NEWS OF THE DAY
From Across the Nation
1 Portland protests: Downtown businesses in Portland, Ore., have sustained about $23 million in damages and lost customers because of violent nightly protests that have brought the city to its knees, authorities said this week. At a police briefing, Deputy Chief Chris Davis said the intensity of the violence by an “agitator corps” and the length of the protests that are now in their sixth week are unprecedented in Oregon’s largest city. Davis made a sharp distinction between Black Lives Matter protesters, whom he said were not violent, and a smaller group of people he repeatedly called “agitators.”
2 Hitandrun: An Indiana woman was arrested in a hitandrun crash that sent one woman to the hospital and caused minor injuries to a man during a southern Indiana protest over the assault of a Black man by a group of white men, authorities said Thursday. Christi Bennett, 66, of Greensburg, was booked into the Monroe County Jail Thursday on charges of criminal recklessness and leaving the scene of an accident. The protesters had gathered in Bloomington to demand arrests in an assault on Vauhxx Booker, a civil rights activist and member of the Monroe County Human Rights Commission, by a group of white men at Monroe Lake near Bloomington over the Fourth of July weekend. The FBI has said it’s investigating the reported assault.
3 School threats: A Kentucky man who pleaded guilty to threatening to shoot someone at a high school in Shelby has been sentenced. Dylan Jarrell was sentenced this week to 10 years in prison followed by five years of supervised released, WKYTTV reported. Jarrell pleaded guilty in November to transmitting a threatening communication in interstate commerce, cyberstalking, lying to law enforcement officers and possessing a gun to commit violence.
_4 Union lawsuit: The conservativecontrolled Wisconsin Supreme Court on Thursday upheld Republicanauthored lameduck laws that stripped power from the incoming Democratic attorney general just before he took office in 2019. The court rejected arguments that the laws were unconstitutional, handing another win to Republicans before the conservative court in recent years. The ruling marks the second time that the court has upheld the lameduck laws passed in 2018, just weeks before Gov. Tony Evers and Attorney General Josh Kaul, both Democrats, took office. The actions mirrored Republican moves after losing control of the governor’s offices in Michigan in 2018 and in North Carolina in 2016. 5 Michael Cohen: President Trump’s former personal lawyer returned to federal prison, weeks after his early release to serve the remainder of his sentence at home because of the virus pandemic, the federal Bureau of Prisons said Thursday. The Bureau of Prisons said Cohen had “refused the conditions of his home confinement and as a result, has been returned to a BOP facility.” This comes days after the New York Post published photos of him and his wife enjoying an outdoor meal with friends at a restaurant near his Manhattan home.