Police Beat: The officer who killed an unarmed motorist in Brooklyn Center, Minnesota, and the chief of police both resigned yesterday. Kim Potter, the 48-year-old officer, is a 26-year veteran of the force. 

  On Monday, the city council had voted resolutions for both to be fired.

  Disturbances in Brooklyn Center continued for a third night.

  Chief Tim Gannon said Monday that Potter had pulled her pistol when she thought it was her Taser. Potter wrote in a letter to the city council that, “I have loved every minute of being a police officer and serving this community to the best of my ability, but I believe it is in the best interest of the community, the department and my fellow officers if I resign immediately.”

  The prosecution rested yesterday and the defense opened in the murder trial of former Minneapolis officer Derek Chauvin for the notorious death of George Floyd.

  Floyd died with Chauvin’s knee on his neck. Contradicting witnesses from within the Minneapolis PD, Barry Brodd, a former police officer and expert on the use of force, testified that, “I felt that Derek Chauvin was justified, and was acting with objective reasonableness, following Minneapolis police department policy and current standards of law enforcement, in his interactions with Mr. Floyd.”

  The two Minnesota cases have combined with the experience of an Army officer stopped at gunpoint by cops in Virginia who failed to see that Lt. Caron Nazario’s new car had the proper temporary license and refused to say why they had stopped him. They pepper sprayed Nazario then threatened to ruin his army career if he complained to their department.

  Joining the national outrage over police treatment of black people, Trevor Noah, host of The Daily Show, said, “They don’t care if you’re a member of the military. They don’t care if you’re a beloved member of the community. They don’t care if you’re recording them. They don’t care if they’re recording themselves. And the reason they don’t care s because they know they’re going to get away with it. And until that changes. They’re going to just keep not caring.”

The Forever War: President Biden announced that he plans to pull the last 3,000 American troops out of Afghanistan this year on the 20^th anniversary of the September 11^th attacks that moved the US to go to war to depose the  Muslim fundamentalist Taliban who hosted al Qaeda terrorists.

  More than 2,200 Americans have been killed in Afghanistan and over 20,000 wounded.

  A new intelligence report says the prospects for Afghanistan are grim. “The Afghan government will struggle to hold the Taliban at bay if the coalition withdraws support,” the report said. What that means is it’s pretty likely the Taliban will take over again, and it was all for nothing.

Viral News: Questions about the safety of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine have put a pause in the vaccination campaign and fed doubts of Americans who don’t trust the new Covid-19 vaccines. Health authorities are examining six cases of women developing blood clots, one of them fatal.

  The J&J vaccine was just getting traction with the public after early reports that it’s not as effective as other vaccines.

Cold Case Files: Nearly 25 years after Cal Poly freshman Kristin Smart vanished following a fraternity party, a man who was a classmate at the time and the last known person to have seen her alive, has been arrested.

  It has been an infamous missing person case. Paul Flores, now 44, was arrested in San Pedro. His father, Ruben Flores, 80, was also taken into custody as an accessory. 

  What new evidence led to the arrests has not be revealed. 

  Smart was 19-year-old freshman at California Polytechnic’s San Luis Obispo campus when she vanished Memorial Day weekend in 1996. 

  Some students found Smart passed out on a lawn and woke her up. Flores told the police he walked her to her dormitory then returned to his own.  A month later cadaver dogs led police to Flores’ mattress in his dorm room. Flores’s story was fishy, but the police never found Smart or her body.

War Games: Russia has warned the US to turn around two warships headed into the Black Sea off the coast of Crimea. In a change of sentiment, they called the US an “adversary.” Russia annexed Crimea in 2014 and has been fighting a proxy war in eastern Ukraine. Ominously, they have built up a force of 40,000 soldiers on the border. 

Capitol Case: Despite early warnings about the January 6^th demonstrations and insurrection, the Capitol Police did not to deploy their most powerful crowd control weapons, according to a scathing Inspector General’s report.

  The report quotes the Capitol Police’s own threat assessment saying, “Unlike previous postelection protests, the targets of the pro-Trump supporters are not necessarily the counter protesters as they were previously, but rather Congress itself is the target on the 6^th.”

  Ignoring that, the chief of the Capitol Police determined that violence was “improbable” and he failed to prepare for the worst.

The Spin Rack: Following an Israeli attack on one of its nuclear plants, Iran vowed to increase production of higher purity uranium. — Tax cheats cost the federal government $1 trillion a year, the head of the IRS says. Charles Rettig said the rich are stashing money in crypto-currencies to avoid taxes.  

Ice Cube: Scientists are rushing to study the giant Muldrow Glacier on the north side of Alaska’s Mount Denali, which is  undergoing a rare surge. In the past few months the 39-mile-long river of ice has moved as much as 90 feet a day, 100 times its usual speed.

  The glacier is a popular route for climbers going up Denali, but the movement and pressure have broken and shattered the surface, and the noise is reported to even drown out a helicopter. 

  Surges like this are rare, which is why scientists are thrilled to have one to study.

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