| This powerful image of a Black man carrying a white counter-protester to safety frames a day of chaos and race-inspired violence in London Posted: 14 Jun 2020 03:06 AM PDT  The picture was taken as hundreds of white demonstrators, some of which belong to far-right groups, clashed with police in central London on Saturday.
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| Lone black Republican senator says he is open to 'decertification' of bad police Posted: 14 Jun 2020 07:40 AM PDT  Tim Scott, the only black Republican member of the U.S. Senate, said on Sunday he is open to exploring whether to enact a new law that would decertify bad police officers as part of a larger law enforcement reform package. Speaking on CBS "Face the Nation," Scott said a new policy to decertify police who engage in misconduct could be a compromise as he negotiates with Democrats, who have called for more drastic measures, such as ending the "qualified immunity" legal doctrine that helps shield officers from liability. Scott acknowledged that implementing decertification standards could be an uphill battle due to opposition by police unions, but he said the proposal is nevertheless up for discussion.
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| Meet the Gloster Meteor: The Only Allied Jet Aircraft of World War II Posted: 13 Jun 2020 01:30 PM PDT  Was it a game-changer or too late to make a difference?
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| The Atlanta police officer who fatally shot Rayshard Brooks has been fired, and a 2nd officer is on administrative leave Posted: 13 Jun 2020 09:47 PM PDT  The officer had opened fire on Rayshard Brooks after a scuffle in which Brooks grabbed a Taser, then ran away and pointed it behind him.
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| French leader rejects racism but colonial statues to remain Posted: 14 Jun 2020 06:06 AM PDT  French President Emmanuel Macron has vowed Sunday to stand firm against racism but also praised police and insisted that France wouldn't take down statues of controversial, colonial-era figures, as he addressed the issues for the first time since George Floyd's death in the U.S. In a televised address to the nation on Sunday evening, Macron called for the nation's "unity" at a key moment when the country is trying to put the coronavirus crisis behind while being shaken by a series of protests against racial injustice and police brutality. Echoing American protesters, demonstrators in France have expressed anger at discrimination within French society, particularly toward minorities from the country's former colonies in Africa.
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| U.S. ramps up expulsions of migrants as border crossings rise Posted: 14 Jun 2020 09:53 AM PDT  A CDC coronavirus directive, which has been extended indefinitely, has given the Trump administration the power to rapidly remove most border-crossers from U.S. soil.
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| The COVID-19 pandemic is unleashing a tidal wave of plastic waste Posted: 13 Jun 2020 05:00 AM PDT  Activists worry that all those coronavirus masks, medical kits, takeout containers and grocery bags are setting back a global fight to curb single-use plastic.
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| Fox News Host Tucker Carlson Loses More Advertisers Posted: 13 Jun 2020 07:09 AM PDT  On Monday's segment of his prime-time show, Fox News host Tucker Carlson cast doubt on the reasons behind the worldwide unrest prompted by the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis last month."This may be a lot of things, this moment we are living through," Carlson said. "But it is definitely not about black lives, and remember that when they come for you. And at this rate, they will."Since he made those statements and others, prominent companies including The Walt Disney Co., Papa John's, Poshmark and T-Mobile have distanced themselves from "Tucker Carlson Tonight," joining other businesses that have backed away from the show in recent years.The flight of advertisers accelerated Tuesday, when watchdog group Sleeping Giants tagged T-Mobile in a Twitter post, saying that Fox News had aired what amounted to an "extremely racist segment scaremongering about the Black community."The telecommunications giant responded on Twitter, saying that its ads had not run on the show since early May and would not run in the future. Mike Sievert, T-Mobile's chief executive, added a post of his own: "Bye-bye, Tucker Carlson!"Fox News said that Carlson was referring to Democratic leaders, not protesters, when he said "they" in his remarks on Monday night's program."No matter what they tell you, it has very little to do with black lives," Carlson had said. "If only it did."Advertiser disavowals of the show gained momentum Wednesday, after the newsletter Popular Information highlighted that Disney had run commercials 29 times on Carlson's program this year. The entertainment giant responded by saying that it had asked the third-party media agency that placed the ads, which were for Disney's ABC network, to stop doing so on the show.Papa John's, a pizza chain that was the center of an uproar in 2018 over a racial slur used by its founder, also backed away from Carlson. The company said that Havas, its media agency, placed a general buy for ad space across several cable news networks and left the positioning of the spots up to the networks.Papa John's began advertising on cable only after the pandemic began, as live sports and other content disappeared. It has run ads on "The Rachel Maddow Show" on MSNBC and "CNN Tonight With Don Lemon."After Carlson's comments, Papa John's said in a statement that it would stop spending on opinion shows, noting that "placement of advertising is not intended to be an endorsement of any specific programming or commentary."Steven Tristan Young, chief marketing officer of Poshmark, said in a statement Thursday that the e-commerce company stopped advertising on "Tucker Carlson Tonight" on June 2."We do not agree with the comments he made on his show and stand in solidarity with those who seek to advance racial justice and equality," Young said.Companies are trying to be especially sensitive amid the nationwide reckoning over race. Many, including Disney, T-Mobile, Poshmark and Papa John's, have posted messages on social media in support of the Black Lives Matter movement. Others have been advertising less in recent weeks.Carlson has spoken harshly about the unrest, urging a more severe crackdown on protests. In a segment posted to YouTube on June 1, which was preceded by a note that it could be "inappropriate or offensive to some audiences," he chided Vice President Mike Pence for having "scolded America for its racism" and told President Donald Trump that "people will not forgive weakness."Fox News said the advertiser departures had not caused the network to suffer a financial hit overall, noting that the commercials that would have run nationwide on "Tucker Carlson Tonight" had moved to other programs on the network.On Thursday night, a hashtag campaign -- IStandWithTucker -- sprang up on Twitter, with his fans appending it to messages of support for the host. As the phrase made the list of the platform's trending topics, Carlson's detractors tweeted insults at the host and the network that employs him while making use of the same hashtag.Carlson, who recently sold his stake in the conservative site The Daily Caller, has lost major advertisers in the past few years. Dozens of companies, including Pacific Life, Farmers Insurance and IHOP, have distanced themselves following his on-air comments about white supremacy, immigrants and women.But his show remains a linchpin of the Fox News lineup, drawing 4.8 million viewers last week. So far this year, "Tucker Carlson Tonight" generated 16% of ad revenue for Fox News, according to iSpot.tv, the television ads measurement company. Out of $75 million in total spending, more than a third came from a single advertiser: MyPillow, a pillow manufacturer in Minnesota run by Mike Lindell, a supporter of Trump who appeared at a White House Rose Garden news briefing in March.Few major brands remain on Carlson's program. Several major media buyers said they did not have clients with recent spots on the show.Alongside spots from the computer security brand Norton, skin care brand Proactiv and Trump's reelection campaign, recent ads have included a beet powder company that has used gun rights personality Dana Loesch as a spokeswoman, a foot fungus treatment brand and several law firms, according to iSpot.tv.This article originally appeared in The New York Times.(C) 2020 The New York Times Company
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| Virginia protesters march to statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee Posted: 13 Jun 2020 06:59 PM PDT  "We picked the monument with the idea that this would be the last big gathering here," an organizer said.
