Black Lives Matter protests: push for justice and police reform continues – live updates

Senate majority whip John Thune said it is “perhaps time” to rename the military bases named after Confederate generals.

The South Dakota Republican said it would likely be difficult to remove senator Elizabeth Warren’s amendment from the annual defense authorization bill. Warren’s amendment lays out a plan to rename the bases wthin three years.

“It’ll probably take 60 votes to get out,” Thune told reporters on Capitol Hill. “This is a debate whose time has probably come. I think we’ll listen to where people in the country are.”

Thune acknowledged Senate Republicans did not want to risk a veto from Trump, who is staunchly opposed to renaming the bases. But he added, “We have to proceed here, and right now we’ve got a provision in the bill that, at least for right now, looks like that’s going to be maybe the new position.”

Two justice department officials have been subpoenaed to testify in a House hearing next week on the politicization of the department.

The Democratic chairman of the House judiciary committee, Jerry Nadler, said John W Elias and Aaron SJ Zelinsky had been subpoenaed and were expected to appear at the June 24 hearing on “the unprecedented politicization of the Department under President Trump and Attorney General William Barr.”

Zelinsky was previously a member of special counsel Robert Mueller’s team, and he was one of the prosecutors who quit the Roger Stone case after Barr and other senior leaders intervened to request leniency for the former Trump associate.

“Again and again, Attorney General Barr has demonstrated that he will cater to President Trump’s private political interests, at the expense of the American people and the rule of law,” Nadler said in a statement.

The hearing comes less than a month after peaceful protesters were forcibly removed from near the White House, a highly controversial decision that Barr was reportedly directly involved in.

Here’s some unsurprising but still demoralizing news: Americans are the unhappiest they’ve been in half a century amid the coronavirus pandemic and nationwide protests over police brutality, according to a new study.

The AP reports:

This bold — yet unsurprising — conclusion comes from the COVID Response Tracking Study, conducted by NORC at the University of Chicago. It finds that just 14% of American adults say they’re very happy, down from 31% who said the same in 2018. That year, 23% said they’d often or sometimes felt isolated in recent weeks. Now, 50% say that.

The survey, conducted in late May, draws on nearly a half-century of research from the General Social Survey, which has collected data on American attitudes and behaviors at least every other year since 1972. No less than 29% of Americans have ever called themselves very happy in that survey.

Most of the survey’s interviews were completed before the police killing of George Floyd last month, which sparked the most recent protests against police brutality.

However, early evidence suggests Floyd’s death, along with the video capturing a white police officer kneeling on his neck in his final moments, have taken a toll on African Americans’ mental health.

Census data indicates rates of anxiety and depression surged among African Americans in the week after the video was made public, even as those numbers remained relatively flat among white Americans.

The vice president is headed to Iowa today, marking his second trip to the Midwestern state in the past six weeks amid signs that Joe Biden may be gaining support there.

Mike Pence will meet with the state’s Republican governor, Kim Reynolds, and tour Winnebago Industries, which produces recreational vehicles, to highlight the reopening of the country.

Pence’s trip comes one day after the Des Moines Register released a poll showing Trump leading Biden by just 1 point in Iowa, which the president carried by 9.4 points in 2016.

However, Barack Obama carried the state twice, giving some Democrats hope that Biden could win it back in November. If he can, it would have major implications for the Senate map, as Republican senator Joni Ernst is up for reelection in Iowa this year.

This is Joan Greve in Washington, taking over for Martin Belam.

Atlanta mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms was on the Today show this morning, discussing the police killing of Rayshard Brooks and the policing reforms she has already implemented in response to his death.

Bottoms said the killing of Brooks, a black man who was fatally shot by a white police officer, is “so personal to so many people of color in this country.”

“When I watch the video and the interaction with Rayshard Brooks in that drive-through, that could have been any one of us,” Bottoms said. “It breaks my heart. This interaction with these police officers was almost a pleasant interaction, and it did not have to end this way.”

