2 Buffalo cops charged with assault in shoving
Two Buffalo police officers were charged with assault Saturday, prosecutors said, after a video showed them shoving a 75year- old protester in recent demonstrations over the death of George Floyd.
Robert McCabe and Aaron Torgalski, who surrendered Saturday morning, pleaded not guilty to second- degree assault. They were released without bail.
McCabe, 32, and Torgalski, 39, “crossed a line” when they shoved the man down hard enough for him to fall backward and hit his head on the sidewalk, Erie County District Attorney John Flynn said at a news conference, calling the victim “a harmless 75year- old man.”
The officers had been suspended without pay Friday after a TV crew captured the confrontation the night before. If convicted of the felony assault charge, they face up to seven years in prison.
CORONAVIRUS Government job losses up, and it could get worse
Jobs with state and city governments are usually a source of stability in the U. S. economy, but the financial devastation wrought by the coronavirus pandemic has forced cuts that will reduce public services - from schools to trash pickup.
Even as the U. S. added some jobs in May, the number of people employed by federal, state and local governments dropped by 585,000. The overall job losses among public workers have reached more than 1.5 million since March, according to seasonally adjusted federal jobs data released Friday. The number of government employees is now the lowest it’s been since 2001, and most of the cuts are at the local level.
“With that comes a decline in essential public services,” Lee Saunders, president of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, said on a conference call with reporters this week. For instance, “911 calls are taking a long time to be answered.”
Clean drinking water and trash pickups also are being affected in some places, he said.
Tax revenue from businesses walloped by coronavirus restrictions has plummeted, forcing cuts by cities and states that rely on that money. It’s likely to get worse in the coming months unless Congress delivers additional aid to states and cities.
APOLOGY Fox: Black deaths, market graphic was insensitive
Fox News apologized Saturday for how it displayed a chart correlating the stock market’s performance with the aftermath of the deaths of George Floyd, Martin Luther King Jr. and Michael Brown.
The graphic that aired Friday to illustrate market reactions to historic periods of civil unrest “should have never aired on television without full context. We apologize for the insensitivity of the image and take this issue seriously,” the cable channel said in a statement.
The apology followed a sharp backlash to the “Special Report with Bret Baier” segment. Rep. Bobby Rush, D- Ill., tweeted that the graphic makes it clear that Fox News “does not care about black lives,” while Michael Steele, former Republican National Committee chair and a MSNBC political analyst, posted, “This is how they mourn the loss of black men at # FoxNews — by how much the stock market goes up.”
Baier retweeted Fox’s apology without further comment.
The chart included on “Special Report” illustrated gains made by the S& P 500 index after King’s assassination in 1968; the Ferguson, Missouri, police shooting of 18- year- old Michael Brown in 2014, and the May 25 death of Floyd while in Minneapolis police custody. It also measured the financial yardstick against the 1991 acquittal of Los Angeles police officers in the beating of Rodney King.