Black-owned businesses at the intersection where George Floyd was killed by police last year — now known as George Floyd Square — say they are in dire straits.

Black merchants near the once-thriving corner of 38th Street and Chicago Avenue said police have abandoned the blocked-off intersection, creating a dangerous autonomous zone that has seen crime spike and business evaporate.

"The city left me in danger," the owner of Smoke In The Pit restaurant told The Post Thursday.

"They locked us up on here and left us behind," said the merchant, who asked to be identified only as Alexander W. for fear of reprisals.

"They left me with no food, no water, nothing to eat," he said. "The police, fire trucks, can't come in here."

The veneration of career criminal George Floyd and the failure to acknowledge that the shooting of Ohio teen Ma'Khia Bryant was justified shows the debate on police reform has turned into a simple case of tribal allegiance.

Derek Chauvin, the former police officer who was found guilty of murdering George Floyd, may very well be the year's most hated man. Regardless of how one personally views his guilt or innocence, considering the viral video that depicted him kneeling on a pleading Floyd's neck - the only evidence pertaining to the case that most people are familiar with - Chauvin's vilification is at the very least understandable.

What's less clear, however, is why George Floyd has simultaneously received near transcendent veneration from Black Lives Matter activists. And as we have seen, this canonization of police shooting victims now means that even cases where officers are justified in using lethal force are regarded as senseless attacks against morally upright citizens, targeted solely for their skin color.

The UK's LGB Alliance has strayed into the minefield of gender politics by winning charitable status without the approval of the poly-alphabetical warriors that claim ownership of such issues.

Obsessed not so much with their side of the argument as with who might agree with it and how, British gender warriors have launched into all-out war against a gay group that looked to validate the most unforgivable of crimes - they sought and won recognition as a charity, but without including trans people.

Oh, my Lord. The wailing! The gnashing of teeth! The flouncing! The sheer horror at the very idea was hilarious, if it wasn't so absurd. The Pink News led from the front with a mouth-foaming attack against the "transphobic hate group". Really?

Last night, in the heart of Jerusalem, hundreds of Jewish supremacists, chanting "Death to Arabs," attacked Palestinian passers-by; some 78 Palestinians were injured and 15 were hospitalized. IfNotNow, the activist organization of young American Jews, called the attacks "a pogrom."

In a surprise, the New York Times did report on the attack. Isabel Kershner's article was itself biased — and also did nothing to provide context: the pogrom is not an isolated outbreak, but another sign of the rise of far right-wing Israeli extremism. But at least the Times did cover the ugly episode; so far, not a word in the Washington Post, or on National Public Radio.

The Senate on Thursday passed legislation aimed at combating a rise in hate crimes against Asian Americans during the coronavirus pandemic in a 94-1 vote, with GOP Sen. Josh Hawley (Mo.) the only "no" vote. The bill now goes to the House, where Democrats are expected to soon take up their version of the legislation.

A California State University, San Bernardino study that looked at 16 cities found a 149 percent increase in hate crimes targeting Asian Americans in 2020.

Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) said that it was "time to stand up" on anti-Asian hate crimes:

"By passing this bill we say to the Asian American community that the government is paying attention to them, has heard their concerns and will respond to protect them. And second, by passing this bill we'll send a message to the country that should be all too obvious by now: Hate crimes will not be tolerated."

Thursday's vote followed days of behind-the-scenes negotiations to try to lock in support for the legislation, which needed at least 60 votes to pass.

A brief weekend pause in the Arizona Senate's election audit that a judge ordered on Friday won't happen because the Arizona Democratic Party declined to put up a $1 million bond that the judge requested to cover any expenses that the Senate wrongfully incurs due to the halt.

Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Christopher Coury ruled that the audit must halt from 5 p.m. Friday to noon on Monday. But that order was contingent on the Arizona Democratic Party, which brought the lawsuit seeking to block the audit, posting a $1 million bond to cover any expenses that the Senate wrongfully incurs due to the delay. The Senate's lease of Veterans Memorial Coliseum, where the audit is being conducted, ends on May 14.

Roopali Desai, the Democrats' attorney, said the party won't put up the bond. That means the audit will continue uninterrupted.

Nonetheless, the audit will still have to comply with several other orders Coury issued during a hearing on Friday.

According to former Speaker of the House John Boehner, everything in the Republican Party would be going swimmingly if everyone had just listened to him: Barack Obama, George W. Bush, John McCain, Harry Reid, the "knuckleheads" and "legislative terrorists" on his team. Even "Lucifer in the flesh" Ted Cruz. The thread that connects all of them is their failure to not greedily gulp Boehner's pearls of wisdom.