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| Bust of slave owner torn down and thrown into river in New Orleans Posted: 13 Jun 2020 07:50 PM PDT  Protesters on Saturday tore down a bust of a slave owner who left part of his fortune to New Orleans' schools and then took the remains to the Mississippi River and rolled it down the banks into the water. The destruction is part of a nationwide effort to remove monuments to the Confederacy or with links to slavery as the country grapples with widespread protests against police brutality toward African Americans. Police said in a statement on Saturday that demonstrators at Duncan Plaza, which is directly across the street from City Hall, dragged the bust into the streets, loaded it onto trucks and took it to the Mississippi River where they threw it in. Two people who were driving the trucks transporting the bust were apprehended by police and taken to police headquarters, authorities said. Their names were not given in the statement. The police did not identify the bust but local media identified it as a bust of John McDonogh.
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| Businessman close to Venezuela's Nicolás Maduro arrested in Cape Verde Posted: 13 Jun 2020 02:54 PM PDT  Colombian national Alex Nain Saab is wanted in the US on charges of corruption and money laundering.
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| Defund the Police? Sorry, Police Budgets Are Booming Posted: 13 Jun 2020 04:00 AM PDT  Police budgets should be examined, particularly since policing costs vary widely across the country.
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| China sentences Australian to death in fresh blow to relations Posted: 14 Jun 2020 07:39 AM PDT |
| Sen. Tim Scott rejects key criminal justice proposals by Democrats, setting up Capitol Hill showdown on police conduct Posted: 13 Jun 2020 06:20 PM PDT  Sen. Tim Scott, R-S.C., is crafting the GOP response to the Justice in Policing Act Democrats proposed following protests over George Floyd's death.
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| A white couple called the police on a man for stenciling 'Black Lives Matter' in chalk on his own property Posted: 14 Jun 2020 09:54 AM PDT  The couple accused James Juanillo of defacing private property, even though he lived in the home and was writing with chalk.
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| Fears rise over safety of detained Saudi princess, family confidant says Posted: 14 Jun 2020 01:30 AM PDT  "[If] she's dead or alive we have no idea, we literally have no single clue," said someone close to the Saudi princess.
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| One Big Difference About George Floyd Protests: Many White Faces Posted: 13 Jun 2020 07:05 AM PDT  As crowds have surged through American cities to protest the killing of George Floyd, one of the striking differences from years past has been the sheer number of white people.From Minneapolis to Washington, D.C., marchers noticed the change and wondered what it meant that so many white Americans were showing up for the cause of justice for black Americans."I was shocked to see so many white kids out here," said Walter Wiggins, 67, as he sat near the heart of the protests in Washington last week. Wiggins, a retired federal worker, who is black, remembered attending the 1963 March on Washington and other civil rights events with his parents. "Back then it was just black folks."Why is this happening now? The nine-minute video of a white police officer refusing to remove his knee from Floyd's neck has horrified Americans as attitudes on race were already changing, particularly among white liberals. Another driver is opposition to President Donald Trump, who has drawn large crowds of protesters since his election. Finally, there's the coronavirus pandemic, which has left millions of Americans -- including college students -- cooped up at home, craving human contact. The result was hundreds of thousands of white Americans in the streets."This is utterly different from anything we've seen," said Douglas McAdam, a Stanford sociologist who studies social movements, referring to the recent protests. Since the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014, every highly publicized death of an African American man while in police custody brought protests, he said, "but overwhelmingly in the black community."The pattern evident in the streets has now been confirmed by early demographic data: Researchers fanned out across three American cities last weekend and found overwhelmingly young crowds with large numbers of white and highly educated people.A team of 11 volunteers asked every fifth person they encountered to fill out a survey and gathered data from 195 people in New York, Washington, D.C., and Los Angeles. The researchers, Dana Fisher, a sociologist at the University of Maryland, and Michael Heaney, a political scientist at the University of Michigan, used an established method for studying street protests. They said their numbers provide only rough estimates but offer the first, more systematic look at who the protesters are.White protesters made up 61% of those surveyed in New York over the weekend, according to the researchers, and 65% of protesters in Washington. On Sunday in Los Angeles, 53% of protesters were white.It's not just protests. White Americans are going through a wave of self-examination, buying books about racism, talking to black friends and arguing within their own families. Still, how much of this translates into broader change remains to be seen."All of these white people on the front lines of these protests go back to their white neighborhoods and their overwhelmingly white and better schools," said Hakeem Jefferson, who is black and a political scientist at Stanford University. "They protest alongside them, but they don't live alongside them," he said, referring to black people.He added, "As much as people really want that progress narrative, I don't think it exists yet."While opinion polls on race do not always capture what people actually think, surveys have shown that racial attitudes among white Americans have been shifting. There has been a sudden and sharp turn by white liberals toward a much more sympathetic view of black people in recent years, said Andrew Engelhardt, a postdoctoral researcher at Brown University, who has published papers documenting the shift."In the last 10 years or so we've seen something unprecedented with white Democrats," Engelhardt said.Racial groups tend to feel warmest toward their own