organizers of the event.


Wearing face masks and adhering to social distancing guidelines, many of the protesters waved national Palestinian flags.

If you haven't heard of Avi Yemini, he is Australia's answer to Tommy Robinson. And not the kind of bloke you'd like to meet in a dark alley. Having said that, you don't have to like a man to agree with what he says, and when he talks sense, you should agree with him, period.

The insanity of these sham protests against the killing of George Floyd and something called racism have spread to the UK, including Bristol where a statue was torn down. They have also spread to Australia.

Yemini turned up at a demonstration in Melbourne and asked protesters if they had heard of Justine Damond. If like the people he asked you have never heard of her, this unfortunate forty year old exemplifies American diversity at its finest: a white Australian woman shot dead in Minnesota by a male Somali police officer, an incident that led to the resignation of its first female Native American police chief, who for good measure is a lesbian.

Unlike George Floyd, Justine wasn't under arrest, rather she had phoned the police to report what she thought was a crime, and when two police officers turned up in their car, one of them shot her. This was in July 2017; the case made headlines around the world, but nothing like the mega-headlines the shooting of a black woman in similar circumstances might attract.

JK Rowling recently drew fire on social media for tweeting the statements to the effect that "biological sex is real." The tweets began when she mocked an opinion piece that used the term "people who menstruate" in place of "women" to account for the fact that transgender men also menstruate, and prefer not to be described as women.


The backlash on Twitter has been swift and cacophonous, and headlines have followed. GLAAD, an LGBT advocacy group, issued a response on Twitter, calling Rowling's tweets "inaccurate and cruel." One commenter wrote "I know you know this because you have been told over and over and over again, but transgender men can menstruate. Non-binary people menstruate. I, a 37-year old woman with a uterus, have not menstruated in a decade. Women are not defined by their periods."

Till now, even the most thematically ambitious feminist theorists have acknowledged that sex itself is a real biological phenomenon, and that sexual dimorphism is an important component of human existence as well as human rights. Yet increasingly, such common-sense propositions as JK Rowling's are now cast as hate speech.

As more and more people refer to themselves as trans, nonbinary, two-spirited, and gender-non-conforming, there's been a push to realign the objective reality of biological sex to match one's subjectively experienced gender identity. In the emerging view, the very notion of males and females existing as real biological entities is now seen as obsolete. Instead, some argue, we have only varying degrees of "male-ness" and "female-ness." And so the very idea of segregating sports (or anything, for that matter) using binary sex categories is seen as illegitimate, since, if no definitive line can be drawn, who's to say a purported "male" athlete isn't really female?

New York Times editorial page director James Bennet resigned Sunday, the newspaper announced, following the newspaper's decision to publish a controversial op-ed by Republican Sen. Tom Cotton (Ark.) that sparked backlash.

The Times said Bennet's resignation is effective immediately. He had been in the position since May 2016.

Jim Dao, the deputy editorial page editor, is stepping off the masthead and will be reassigned to the newsroom, the Times said.

Katie Kingsbury, who joined the Times in 2017, will be named acting editorial page editor through the November election.

"The journalism of Times Opinion has never mattered more than in this time of crisis at home and around the world, and I've been honored to be part of it," Bennet said in a statement. "I'm so proud of the work my colleagues and I have done to focus attention on injustice and threats to freedom and to enrich debate about the right path forward by bringing new voices and ideas to Times readers."

One of my favorite passages from Black Boy, Richard Wright's poetic and searing memoir, which turns 75 this year, goes like this:

I would hurl words into this darkness and wait for an echo, and if an echo sounded, no matter how faintly, I would send other words to tell, to march, to fight, to create a sense of the hunger for life that gnaws in us all, to keep alive in our hearts a sense of the inexpressibly human.

Black Boy traces Wright's development from a troubled youth who encountered bigotry daily in the Jim Crow-era American South to a self-educated man whose reading shaped his understanding of society. I think about Wright's words often, these and others. Especially now, as cries from black men and women demanding agency reverberate across the nation and the world. It feels like the summer of our discontent is only just beginning.


Books, when people come to them early enough or at the right time, have the power to be transformative. And for a lot of readers, this is the right time — witness the many anti-racist book lists circulating on social media. We must recognize the inherent value that good literature has, and the ability of language to strike an emotional chord. But someone, at some point, has to get down to the business of reading — as Lauren Michele Jackson writes at Vulture. Simply handing someone a book cannot automatically make them care. This is something I remind myself whenever anti-racist lists start to make the rounds online.

Politicians in Glasgow want to erase part of the city's history by renaming major streets. But this won't make up for the mistakes of the past, so why bother?

We can't change the past. That statement is so ubiquitous, it's become a cliche. However, it fits so much of what's happening now in the wake of George Floyd's killing.

Glasgow in Scotland was the Second City of the British Empire, back when it stretched so far across the globe the sun never set on it. Its positioning on a major river — the Clyde — meant it was a gateway for international trade to and from the Americas for the likes of sugar, cotton and tobacco.