Everyone is the hero of their own memoir, and Boehner certainly is in his. Yet in recounting his path to power — and evolution from bomb-thrower to embodiment of the establishment — he fails to reckon with his role in bringing to bear the "legislative terrorism" he so graphically (and profanely) decries.

The country changed under Boehner's watch, and organic political movements like the Tea Party rose in response to it. History — and the end to Boehner's career as speaker — demonstrate how badly he misread the moment, largely by failing to take seriously both the concerns and the urgency expressed by a significant segment of Republican voters.

A number of US banks have unleashed AI-powered cameras capable of both facial recognition and general behavioral pattern analysis, hinting at a wider rollout in retail stores and elsewhere - and a big drop in customer trust.

Speaking to Reuters earlier this week, City National's chief information security officer Bobby Dominguez tried to put a positive spin on the dystopian step forward when interviewed by Reuters about the phenomenon on Thursday. noting "we're already leveraging facial recognition on mobile. Why not leverage it in the real world?"

This cheery approach clashes a bit with the secrecy of the banks that are already using such technology - Reuters explained City National Bank of Florida, JP Morgan Chase, and Wells Fargo were conducting trials of AI surveillance systems, but declined to say when, where, or on what basis the recording takes place. Are the recordings held for months? Deleted after a day unless something really juicy happens? And while City National specifically mentioned it would be trailing 31 sites using facial recognition software that potentially could "spot people on government watch lists" that sounds like a lawsuit waiting to happen.

Mere hours after Seniors Minister Everett Hindley held his first COVID-19 briefing Thursday to announce a loosening of restrictions in Saskatchewan care homes by Mother's Day, doctors in the province were hit with a far different message.

The latter came in the weekly Thursday evening "physicians' town hall" held by the Saskatchewan Health Authority (SHA) that proclaimed the only area of controllable COVID-19 transmission risk in this province this past week was confined to the Cumberland region in the province's far northeast. The southern three-quarters of the province's grainbelt was categorized as areas where there is a "high likelihood that COVID transmission is not controlled."

As reported by the CBC's Guy Quenneville, doctors view the Thursday night event this way: "This was a devastating, heartbreaking meeting. We need the public to know how dire the situation is."

But even more stunning is that neither Premier Scott Moe, Health Minister Paul Merriman nor Hindley felt inclined to share this news Thursday. In fact, had the presentation not been leaked, it's quite likely the Saskatchewan Party government would have downplayed it and not released it for days as was the case last week when Merriman suggested similar dire warnings emerging from the town hall were simply "modelling projections."

Thursday's slide presentation also included dire SHA warnings that the transmission problem is so severe ICUs will have to start triaging people and doctors will have to make heartbreaking decisions based on the likelihood of survival — the exact concern raised by SHA chief medical officer Dr. Susan Shaw earlier this week.

When Professor Neil Ferguson and his team at Imperial College London have been challenged on their model's miserable failure to predict the pandemic death toll in Sweden they have always pushed back saying they didn't model Sweden, disavowing the work of the team at Uppsala University which adapted their modelling to the Swedish context. But it turns out this is not exactly accurate. Phillip W. Magness explains on AIER:

In the House of Lords hearing from last year, Conservative member Viscount Ridley grilled Ferguson over the Swedish adaptation of his model: "Uppsala University took the Imperial College model - or one of them - and adapted it to Sweden and forecasted deaths in Sweden of over 90,000 by the end of May if there was no lockdown and 40,000 if a full lockdown was enforced." With such extreme disparities between the projections and reality, how could the Imperial team continue to guide policy through their modelling?

Ferguson snapped back, disavowing any connection to the Swedish results: "First of all, they did not use our model. They developed a model of their own. We had no role in parameterising it. Generally, the key aspect of modelling is how well you parameterise it against the available data. But to be absolutely clear they did not use our model, they didn't adapt our model."

The Imperial College modeller offered no evidence that the Uppsala team had erred in their application of his approach. The since-published version from the Uppsala team makes it absolutely clear that they constructed the Swedish adaptation directly from Imperial's UK model. "We used an individual agent-based model based on the framework published by Ferguson and co-workers that we have reimplemented" for Sweden, the authors explain. They also acknowledged that their modelled projections far exceeded observed outcomes, although they attribute the differences somewhat questionably to voluntary behavioural changes rather than a fault in the model design.

Ferguson's team has nonetheless aggressively attempted to dissociate itself from the Uppsala adaptation of their work. After the UK Spectator called attention to the Swedish results last spring, Imperial College tweeted out that "Professor Ferguson and the Imperial COVID-19 response team never estimated 40,000 or 100,000 Swedish deaths. Imperial's work is being conflated with that of an entirely separate group of researchers." It's a deflection that Ferguson and his defenders have repeated many times since.