group. White people favor white people, and black people favor black people. But by 2018, white liberals felt more positively about blacks, Latinos and Asians than they did about whites. That reversal surfaced in a recent poll by the Pew Research Center: About 49% of white Democrats said it bothered them that their nominee would be a white man, while just 28% of black Democrats said so.The researchers who collected data last weekend found that the crowds were overwhelmingly young and well educated. More than three-quarters of those surveyed were under the age of 34, and 82% of white protesters had a college degree, while 67% of black protesters had one.Younger Americans are much more racially diverse than earlier generations and tend to have different views on race."My parents have a lot of learning to do," said Isabel Muir, 22, a recent college graduate, who was standing in front of St. John's Church on Saturday in Washington. She said she was having conversations on social media, and with her mother, on "how to be a white ally."When her mother, who is 62, questioned the property destruction, Muir said she told her that "we have to understand this community's pain. This economy has been built on their backs."Trump also appeared to be a powerful driver. Of whites surveyed in Fisher's work, 45% cited Trump as a motivation for joining the protests, compared with 32% of blacks. Whites were the group most likely to report having attended the 2017 Women's March but the second-least likely, after Asians, to report having attended the March for Racial Justice in 2017."My outrage for Trump is so strong," said Tanya Holtzapple, 56, who is white, walking in a crowd of people on I Street on Saturday in Washington. Since he was elected, she said, she has felt "energized," and marching was channeling that energy. "I'm not just sitting at home," she said.Since 2017, as many as 27 million people have taken part in protests opposing Trump, equal to about 8% of the population, according to researchers from Harvard University and the University of Connecticut.These protests are part of that surge, said Fisher, who compiled the data on the protests last weekend. Groups like Indivisible, March On and Swing Left, whose goal is to prevent Trump's reelection, may see joining the anti-police-brutality protests both as a moral necessity and a way to "expand their tent," she said."It's emblematic of this moment, which is about the big-L left starting to pay attention to this issue," Fisher said. "Groups not typically focused on racial justice and police brutality are turning people out."White Americans have taken part in struggles for racial equality at times -- as abolitionists in the 19th century and Freedom Riders in the 1960s. But scholars of race in America said it remained to be seen whether a heightened awareness of racial injustice now would lead to broad change. Condemning the killing of George Floyd, said Jennifer Chudy, a political scientist at Wellesley College, was "relatively costless.""Who is going out on a limb when they are distancing themselves from murder?" Chudy asked. Her work has shown that most white Americans have sympathy for a stark story of a sufferer and a villain -- much like in the video of Floyd's death -- but far lower rates of sympathy for more abstract mistreatment, like a polluting bus depot in a mostly black neighborhood. Some participants will become passionate for life, she said, but most won't. For some of them, "it may be nothing more than a fad."In a Monmouth University poll released this week, 71% of white respondents called racism and discrimination "a big problem" in the United States, a spike since 2015. But Jefferson, the political scientist at Stanford, argued that it was too early to declare that a national reckoning had arrived. He pointed to another finding in the same poll: Just 49% of white Americans say that police are more likely to use excessive force against a black culprit.Karyn Wills, 57, who came to the protest in Washington on Saturday, said she was hopeful. Wills, who is African American and a medical doctor, remembers protesting as a child with her parents in Chicago. She raised her children in suburban Maryland and said she believed their generation, which was so much more racially mixed than hers, would bring progress. "Some people out here are just curious; they'll have a sign, post on social media, and life will go on," she said. "But for some of them it really will spark change."This article originally appeared in The New York Times.(C) 2020 The New York Times Company
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| Spain says will reopen EU borders, barring Portugal, on June 21 Posted: 14 Jun 2020 11:23 AM PDT  Spain, one of the world's leading tourist destinations, will next Sunday re-establish free travel with fellow EU countries, Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez announced. The land border with Portugal will however remain closed until July 1. Portugal has suffered a much lower death rate than Spain from the coronavirus epidemic.
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| Russia inaugurates cathedral without mosaics of Putin, Stalin Posted: 14 Jun 2020 07:59 AM PDT  Russia inaugurated on Sunday a huge new cathedral dedicated to its armed forces that had caused controversy over initial plans to decorate its interior with mosaics depicting Russian President Vladimir Putin and Soviet-era leader Joseph Stalin. Russian Orthodox Church officials said last month neither would be depicted in the cathedral. The cathedral had been scheduled to open its doors in May when Russia was also planning to hold a military parade, but both events were postponed due to the coronavirus pandemic.
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| Drone strike kills 2 al-Qaida commanders in NW Syria Posted: 14 Jun 2020 11:02 AM PDT |
| Rep. Denver Riggleman ousted in Virginia GOP convention Posted: 13 Jun 2020 10:27 PM PDT  The first-term congressman became a target of conservatives after officiating a same-sex wedding in 2019.
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| Should police officers be required to live in the cities they patrol? There's no evidence it matters Posted: 13 Jun 2020 01:00 AM PDT  Protests that have swept the country in the wake of George Floyd's death have prompted calls to limit where police can live.
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| Northrop F-89 Scorpion–The First Combat Aircraft Armed with Air-to-Air Nuclear Weapons Posted: 13 Jun 2020 09:30 AM PDT  What could go wrong? Well, everything.