Bottoms announced yesterday she would sign a series of administrative orders aimed at reforming the city’s police department. The orders specifically called for examining use of force policies and requiring de-escalation in police encounters.

The Democratic mayor initially said after the police killing of George Floyd last month that a task force would offer recommendations on police reforms in the coming weeks, but Bottoms then came out with her own orders, stressing the urgency of the situation.

“We can’t wait,” Bottoms said in her interview this morning. “We don’t have another hour to wait in Atlanta, and there will likely be even more announcements and more administrative orders from my administration for us to very quickly begin to address and in so many ways undo the training that our officers have received over several years.”

The University of Virginia has announced it is changing the logos it uses for its athletics teams, just two months after they were unveiled. They had been criticised for a design element that referred to the school’s history with slavery.

Objections were raised to the serpentine curves put on the handles of the sabres that were meant to mimic “the design of the serpentine walls” that long stood on the campus.

Athletic Director Carla Williams said she decided to change the logos after she was “made aware of the negative connotation between the serpentine walls and slavery.”

Historians pointed out that former President Thomas Jefferson designed the original eight-foot-high walls to muffle the sounds of slaves and hide them from public view.

“There was no intent to cause harm, but we did, and for that I apologise to those who bear the pain of slavery in our history,” Williams said.

The school has redesigned the detail in the logos to remove the curved handle. Fans who purchased clothes with the logos between 24 April and 14 June who are interested in exchanging them for the newly altered ones are being asked to email the athletics department.

Donald Trump is up and tweeting about a record increase in retail sales.

My colleague Jasper Jolly has looked at the figures for us on our live business blog.

US retail sales rose by 17.7% in May, more than double the average bounceback expected by economists.

Sales had slumped in April by 14.7%, according to a revised reading from the US Census Bureau, but Americans increased spending by more than $70bn in May.

Spending in May was just shy of March levels at $485bn, although still well below the $516bn spent in May 2019.

Incidentally, The Hill’s Jonathan Easley is reporting that Donald Trump Jr. will interview his father Donald Trump on Team Trump’s online show “Triggered” this week – it will air Thursday night. Possibly not going to be the most hard-hitting interview of Trump’s re-election campaign.

Elizabeth Warren has just endorsed Jamaal Bowman for the 16th Congressional District of New York.

Bowman is challenging longtime New York Rep. Eliot Engel in the New York primary elections on 23 June.

CNN had a copy of the endorsement in advance, reporting Warren’s statement as: “[Bowman] is exactly the kind of person we need in Congress fighting for big, structural change. Whether it’s fighting for high-quality public schools, affordable housing, or rooting out systemic racism, Jamaal Bowman will be a champion for working people in Washington.”

Bowman promises “big, structural change” rather than “nibbling around the edges.”

Hillary Clinton yesterday endorsed the incumbent Engel, who has been a congressman since 1989.

Gerald Bostock was one of the lead plaintiffs in the case that the Supreme Court adjudicated yesterday, leading to the ruling that the 1964 civil rights law bars employers from discriminating against workers based on sexual orientation or transgender status.

Bostock, an award-winning child social services coordinator, was fired from his job in Georgia after his boss discovered he had joined a gay softball league.

He was on television this morning, talking about the case and the struggle to get equality. You can watch a clip here:

The killing of George Floyd has seen protests all around the world, including in the UK. Today photographer Henry J Kamara has published a picture essay for us looking at what it was like to experience the protests in London.

The protest movement has started a national debate in the UK about statues and memorials, which led to ugly clashes at the weekend as far-right activists sought to defend monuments which they claimed were being targetted.

One such monument was in Mowbray Park in Sunderland, in the north-east of England. The statue is of General Havelock – a major figure in crushing rebellion in India in 1857 when it was under British rule. That statue appears to have been vandalised overnight with the words “racist” and “parasite” daubed on to it.

Less successfully, and to some considerable ridicule on social media, a group of men has also been somewhat inexplicably defending the Nuneaton statue of 19th century novelist Mary Ann Evans – she is ofter better known by her pen name George Eliot.