Food insecurity in Bell County

Recommended Stories

  • CEO who Fox News called 'socialist' for $70k minimum wage says company is now worth $10billion

    The company’s revenue has tripled since the change was implemented

  • Intelligence agencies: China is top threat to U.S. global influence

    A 27-page report, which summarizes the best assessments of analysts from across the 18 different agencies within the intelligence community, has identified China as the biggest threat to U.S. global influence.

  • Monaco Is Becoming an Unexpected Leader in Sustainability

    Forget the glitzy casinos and multimillion-dollar homes: Monaco is quickly becoming a laboratory for innovative ideas in sustainable design

  • Before and after photos show Caribbean island completely covered in volcanic ash

    The La Soufriere volcano has erupted multiple times since Friday, and the damage to St Vincent is shocking

  • George Floyd’s girlfriend once taught Daunte Wright in high school

    ‘Our system doesn’t serve kids like Daunte,’ Courteney Ross says

  • ‘An indefensible system’: AOC leads calls to abolish police after Daunte Wright killing

    Democrat leads calls for reform of US policing as brands including Ben & Jerry’s issue demand for ‘a real system of public safety’

  • Biden picks up toy of slain Capitol officer’s daughter during emotional memorial service

    During a memorial service at the US Capitol Rotunda for Officer William Evans, President Joe Biden picked up a toy dropped by the officer’s daughter, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi told his family that while “no words are adequate” to address their loss, “we hope it’s a comfort to you that so many now know about your dad and know he’s a hero”. “And that the President of the United States is picking up one of your distractions.” Officer Evans was killed outside the Capitol on 2 April after a driver struck two officers before slamming into a security barrier outside the Capitol, then exited the car with a knife, according to police.

  • UAE sets new ambitious timeline for launch of moon rover

    The United Arab Emirates’ space center announced Wednesday a more ambitious timeline for sending its first rover to the moon. The Mohammed Bin Rashid Space Center said it is partnering with Japan’s ispace company to send a rover to the moon on an unmanned spacecraft by 2022, rather than 2024. The “Rashid” rover, named after Dubai’s ruling family, will deploy to the moon using ispace's lunar lander.

  • Britain will ‘drawdown’ troops from Afghanistan after Biden confirms pullout by 9/11 anniversary

    456 British troops were killed in Afghanistan before UK combat operations ended in 2014

  • Kim Potter: Former police officer who shot and killed Daunte Wright arrested on manslaughter charges

    Killing of 20-year-old Black man has sparked protests and unrest in Minnesota city

  • Kim Kardashian and Kanye West agree joint custody after divorce

    US reality star Kim Kardashian married rapper Kanye West in 2014 but filed for divorce in February.

  • ‘Congress itself is the target’: Capitol police overlooked intel and were ordered to hold back during riot, report finds

    Days before attack, law enforcement officials were warned Stop the Steal campaign could attract ‘white supremacists, militia members’ and other violent groups

  • Daunte Wright shooting - latest: Kim Potter’s mugshot released as ex-police officer faces manslaughter charges

    Follow for latest updates

  • Daunte Wright Mentor Wishes He Would Have Told Him About Police and Minnesota’s Air-Freshener Law

    REUTERSA Minnesota educator who mentored Daunte Wright while he was in high school said he is haunted by conversations the two had—and by his perceived failure to mention that police sometimes use the sight of car air fresheners as a pretext to stop Black men. Jonathan Mason mentored the 20-year-old when he was at Edison High School in Minneapolis and recounted to the Minneapolis Star Tribune how they often discussed police targeting of members of the Black community. He said he felt sick to his stomach when he heard his former mentee was killed in suburban Brooklyn Center on Sunday afternoon at the hands of police. “He was afraid police would do something like this to him,” Mason told the paper. Mason said those fears in part drove him not to talk about ways police sometimes arrest Black men for minor infringements: by finding reasons to search their vehicles or investigate their suspicions. “We talked about this daily. We talked about police brutality. We talk about these things in the Black community,” he told the Star Tribune. “Those little things will haunt me. That maybe I didn’t talk to him about the air freshener.”Minnesota is one of several states that prohibits hanging anything from a vehicle’s rear-view mirror that might obstruct a driver’s vision. But the law and other minor infractions are often perceived to target Black drivers as a reason to stop them and check for illegal weapons, drugs, or other crimes. In 2018, two Black men in Chicago were stopped after police saw a pine-tree-shaped air freshener and found illegal weapons in the car. (Illinois prohibits anything dangling from rear-view mirrors.) The case was unsuccessfully challenged in federal court after the men argued that the air-freshener suspicion was not sufficient reason to stop them, according to CNN. The federal appeals court ruled against the men, who are now in prison. In 2012, Women’s NBA star Seimone Augustus, who is Black, was also pulled over in Minneapolis for air fresheners on what she tweeted was a pretext for police to ask her about her out-of-state license plates and crimes in the area. “Supposedly he stop me for an air freshener hanging in my window, but then went on talking about theft at the mall,” she tweeted. Police Chief Claims Cop Who Killed Minnesota Black Man Accidentally Fired Gun Instead of TaserArizona, California, Virginia, and Pennsylvania also have laws against air fresheners or other objects hanging from a rear-view mirror. Daunte Wright’s car also had expired license-plate tags, Brooklyn Center police said Monday. When officers stopped him to question him on Sunday afternoon, they also noticed the air fresheners—which Wright told his mother in a phone call. A name-check then pointed to a misdemeanor arrest warrant tied to a failure to appear at a hearing. The officer who shot him later admitted she thought she had pulled her taser instead of her service weapon. Mason, the mentor, said he had grown particularly close to Wright when they met. He said he hopes people remember Wright for the person he could have been. “The reality is, Daunte is still a young man, under 21,” Mason said. “He had a huge future and it was snatched because of a huge mistake.”Read more at The Daily Beast.Get our top stories in your inbox every day. Sign up now!Daily Beast Membership: Beast Inside goes deeper on the stories that matter to you. Learn more.