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| The Saudis’ Preaching Inspired Terror, and Then It Turned on Them Posted: 14 Jun 2020 01:52 AM PDT  If you recognize the term "Wahhabi" or "Wahhabism," the conservative state religion of Saudi Arabia, it's probably because of 9/11. It was in the wake of that attack that institutions like Freedom House began to publish reports about "Wahhabi ideology" that seemed to provide some intellectual context for a senseless event. The same goes for Salafism, for which there wasn't even a standard spelling in 2001: The Guardian went with "Salafee" in one post-9/11 article.Trump Administration Preps New Weapons Sale To Saudi ArabiaThe terms still tend to be tossed around by non-Muslims, with renewed vigor after the rise of ISIS, as examples of a "fundamentalist Islam" promoted by Saudi Arabia, which vaguely corrupted the Muslim world and was often embraced by jihadi terrorists. But understanding Saudi religion, and what it did abroad, requires considerably more nuance. It's true that, for decades, the Saudis used their austere religious vision as a tool of soft power to promote their interests around the world among Arabs and also in Indonesia, in Nigeria, in Kosovo and almost anywhere else with a sizeable Muslim community. But over the course of six decades, the faith the Saudis spent so lavishly to spread had unpredictable effects on the ground, and its most violent apostles actually turned against the kingdom.The Saudi brand started to deteriorate during the Gulf War of 1990–1991, when non-Muslim U.S. troops were accepted on the holy soil of Arabia in order to protect it from Saddam Hussein. That move, and the perceived hypocrisy of the Saudi clerics who greenlit it, dented Saudi Arabia's cultivated image as a leader of Muslims everywhere. And it ended the golden age of Saudi dawa, which means literally "the call" or "invitation" to Islam, and refers more generally to proselytizing.But 9/11 was something else. Fifteen out of the 19 hijackers were Saudi nationals and popular opinion about the kingdom quickly soured. Just six months after the attack, 54 percent of Americans agreed that "the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is a state that supports terrorism." The Gulf War was a blow to Saudi Arabia's bid for leadership of the Muslim world, but 9/11 brought it to its knees.The 838-page-long joint inquiry by the House and Senate Intelligence Committees into the 9/11 attacks published in 2002 contains a long-suppressed 28-page section on Saudi financing that was only declassified in 2016 and found that some of the hijackers "were in contact with, and received support or assistance from, individuals who may be connected to the Saudi Government."Something else happened while Saudi Arabia was in the spotlight: it experienced a 9/11 of its own. Al Qaeda, led by the ex-Saudi national Osama bin Laden, attacked major targets inside the kingdom, destroying a housing compound in Riyadh in 2003 and then Saudi oil fields in 2004.The stunned Saudi government set up a joint task force with the U.S. to investigate terrorist financing, and in May 2003, introduced banking regulations that temporarily stopped all private charities from sending funds abroad. These shock waves would be felt around the Muslim world, where Saudi charity had become an integral part of education and development. In 2003, the kingdom briefly considered recalling its religious attachés, diplomats under the Saudi Ministry of Religious Affairs, Dawa, and Guidance who oversaw dawa activities in about two dozen foreign countries. In 2004, a royal decree was issued to centralize all Islamic charities.Thus, 9/11 briefly imploded the transnational Saudi dawa apparatus. So when we talk about Saudi money today, it's essential to keep this dynamic in mind; it is no longer accurate to refer to some kind of all-powerful, centralized, ideologically coherent global project. We need to appreciate it at face value: piecemeal, diluted, opportunistic. DEFINING DEFINITIONSSaudi Arabia's mid-century ambitions to define orthodoxy in the Muslim world, fight revolutionary ideologies coming from Iran and Egypt, and support besieged Muslim minorities abroad stretched its global campaign, by the 1990s, into a project that frankly outpaced its capacities. For the eminent Saudi scholar Madawi al-Rasheed, who lives in self-imposed exile in London, the phenomenon of jihadis like Bin Laden, a Saudi citizen by birth, perfectly encapsulates the tension between the kingdom's rhetoric to "obey their current rulers at home while at the same time fostering the spirit of jihad abroad." That gets to the heart of why Saudi dawa has such chaotic effects outside the kingdom's borders.Wahhabism is an ultraconservative religious movement founded by the fiery 18th-century Arabian preacher Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab. It focuses on removing idolatry and "deviations" in Islam, and after Ibn Abd al-Wahhab signed a pact with the royal House of Saud, it became the official religion of the family and their successive attempts to consolidate a state on the Arabian peninsula, the last of which came together in 1932 and is modern-day Saudi Arabia.Salafism, meanwhile, is a revivalist Sunni Islamic movement that seeks to return to the traditions of the salaf, the first three generations of Muslims in the seventh and eighth centuries. It came out of late 19th century Egypt, chiefly as a reaction to Western colonialism. In practice, Salafis and Wahhabis have a lot in common. Both religious currents tend to promote personal austerity as well as intolerance of other beliefs, not only those of Christians, Jews, Buddhists, but of Muslims who have not embraced what they consider the true faith. Shia Muslims are a particular target. Wahhabism is highly linked to Saudi royal authority, which makes little sense outside the Gulf, so Saudi dawa tends to create Salafi communities abroad.Inside Saudi Arabia, as proved most recently by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman's brash moves to modernize civil society, the state can rein in the excesses of the Wahhabi clerics if it thinks that is necessary. Outside, Saudi-promoted Salafi movements are much harder to control.Does Saudi dawa actively create terrorists? Sometimes, but in very specific conditions, like the Afghan jihad, when it sponsored people including Abdullah Azzam and Osama bin Laden. Has Saudi dawa inspired terrorists, jihadists, and extremists? Much more broadly, yes. But they are a subset of a broader universe. "Salafi-jihadism," the strain of violent Salafism that includes al Qaeda, Boko Haram, ISIS, and others typically draws from a larger pool of nonviolent Salafis in a given region, and those broad communities often have direct connections to Saudi dawa. The most infamous Salafi-jihadist group, ISIS, rose to global prominence claiming to be the world's true Wahhabi state, and it set up its own printing press in Mosul in 2014 to publish Ibn Abd al-Wahhab's texts, much to Saudi Arabia's chagrin. The surprisingly widespread phenomenon of hardline Muslims destroying ancient holy sites, from Palmyra to Timbuktu, also follows a distinctly Wahhabi logic of eliminating occasions for "idolatry" and "polytheism" by razing shrines and tombs. ISIS is the worst offender, but non-jihadists do this, too: in Bale, Ethiopia, Saudi-affiliated fundamentalists destroyed more than 30 Sufi shrines in the early 2000s. The world's growing anti-Shia rhetoric, too, speaks in the distinctly Wahhabi language of "deviance" and "polytheism." And even blasphemy convictions often echo the Wahhabi logic of takfir, "excommunicating" improper Muslims. Even if Saudi officials occasionally decry the violent effects of past dawa, they are in an awkward position, given that these actions are completely in accordance with the ideas of the most famous Saudi preacher of all time.Nigeria is an instructive example. 