Trump tweet has ‘glorified violence’
been damaged. They marched side by side and block by block as they expanded a perimeter around a heavily damaged area.
Protests first erupted on Tuesday, a day after Floyd’s death in a confrontation with police captured on video by a citizen and widely viewed.
Walz deployed the National Guard on Thursday at the Minneapolis mayor’s request. The Guard tweeted minutes after the precinct burned that it had sent more than 500 soldiers across the metro area. The Guard said a “key objective” was to make sure fire departments could respond to calls, and said in a follow-up tweet it was “here with the Minneapolis Fire Department” to assist. But no move was made to put out the 3rd Precinct fire.
Assistant Fire Chief Bryan Tyner said fire crews could not safely respond to fires at the precinct station and some surrounding buildings.
On Thursday, businesses boarded up their windows and doors to prevent looting. Minneapolis shut down nearly its entire light-rail system and all bus services out of safety concerns.
In St Paul, clouds of smoke hung in the air as police armed with batons, wearing gas masks and body armour kept an eye on protesters as firefighters were putting out blazes. But elsewhere in Minneapolis, thousands of peaceful demonstrators marched through the streets calling for justice.
Meanwhile, in Louisville, Kentucky, police confirmed that at least seven people were shot on Thursday night as protesters demanded justice for Breonna Taylor, a black woman who was shot and killed in a police raid in March. Taylor, an emergency medical technician, was shot at least eight times when three officers entered her apartment by force to serve a search warrant in a narcotics investigation. The department said the officers announced themselves and returned gunfire from her boyfriend, Kenneth Walker.
The US Attorney’s Office and the FBI in Minneapolis said on Thursday they were conducting “a robust criminal investigation” into the death.
The FBI is investigating whether Floyd’s civil rights were violated. | AP
US PRESIDENT Donald Trump raged against Twitter yesterday after the social media company added a warning label to a tweet he in the middle of the night implying that protesters in Minneapolis could be shot, escalating tensions between the president and his favourite online megaphone.
The company said Trump’s original post violated its rules against glorifying violence and it prevented users from viewing the tweet without reading a brief notice, the first time it has restricted one of the president’s messages in this way.
Twitter blocked users from liking or replying to Trump’s post, although they were still allowed to retweet it if they added a comment of their own.
But it did not take the tweet down, saying it was in the public’s interest that the message remain accessible.
In the tweet, posted early yesterday, Trump called the protesters “thugs” and said he had told Minnesota’s governor that the military was “with him all the way”. “Any difficulty and we will assume control but, when the looting starts, the shooting starts,” Trump wrote. “Thank you!”
Twitter’s decision came a day after Trump signed an executive order that seeks to limit the legal protections under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which shields social media companies from liability for the content posted on their platforms.
Trump had fulminated over Twitter’s decision earlier this week to add fact-checking labels for the first time to two of his tweets.
In response, he accused Twitter of stifling speech and said that he would end the interference. | New York Times