Migrants sleep on NYC sidewalk after refusing transfers to shelter in Brooklyn, advocates say
January 30, 2023
For customer support issues contact
support@rawstory.com. Report typos and corrections to
corrections@rawstory.com.
Stories Chosen For You
Disturbing video footage released Tuesday shows the death of a 28-year-old Black man as he was being admitted to a US mental hospital, where he was forcibly restrained by as many as 10 police officers and hospital security guards.
Irvo Otieno's March 6 death in Virginia has already drawn murder charges against the officers and guards involved, thrusting the spotlight back on US law enforcement brutality and the treatment of mental health patients in particular.
Otieno was already in handcuffs and leg restraints when police brought him from the Henrico County jail near Richmond, Virginia, to Central State Hospital in nearby Petersburg.
The Washington Post published a nine-minute video, drawn from 27 minutes of hospital surveillance footage of the incident.
The edited clip shows the seven officers bringing the shirtless and shoeless Otieno into a room at the hospital on March 6.
In the video he does not appear to struggle.
They place him on the floor and then hold him down at length, the purpose unclear, with one officer laying on him and another apparently pressing his knee to Otieno's head or neck, while up to 10 hospital workers watch, some sometimes helping out.
Eventually he goes limp and efforts by police and hospital workers to resuscitate him proved fruitless.
Seven police officers and three hospital workers, most of whom were also African American, were charged with second-degree murder in the case.
Otieno was taken by police into custody three days earlier after experiencing a mental health crisis.
Held for three days in the local jail, he was then transferred to the Central State Hospital, where he died.
According to preliminary autopsy results, he died of asphyxiation while being "physically restrained," Dinwiddie County District Attorney Ann Cabell Baskervill said in a statement.
Last week his mother Caroline Ouko said he was "going through mental illness."
"My son was treated like a dog, worse than a dog. I saw it with my own eyes... they smothered my baby," she said.
Ben Crump, a nationally-known attorney who has represented the families of a number of African Americans killed or injured in police custody, has been retained by Otieno's family.
Crump has drawn a parallel between Otieno's case and the murder of George Floyd, a Black man whose videotaped death under the knee of a Minneapolis police officer shocked the world in 2020, triggering a mass mobilization against racism and police brutality.
Warning Graphic Video Below
© Agence France-Presse
CONTINUE READING
Show less
Jesus Christ never made hush money payments to an adult film star, bragged about grabbing women's genitals, or incited a deadly riot after telling his supporters falsehoods about the results of a presidential election.
Despite this, reports Vice News, many Christian Trump supporters are now explicitly drawing comparisons between former President Donald Trump and Jesus Christ, as they see the looming indictments hanging over the former president as the same kind of persecution that Christ suffered at the hands of the Romans.
Reacting to the news that Trump could soon be indicted for making illegal hush money payments to Stormy Daniels in 2016, MAGA influencer Reanna Dilley warned the former president's enemies that "Rome tried to silence a peaceful leader via political persecution, and ended up creating the most pervasive and permanent religious figure in all of world history."
Trump-loving lawyer Joseph McBride, meanwhile, posted an all-caps tirade on Twitter in which he declared that "JESUS LOVES DONALD TRUMP. JESUS DIED FOR DONALD TRUMP. JESUS LIVES INSIDE DONALD TRUMP. DEAL WITH IT.”
READ MORE: Prankster sneaks uncensored view of Trump onto right-wing news network
Thomas Lecaque, an associate professor of history at Grand View University, tells Vice News that Trump has picked up on his supporters' view of him as a Christ-like figure and has incorporated language appealing to that belief into his speeches.
“This language is just going to keep reinforcing the narrative that your cultural and religious enemies are politically persecuting you,” he explained. “Trump is an exemplar of how ‘your political enemies are persecuting you, we have to do something about it.'"
CONTINUE READING
Show less
A lake that dried up 80 years ago looked set on Tuesday to reappear, as monster rainfall accumulated over California's wet winter season overwhelms the state's rivers.
Even as spring appeared in the northern hemisphere, there was no let-up for America's most populous state, with forecasters predicting another 4 inches (10 centimeters) of rain and up to 4 feet (120 centimeters) of snow over the mountains.
"Another significant event... on top of everything that has come before is going to cause some major problems," meteorologist Daniel Swain said on Twitter.
In California's Central Valley, authorities issued evacuation orders for residents of communities in Tulare County, where a lake that dried up around World War II was set to reappear.
"Increasingly serious high water prospects in what is shaping up to possibly be a record Kings River runoff season have led the US Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) Sacramento District to announce plans to begin a rare flood release into old Tulare Lakebed," said a statement from the King's River Conservation District (KRCD).
"Releases growing to 1,500 cubic feet per second... will begin taking the flood flows to the former lakebed in Kings County.
"They are anticipated to continue indefinitely, USACE officials said, possibly lasting until sometime in the summer."
Tulare Lake was once the largest freshwater lake in the western United States, fed chiefly by snowmelt from the Sierra Nevada range.
But as the area was developed for agriculture and rivers were diverted for irrigation, the lake shrank, and by the middle of the 20th century, it had become farmland.
It has flooded periodically since, including in 1983 when record snowfall covered the mountains, with 2023 shaping up to rival those totals.
Calling it "the winter that just doesn't want to end," the National Weather Service (NWS) in Reno, on the eastern side of the Sierra, said Tuesday this year is the second snowiest season in 77 years.
The western United States has been pummeled by a train of atmospheric rivers -- moisture-laden ribbons that ferry water from the Pacific over land.
The region has been suffering from a decades-long drought, but so much rain and snow has fallen this winter that the once-parched soil is now saturated.
Each successive rain event brings the threat of flooding, with the ground unable to soak up any more water.
On Tuesday, the NWS issued flood warnings to parts of San Francisco and areas south of there, and urged people to be exceedingly careful when travelling.
"Water levels are extremely high on area rivers, creeks, and streams. Heavy rainfall below 4,000 feet could cause flooding or worsen ongoing flooding today into Wednesday night," the NWS in Hanford tweeted.
© Agence France-Presse
CONTINUE READING
Show less
Copyright © 2023 Raw Story Media, Inc. PO Box 21050, Washington, D.C. 20009 | Masthead | Privacy Policy | For corrections contact corrections@rawstory.com, for support contact support@rawstory.com.
{{ post.roar_specific_data.api_data.analytics }}