Seattle Shooting, NASCAR, Roosevelt Statue: Live Updates


Seattle Shooting, NASCAR, Roosevelt Statue: Live Updates

One person was treated for injuries after gunfire in Seattle.

Another night of gunfire at Seattle’s protester-led “autonomous zone” sent a person to the hospital with injuries, the second round of gun violence over the weekend in an area where officers had pulled out of the police station.

Susan Gregg, a spokeswoman at Harborview Medical Center, said one person who had been shot in or near the zone was brought by private vehicle for treatment late Sunday night. The victim was in serious condition, Ms. Gregg said. The Seattle Police Department said it was investigating a reported shooting inside the zone.

On Saturday morning, separate shootings left a 19-year-old man dead and another in critical condition.

The zone was declared this month in the wake of clashes between protesters and the police after the death of George Floyd, a black man whose death in police custody in Minneapolis touched off protests around the world.

The city decided to board up the police station in the neighborhood in hopes of de-escalating tensions after several nights of standoffs in the streets.

But the city has found in meetings with businesses and residents in the area around Cal Anderson Park that the situation in the neighborhood has become more dangerous at night, said Kelsey Nyland, a spokeswoman for Mayor Jenny Durkan.

Ms. Durkan said she was working with different groups to focus on de-escalation strategies in the neighborhood.

The Roosevelt statue at the entrance of the American Museum of Natural History is being removed.

The bronze statue of Theodore Roosevelt, on horseback and flanked by a Native American man and an African man, which has presided over the entrance to the American Museum of Natural History in New York since 1940, is coming down.

The decision, proposed by the museum and agreed to by New York City, which owns the building and property, came after years of objections from activists and at a time of reckoning about the country’s past. For many, the equestrian statue at the museum’s Central Park West entrance has come to symbolize a painful legacy of colonial expansion and racial discrimination.

“Over the last few weeks, our museum community has been profoundly moved by the ever-widening movement for racial justice that has emerged after the killing of George Floyd,” the museum’s president, Ellen V. Futter, said. “We have watched as the attention of the world and the country has increasingly turned to statues as powerful and hurtful symbols of systemic racism.”

Ms. Futter made clear that the museum’s decision was based on the statue itself — namely its “hierarchical composition”—- and not on Roosevelt, whom the museum continues to honor as “a pioneering conservationist.”

“Simply put,” she added, “the time has come to move it.”

The museum took action amid a heated national debate over the appropriateness of statues or monuments that first focused on Confederate symbols like Robert E. Lee and has now moved on to a wider arc of figures, from Christopher Columbus to Winston Churchill.

Last week alone, a crowd set fire to a statue of George Washington in Portland, Ore., before pulling it to the ground. Gunfire broke out during a protest in Albuquerque to demand the removal of a statue of Juan de Oñate, the despotic conquistador of New Mexico. And New York City Council members demanded that a statue of Thomas Jefferson be removed from City Hall.

In passionate debate over removing Confederate symbols across the South, one of the most conspicuous holdouts is Mississippi, which has the battle flag of Robert E. Lee’s rebel army prominently embedded in its state flag and has resisted efforts to change it for decades.

In a statement, NASCAR called the placement of the noose a “heinous act” and said the organization has opened an investigation, The Associated Press reported.

The noose was found about two weeks after NASCAR announced it was banning the Confederate battle flag from its events and properties, spurred by the nationwide protests against racism and white supremacy after the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis while in police custody.

Two people were shot dead at a party linked to Juneteenth celebrations in Charlotte, N.C.

Two people were shot dead and seven others injured by gunfire early Monday during a gathering in Charlotte, N.C., the authorities said.

The Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department said in a statement that about five other people were injured by vehicles at the scene.

Officers were responding to a call for one of those injuries when the gunfire began.

The gunfire broke out at what appeared to be a multi-day block party connected to Juneteenth — the holiday, celebrated on Friday, that commemorates the end of slavery in the United States.

The police department said preliminary information indicated that several people discharged dozens of shots into a crowd that was gathered in the area, a busy commercial street north of the central business district.

Videos posted online by people at the scene captured the sound of dozens of gunshots as some fled the area and others worked to help those injured.

Britain honors a generation of Caribbean migrants on Windrush Day.

Britain marked Windrush Day on Monday, a celebration to honor a generation of Caribbean migrants who were invited to the United Kingdom in 1948 to rebuild the economy after the devastation of World War II.

The British government introduced the day to celebrate the contributions of the migrants in 2018, after a scandal that saw hundreds of them wrongly detained, deported or denied legal rights.

Thousands of Caribbean migrants arrived in Britain between 1948 and 1973 and were given an automatic right to live and work without need for additional documentation. They were called the Windrush generation because the first group arrived in Britain in June 1948 on board the Empire Windrush passenger liner.

But when the British government introduced new immigration laws in 2012, members of the Windrush community were unable to prove their legal immigration status and many of them were stripped of their rights.

In 2018, the government apologized and insisted that members of the Windrush community were welcome, and a compensation program was introduced for those who had been wrongfully detained or deported.

Fewer than 5 percent of claims made under the program have been paid out, according to official figures, and a group of Windrush campaigners went to Downing Street last week to deliver a petition signed by more than 130,000 people, demanding the government to speed up compensation payments and address the failings that resulted in the scandal.

Reporting was contributed by Mike Baker, Aimee Oritz, Robin Pobgrebin, Azi Paybarah, Rick Rojas and Ceylan Yeginsu.




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