'PRESERVING VIRTUE'In December 2015, Abdullahi Muhammad Musa crammed into a sedan with six relatives for the five hour drive from Nigeria's capital, Abuja, to the northern state of Zaria to celebrate Quds Day, the international expression of solidarity with Palestine. Abdullahi, 32, made it back to Abuja alive. But all the rest in that car, and at least 340 other civilians, were gunned down by the Nigerian military in what is now known as the Zaria Massacre. All were followers of an outspoken Shia group, the Islamic Movement in Nigeria, that has long been under attack by Sunnis, Salafis, and the state. As in many other parts of the Muslim world, this anti-Shia sentiment was fueled by Saudi-oriented Salafis. But in Nigeria, it's taken an especially deadly turn. It's estimated that roughly half of Nigeria's 191 million people are Muslim, although religious demographics are so contentious that the question has not been posed on the census since 1963. The country is a huge arena for global contests over Islamic dogma, and in such a volatile religious climate, the rise of Saudi-affiliated Salafism stirred things up, and then spiraled in unpredictable directions.Saudi Arabia started its outreach to West Africa shortly after Nigeria won independence from British rule in 1960. Within a decade, a generation of Salafis emerged in northern Nigeria, whose Muslims had, until then, been predominantly Sufi or non-denominational. Salafis created the Izala movement for "preserving virtue" and were influential in deciding the shape of sharia, Islamic law, which was implemented across the north of Nigeria starting in 1999. The most infamous Nigerians to identify as Salafis are the members of Boko Haram, the Salafi-jihadist group responsible for hundreds of terror attacks and the kidnapping of thousands of schoolchildren since 2009. At one point, in 2015, Boko Haram even surpassed ISIS as the world's deadliest terror group. But it did not emerge in a vacuum. The founder of Boko Haram, Muhammad Yusuf, studied with the most prominent Saudi-educated Salafi in Nigeria, Jafar Mahmud Adam, and even briefly sought refuge, like many Islamists under fire, in Saudi Arabia itself.The Salafi-jihadism of Boko Haram, although an extreme fringe, emerged from the rich Salafi tapestry that was woven in Nigeria over the previous half century. Since the 1960s, Saudi outreach cultivated deep personal contacts in the postcolonial nation and seeded opportunities to study in the kingdom. The resulting Salafis have clashed with both the reigning Sufi orders and the parallel, Iran-affiliated Shia movement. Some have been mainstreamed into government positions, while others laid the ideological groundwork for Boko Haram. BOKO HARAMIn April 2014, Boko Haram boldly kidnapped 276 female students from their school in Chibok, in the northeastern state of Borno. The event horrified observers inside Nigeria and around the world, who were stunned at the inability of the state to protect the girls or to negotiate effectively with the terrorist group (112 of the 276 girls are still missing). In more recent incidents, Boko Haram has kidnapped over 1,000 children since 2018 and, as recently as 2018, abducted 110 more girls from the town of Dapchi. Even during one of my visits in May 2019, a handful of staffers were kidnapped from a girls' school in Zamfara State. Easily the most infamous Islamic movement in northern Nigeria today, Boko Haram also has contributed to a devastating regional famine by preventing farmers from planting crops and blocking access to Lake Chad. Since Boko Haram styles itself as a Salafi-jihadist group, it begs the question of how closely it is linked with the greater Salafi movement in the region, and of whether that Salafi movement would have flourished in northern Nigeria without Saudi dawa. In a word, the answer is no. Saudi proselytizing has been integral to Salafism in northern Nigeria, and Boko Haram's ideology directly springs from the Salafi corpus spread there by Saudi-educated Nigerian preachers. But in an ironic twist, the majority of mainstream Nigerian Salafis oppose the jihadi group and have even tried to wage public debates with its leaders, albeit to little effect. The resulting situation is typical of what Saudi proselytizing often looks like in the wild, rife with unstable by-products. Boko Haram has praised al Qaeda and it pledged allegiance to ISIS in 2015, but it remains more a localized insurgency than a transnational jihadist group. In fact, it existed for six years as a nonviolent fundamentalist group and only turned violent in 2009, when its founder was killed. Its context is deeply local to Maiduguri, the northeastern state where it is headquartered. And Salafism would never have entered Maiduguri were it not for a preacher named Jafar Adam, the most popular and charismatic Saudi educated Salafi in modern Nigeria. He founded a group called Ahl Al-Sunna, which considered itself more purely Salafi, and less tainted with politics, than Izala had become by the new millennium. And Adam's star student was a young man named Muhammad Yusuf. Adam even appointed him to lead Ahl Al-Sunna's youth wing. But just as Adam branched off from Izala in a more hardline direction, so Yusuf did to Adam, whom he rejected as insufficiently Islamic.In 2007, Yusuf published the foundational manifesto of Boko Haram: "This is our creed and method of proclamation," which mostly consisted of quotations from Saudi Salafi texts. Boko Haram was not his own name for the group. He called it Jama'at Ahl as-Sunnah lid-Dawah wa'l Jihad, the Group of the People of the Sunnah for Preaching and Jihad. Nigerian media came up with the shorter cognomen, which captured Yusuf's central idea that Western education, or "Boko" in Hausa, was forbidden. This newer, even more charismatic breakaway movement drew hundreds of young people. Everyone in Maiduguri knew Yusuf and vice versa. "Once I met him in a gas station and he instantly recognized me and asked whether I was still part of the army of Satan," one resident told me. Yusuf eventually attracted thousands of followers across the northeastern states and even from neighboring Niger, Chad, and Cameroon. But within a few years, this volatile Salafi coterie headquartered in Maiduguri became an ouroboros, the snake that eats its own tail. In 2007, Jafar Adam, the most influential Saudi-educated nonviolent Salafi preacher of the decade, was assassinated under mysterious circumstances—most likely on the directive of Boko Haram. And then, in 2009, Boko Haram clashed with the