  • Swift Afghanistan troop withdrawal loomed after Trump lost election — but some special forces could remain

    Joe Biden had long argued against large-scale troop numbers in Afghanistan

  • Louisiana capsizing: 12 lost at sea after ‘microburst’ storm hits coast

    State senator ‘praying for everyone’ caught in strong winds that capsized a 129-foot vessel on Tuesday

  • Biden’s Challenge: Save Police Reform Bill From ‘Irreconcilable’ Differences

    Drew Angerer/GettyAs another American city is gripped by protests following the shooting death of an unarmed Black person by a police officer, the Biden administration is renewing focus on one of the “four historic crises” he pledged to address in his first hundred days: a long-overdue reckoning over racial justice in policing.“With Daunte Wright in Minnesota, that god-awful shooting resulting in his death, and in the midst of an ongoing trial over the killing of George Floyd… we’re in the business, all of us meeting today, to deliver some real change,” President Joe Biden said on Tuesday before a meeting with the Congressional Black Caucus. “We also have an awful lot of things we have to deal with when it comes to police, when it comes to advancing equality.”But as the death of 20-year-old Wright puts renewed urgency behind Biden’s push to pass a landmark police reform bill through Congress, stakeholders in law enforcement and reform advocacy alike are increasingly at odds over the bill’s primary components. As the longtime divide between police and watchdogs widens, Biden’s call for reform that satisfies both groups appears increasingly unlikely.“You can’t reconcile abolition with reform—they’re irreconcilable,” said Eugene O’Donnell, a former NYPD officer and prosecutor in New York City and professor of law and police science at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. “Biden is going to have to confront reality… which is that policing has collapsed completely, and it’s probably irreparably damaged.”Democrats have long walked a thin tightrope in their relationship with law enforcement, particularly in recent years as the Black Lives Matter movement has helped push police reform to the top of the party’s political agenda. This is particularly true of Biden, who worked closely with police unions during his time as a senator—when he was at the forefront of anti-crime legislation that has since become a primary target of reform advocates—and has since made concerted efforts to bring law enforcement organizations into the fold as stakeholders in developing policy.The decision on Monday to kill the national police oversight commission that Biden had promised to create during his first months in office, for example, came at the urging of both law enforcement groups and reform advocates who argued that it was redundant. Instead, the administration announced that its primary focus would be on passing the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, which would, among other things, ban chokeholds and no-knock warrants in drug cases, require the use of de-escalation techniques before use of deadly force, and eliminate qualified immunity for law enforcement.Asked about how much effort the White House would put into getting that bill passed, Psaki pledged Biden would “use the power of his presidency to move it forward.”“The strong consensus from all of these [civil rights] groups is that the work should be focused on trying to pass the George Floyd Act, and the commission would not be the most constructive way to deliver on our top priority,” she said Tuesday. “So we are working together collectively to do exactly that. There are steps that we certainly will work in conjunction to take as they are possible. And some of them we've signed through executive orders, and we’ll continue to communicate with these groups about what is most effective.”But police union stakeholders have already marked the issue of rolling back qualified immunity a red line.“The biggest sticking point is qualified immunity,” said Andrea Edmiston, director of governmental affairs at the National Association of Police Organizations (NAPO), a lobbying group that represents more than 1,000 police units and associations—which in turn represent roughly a quarter million working and retired police officers. “We’ve heard from a lot of our members who are really worried that qualified immunity will go away.”Qualified immunity, in short, shields government officials, including police officers, from being sued in civil court for violating a suspect’s constitutional rights in the course of the performance of their duties as long as those duties were carried out in “subjective good faith”—that is, if an officer believes their actions are reasonable in the moment. Critics of the protection say that it encourages police abuse without accountability, while law enforcement advocates say that it protects officers from frivolous lawsuits and potential financial ruin.Police Union Bosses to Biden: You’re Pissing Us OffEven as public polling suggests a growing national consensus on the need for police reform in the context of racial justice, the two sides are increasingly at odds over the bill that the Biden administration has now made the gold standard for police reform. According to law enforcement groups that have been at the table, putting the George Floyd Act at the center of the administration’s focus for police reform could be the final straw for the police unions that Biden has courted for decades.