Nigerian military amid allegations it was building bombs. One thousand people died, 700 in Maiduguri alone. Among them was Muhammad Yusuf, who was interrogated by police and then executed. The heavy-handed military confrontation was the proximate cause for Boko Haram's turn toward violence, but in the bigger picture, it's obvious that Boko Haram could not have formed as a group, nor attracted its popular base across multiple states without its ideological background and the charismatic Salafi preachers at its core. Boko Haram's material links to Saudi and Gulf actors are basically opportunistic. Around 2002, Osama bin Laden reportedly sent an aide to Nigeria with $3 million to distribute among local groups including Boko Haram. In 2015, Boko Haram switched allegiance to the Islamic State and restyled itself as the "Islamic State in West Africa." It's worth noting that, in its current, violent iteration, Boko Haram considers Saudi Arabia to be a state of unbelief. Under the leadership of Abubakar Shekau, who took over from Yusuf in 2009, Boko Haram declared its enmity toward literally every other Islamic group and entity imaginable, including the Sufis, Shia, Izala, the Nigerian government, and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. In a video message filmed in December 2014, Shekau, holding a rifle that he periodically shot off to punctuate his address for emphasis, screamed, "The Saudi state is a state of unbelief, because it is a state that belongs to the Saud family, and they do not follow the Prophet … the Saudi Arabians, since you have altered Allah's religion, you will enter hellfire!" Saudi Arabia was the site of an attempted negotiation between Boko Haram and the Nigerian state in 2012 to 2013. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the peace talks held there did not make much headway.Given the persistent rifts and splintering among Nigerian Salafis, it's not surprising that Boko Haram experienced its own internal split in 2016, where a rival named Abu Musab al-Barnawi made a bid for leadership over Shekau and linked his faction more closely with ISIS. There's no chance Saudi Arabia foresaw any of these chaotic effects back in 1965, when its dawa outreach to Nigeria started. Indeed, it's likely that every successive splintering of Nigerian Salafism became more and more distant from the original Saudi soft power project, which was formed on close personal contacts between Nigerian and Saudi leaders, but became more localized over time. Spreading such a charged ideology abroad was like opening a can of worms. It's why so many jihadist groups today prize Wahhabi theology and revile the kingdom itself. Thus the central paradox today: even if Saudi Arabia is embarrassed by its reputation for spreading extremism and the unsavory effects of its campaign, it's not really a problem the Saudis can solve anymore.This excerpt is adapted from The Call: Inside the Global Saudi Religious Project, by Krithika Varagur.Read more at The Daily Beast.Get our top stories in your inbox every day. Sign up now!Daily Beast Membership: Beast Inside goes deeper on the stories that matter to you. Learn more.
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| Failings of founder are a lesson, says Chief Scout Bear Grylls Posted: 13 Jun 2020 09:33 PM PDT  Chief Scout has said that the movement cannot deny its founder Lord Baden-Powell's "failings" but should learn from them. Bear Grylls says Scouting needs to be aware of its past and Baden-Powell's role, and that "history is nothing if we do not learn from it". The adventurer and TV presenter explained: "Baden-Powell may have taken the first step in creating Scouting, but the journey continues today without him. We know where we came from but we are not going back." Grylls' comments come after a row over whether a statue of Baden-Powell should be removed from its place in Poole harbour because of his espousal of some far-Right ideas. The local council planned to remove the monument because of fears it would become a target for anti-racist activists. But protesters, many former Scouts, thwarted the removal by forming a ring around the statue. Writing for The Telegraph, Grylls said the Scouting movement had to acknowledge Baden-Powell's vision in bringing together young people "to learn how to celebrate their differences, to love and protect the outdoor world, to serve communities, and to be empowered with skills for life". But he admitted that Baden-Powell was far from perfect and said Scouting had moved on since it was founded. He writes: "As Scouts, we most certainly do not celebrate Baden-Powell for his failings. We see them and we acknowledge them. And if he were here today we would disagree with him on many things, of that there is no doubt. And I suspect he would too." Grylls says that while being grateful to Baden-Powell, the Scouting movement "must also evolve", explaining that for that reason he supports the protests against racism that followed the killing of African-American George Floyd by a white policeman in Minneapolis. "This is why I wholeheartedly stand beside the righteous anger unleashed by the killing of George Floyd, and together we must all do what we can to right the awful injustices that BAME communities live with every day," he writes. The statue of Baden-Powell was installed in 2008 and faces Brownsea Island, off Poole, Dorset, where the Scout movement began. Declassified MI5 files revealed in 2010 that Baden-Powell was invited to meet Hitler after holding friendly talks about forming closer ties with the Hitler Youth. He has also been accused of holding racist and homophobic views. Following the toppling of the statue of slave trader Edward Colston in Bristol, the Baden-Powell monument was one of more than 60 that appeared on a "Topple the Racists" hit list. The list says he "committed atrocities against the Zulus in his military career and was a Nazi/fascist sympathiser". Vikki Slade, the leader of Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole Council, said at that time: "While famed for the creation of the Scouts, we also recognise there are some aspects of Robert Baden-Powell's life that are considered less worthy of commemoration." Grylls writes: "This last week, people have expressed much confusion and anger at the possible removal of a statue of Lord Baden-Powell in Poole. "To me, and many Scouts, Brownsea Island (the place that the statue looks out on) is a reminder of that great Scouting vision that has since helped so many young people gain vital, life-enhancing skills. "It's right we take time to listen, to educate ourselves and reflect on our movement's history. "We need the humility to recognise there are times when the views and actions from our Scouting's past do not always match the values we live by today. "We must learn, adapt, and improve." Read more: BEAR GRYLLS | As Scouts, we certainly do not celebrate Baden-Powell for his failings
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| Black pastor called 911 after alleged attack. The cops arrested him. Posted: 13 Jun 2020 01:34 PM PDT  Pastor Leon McCray said he "was handcuffed in front of my assaulters," and "they waved at me as I go down the road... . Do you know how disturbing that is?"