“If they break a law or knowingly violate someone’s constitutional rights, yes, that has to be addressed,” Edmiston said. “But if this officer is acting in good faith, and you take away qualified immunity, then that opens that officer up to being sued—and officers don’t make a lot of money, right? Suddenly, they’ll lose their life savings, they’ll lose everything.”Edmiston noted that NAPO, as well as other law enforcement advocacy organizations, has been welcomed to the table by members of Congress seeking the input of police groups in the legislation. But while some aspects of the bill have gotten qualified support from law enforcement stakeholders—including mandated data collection for use-of-force statistics, and a national decertification database that would prevent officers fired for misconduct from being hired by police forces in other states—the sticking point of qualified immunity is seen as both a nonstarter in law enforcement circles.“You’re going to get police officers to do absolutely nothing other than being an observer,” said said Tom Scotto, president emeritus of the Detectives’ Endowment Association, one of the three major police unions in New York City, who also served as president of the NAPO. Scotto, who called measures eliminating qualified immunity “absurd,” worked closely with Biden during the drafting of the 1994 crime bill from which the future president would later distance himself. “Every piece of action you take is now subject to some civilian getting an ambulance chasing attorney.”Meanwhile, the removal of qualified immunity, which has already been passed in some states, is a baseline requirement among reform advocates.“It is clear that the only way to end the scourge of police violence is to immediately divest from policing institutions that, from their inception, have been used to oppress Black people,” said Paige Fernandez, a policing policy advocate in the American Civil Liberties Union’s justice division. “You don’t reform police—you remove their responsibilities and reallocate taxpayer money into harm-reducing solutions. It is now far past time for tangible action to avoid killings like that of Daunte Wright.”The impossibility of reconciling those two positions has put Biden, a politician who has defined his career on his ability to bring together warring factions in support of common goals, on a collision course with two longtime constituencies.“If the president fails to deliver meaningful criminal justice reform, it’s essentially waving the white flag on one of the major crises he pledged to address,” said one former longtime staffer who worked in Biden’s office during the passage of the 1994 crime bill. “But if he turns his back on police—or even if they perceive him as turning his back on them—he loses a constituency he has courted for decades, and sets himself up for Crime Bill 2.0 if Republicans retake Congress.”O’Donnell, pointing to statistics showing a decline in qualified candidates for jobs in law enforcement and shortened career spans for those who do qualify, said that the only way to reconcile the two positions may be to accept that street cops may not exist forever.“It’s like coal mining—it’s just a job that we’re not going to lament the passing of,” O’Donnell said. “Assuming that you’re going to have humans doing this job… then how do you protect the country? If Biden wants to lead on that, that’s the question. How do you do that?”Black lawmakers on Tuesday told reporters that the president intends to do so by pushing for the George Floyd Act.“We know we’re going to have other meetings to develop our next steps, but we are moving forward,” said Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-TX), after an Oval Office meeting between Biden and Congressional Black Caucus leadership. “And we were able to discuss those very openly with the president today.”Read more at The Daily Beast.Get our top stories in your inbox every day. Sign up now!Daily Beast Membership: Beast Inside goes deeper on the stories that matter to you. Learn more.

  • It’s time to trade Teddy Bridgewater, for his sake and the Carolina Panthers

    The Carolina Panthers need to admit their mistake and move on by trading QB Teddy Bridgewater

  • The long road to Harriet Tubman’s name replacing Dixie Highway. Holdout: Coral Gables

    Dixie Highway looks likely to survive another year in Miami-Dade County as backers of renaming the state road after Harriet Tubman face setbacks in Tallahassee and Coral Gables.

  • South American soccer to receive 50,000 doses of vaccine

    Chinese pharmaceutical company Sinovac will donate 50,000 doses of its COVID-19 vaccine to South American soccer confederation CONMEBOL in a bid to protect players for upcoming tournaments. CONMEBOL announced Tuesday that the jabs will be used to inoculate players ahead of the Copa America in June and for other regional tournaments. “This is a huge step forward to beat the COVID-19 pandemic, but it doesn’t mean that we will in any way relax,” CONMEBOL president Alejandro Domínguez said in a statement.