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| Hillary Clinton knocks Trump's liability waiver for Oklahoma rally Posted: 13 Jun 2020 01:02 PM PDT  Hillary Clinton chided Donald Trump's presidential campaign for resuming large rallies amid the ongoing coronavirus pandemic and obliging those seeking tickets to his first event in Tulsa, Okla., to sign a liability waiver acknowledging the "inherent risk of exposure to COVID-19."
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| Mexican lawmaker postpones proposal to merge three regulators after opposition Posted: 14 Jun 2020 11:59 AM PDT  A lawmaker from Mexico's ruling party who proposed merging three regulatory bodies into one said on Sunday he would delay the initiative, after opponents criticized the move as a power grab that could jeopardize oversight. Ricardo Monreal, senate leader of the president's National Regeneration Movement (MORENA), said he would wait to move ahead with his proposal to combine energy regulator CRE, antitrust watchdog the Federal Economic Competition Commission (COFECE), and telecoms regulator IFT. The merged body would be called the National Institute of Markets and Competition for Wellbeing, have five board members and would generate annual savings of 500 million pesos ($22.4 million), according to a document presented by Monreal last week.
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| Letters to the Editor: I went through tear gas training in the military. It was traumatizing Posted: 14 Jun 2020 03:00 AM PDT  A Navy veteran who had to walk through a room filled with tear gas during training worries for the June 1 protesters at the White House.
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| William Sessions, FBI head fired by President Clinton, dies Posted: 12 Jun 2020 07:54 PM PDT  William S. Sessions, a former federal judge appointed by President Ronald Reagan to head the FBI and fired years later by President Bill Clinton, died Friday at his San Antonio home. Sessions died of natural causes not related to the novel coronavirus, said his daughter, Sara Sessions Naughton. Sessions was a career Justice Department attorney and federal judge until Reagan appointed him FBI director in 1987.
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| Fact check: Photo shows Biden with Byrd, who once had ties to KKK but wasn't a grand wizard Posted: 14 Jun 2020 02:40 PM PDT  A widely shared image on social media claims Joe Biden is pictured with Robert Byrd, a grand wizard of the KKK. Byrd was in the KKK but not that post.
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| China Has Way Too Much Power Over Zoom. These Activists Learned the Hard Way. Posted: 13 Jun 2020 01:00 PM PDT  Zoom confirmed Wednesday evening that the video conferencing company removed a U.S.-based account after it commemorated the Tiananmen Square Massacre.
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| Reconsider reparations. We need them morally and economically, and we can afford them. Posted: 14 Jun 2020 05:38 AM PDT  Money alone can't right the monumental wrong of slavery. But reparations are justifiable and affordable, and they'd give the economy a needed jolt.
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| Trump’s Deployment of National Guard to Deal With D.C. Protests Cost Taxpayers $21 Million Posted: 13 Jun 2020 05:58 PM PDT  President Donald Trump's decision to deploy the National Guard to quell Black Lives Matter protests in the nation's capital has cost U.S. taxpayers about $21 million as of this past Friday, a spokesperson for the guard told The Daily Beast. That projected cost includes the deployment of the guard to the District from 12 different states, the spokesperson said. The official mission, the spokesperson said, was "to support the D.C. civil unrest operations." About $18.2 million of the total cost of the operation was dedicated to pay and allowance for the guard and about $2.9 million went to operations and management, which included transportation and lodging. The total estimated tally does not include costs for aircraft that were used to transport guard personnel from supporting states to D.C. It also doesn't account for the other various law enforcement units that were dispatched to the capital to deal with the protests that erupted after the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police. According to Attorney General Bill Barr, "all the major law-enforcement components" of the Department of Justice were involved in operations in D.C., "including the FBI, ATF, DEA, Bureau of Prisons, and U.S. Marshals Service." Reuters previously reported that it cost up to $2.6 million per day for 5,000 National Guard troops to assist in the federal response to the protests in D.C.According to an ongoing Daily Beast analysis, the $21 million cost for D.C. represents one of the highest price points out of all the states that chose to deploy National Guard troops during the protests. Other states deployed their guardsman within their borders to deal with their own protests. California spent an estimated $25 million. Minnesota, which was the epicenter of the early protests, spent about $12.7 million in total to deploy guard troops.Trump has come under intense criticism for his decision to deploy overwhelming force in the capital as a means of counteracting protestors. The president has defended his actions on the grounds that he was trying to stop looting and vandalism. But his decision to militarize the operation and his use of law enforcement personnel to effectively stage a photo op outside the White House has been chastised among Democrats and Republicans alike. Read more at The Daily Beast.Get our top stories in your inbox every day. Sign up now!Daily Beast Membership: Beast Inside goes deeper on the stories that matter to you. Learn more.
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| Putin says Russia will be able to counter hypersonic weapons Posted: 14 Jun 2020 03:34 AM PDT  Russia will soon be in a position to counter hypersonic arms deployed by other countries, President Vladimir Putin said on Sunday, adding that Moscow was ahead of the United States in developing new types of weapons. Hypersonic glide vehicles can steer an unpredictable course and manoeuvre sharply as they approach impact. Washington and Moscow have been expanding their defence capabilities as some Cold War-era arms control agreements collapsed during worsening of Russia's ties with the West.
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| Letters to the Editor: Confederates killed Americans and fought for slavery. Remove their names Posted: 14 Jun 2020 03:00 AM PDT  It's unbelievable that the U.S. would honor the leaders of a murderous rebellion who fought to keep slavery.
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| Secret Service says it used pepper spray on Lafayette Square protesters Posted: 13 Jun 2020 01:59 PM PDT  The agency initially denied it had used pepper spray to clear demonstrators.
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| Is international travel allowed yet? See when Jamaica, St. Bart's, Austria plan to reopen borders Posted: 13 Jun 2020 01:44 PM PDT  Jamaica is preparing to welcome back international tourists June 15, while Austria requires negative coronavirus tests and won't allow direct flights.
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| HIMARS Could Be A Game-changer In The Philippines Fight Against China Posted: 14 Jun 2020 12:00 AM PDT  These missiles could settle the South China Sea.
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| Germany's R-rate spikes above 1 ahead of tracing app rollout Posted: 14 Jun 2020 10:58 AM PDT  Germany's R-rate, the crucial metric used to determine how rapidly the coronavirus is spreading, spiked above 1 on Sunday according to both daily and weekly measures - just days before the country is set to launch its tracing app. The news has given rise to concerns that Germany, which won global praise for its response to the crisis, may have relaxed lockdown restrictions too soon. An "R" or reproduction rate above one indicates that each person with the virus is infecting more than one other person - meaning the number of cases will rise rather than fall. It is one of the key indicators used to understand if authorities have control of the virus. On Sunday morning, the daily R-rate across Germany was 1.02. More worrying for authorities is the seven-day R-rate, which provides a more stable and reliable indication of how the virus is spreading by aggregating data over a week-long period. That figure stood at 1.09 on Sunday morning - the first time it has risen above one since the metric was introduced in mid-May - reflecting data collated between eight and 16 days ago. The Robert Koch Institute, which publishes the figure daily, said the new data should be "interpreted cautiously". It is not clear exactly what would have caused such a spike but some of the most significant outbreaks have occurred in the central German state of Thuringia, which relaxed coronavirus measures in mid-May, earlier than many other parts of the country, and ended contact restrictions entirely on June 13th. There have been outbreaks in the Thuringian town of Sonneberg, as well as in neighbouring Hersfeld-Rotenburg, Göttingen and Coburg, which are situated just across the border. Lockdown measures vary in each of Germany's 16 states. Large gatherings remain banned across the country, but bars, restaurants, sports clubs and public transport services have largely reopened, subject to mask requirements. Recent weeks have also seen dozens of rallies across the country, some attracting thousands of people. The spike in infections comes just before Germany is set to roll out its contact tracing app on June 16th. Originally set for release in April, the "Corona-Warn-App" has been delayed due to a dispute about privacy and data storage. Under the original plan, the data was to be stored on a central server but critics said this would make it vulnerable to abuse. Under a new decentralised plan, data will be stored on each user's handset and encrypted before being uploaded centrally, ensuring that information relating to app users will not be accessible. President of the German Society for Computer Science Hannes Federrath said that while this approach would better address privacy concerns, "it was actually less effective [in tracing the virus] than a centralised system". Privacy concerns also ensured that the app will rely on Bluetooth rather than location data to track potential outbreaks. Mobile phones with the app installed will record when one phone is within close enough proximity of another that the virus could be transmitted. If someone tests positive for the virus, they will receive a QR code which can be scanned into the app to notify everyone they have come into close contact with. Authorities in the UK are currently trialling an app based on similar technology, although no release date has been given.
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| Minneapolis officers quit in wake of George Floyd protests Posted: 14 Jun 2020 09:07 AM PDT  At least seven Minneapolis police officers have quit and another seven are in the process of resigning, citing a lack of support from department and city leaders as protests over George Floyd's death escalated. Current and former officers told The Minneapolis Star Tribune that officers are upset with Mayor Jacob Frey's decision to abandon the Third Precinct station during the protests. The Minnesota Department of Human Rights launched a civil rights investigation into the city's police department this month and the FBI is investigating whether police willfully deprived Floyd of his civil rights.
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| South African president's shame over surge in murders of women Posted: 14 Jun 2020 05:33 AM PDT  Cyril Ramaphosa's remarks come after several femicides amid the lifting of coronavirus restrictions.
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| Emergency meeting held in South Korea after Kim Jong Un's sister threatens military action Posted: 14 Jun 2020 05:08 AM PDT  South Korean military "is maintaining resolute military readiness to respond to all situation," the country's defense ministry said.
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| Law enforcement officers react to video of Rayshard Brooks shooting, firing of officer Posted: 14 Jun 2020 05:10 AM PDT  Law enforcement officers join 'Fox & Friends' to discuss the case and riots unfolding in Atlanta, Georgia.
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| Record spikes in new coronavirus cases, hospitalizations sweep parts of U.S. Posted: 14 Jun 2020 07:46 AM PDT  Alabama reported a record number of new cases for the fourth day in a row on Sunday. Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, California, Florida, North Carolina, Oklahoma and South Carolina all had record numbers of new cases in the past three days, according to a Reuters tally.
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