The Fatal Shot: A private autopsy shows that North Carolina deputies shot drug suspect Andrew Brown Jr. five times, one of them a fatal wound in the back of the skull as Brown tried to drive away, lawyers for the family said yesterday.

  Attorney Ben Crump said, “There was a kill shot to the back of the head” and his colleague Wayne Kendall described it as “nothing but a straight out execution.”

  They said Brown was hit four times in his right arm as multiple officers fired their guns. The lawyers said Brown backed up to get away from the gunfire, spun around, and was hit in the back of his head as he tried to drive away.

  Brown ultimately crashed into a tree and Kendall said, “I think once the video actually comes out, we’re going to also find out that there were shots into that vehicle after he crashed into that tree and after he had been hit in the back of the head.”

  The local sheriff’s department has so far not released the bodycam video from as many as 10 officers on the scene. They showed 20 seconds to the Brown family, which they found very unsatisfactory. The unarmed Brown has been described as having his hands on the wheel of his car, not moving, when the shooting started. The sheriff has not provided a detailed explanation of what happened.

  Attorney Bakari Sellers, who’s become a familiar face as a panelist on CNN, said, 

You don’t have to be black, you dot have to be white, you just have to have a beating heart, a moral conscience, to understand that injustice was done.”

The Police Beat: Police in Alameda, California, have released body camera video of an incident in which a man died after being pinned to the ground by deputies for five minutes the day before former Minneapolis officer Derek Chauvin was convicted of killing George Floyd by kneeling on his neck.

  A press release from the Alameda police, south of Oakland, said their officers responded to “two separate reports of a male who appeared to be under the influence and a suspect in a possible theft.” The man was Mario Arenales Gonzalez. The release went on, “Officers attempted to detain the man, and a physical altercation ensued. At that time, the man had a medical emergency.” Gonzalez died in a hospital.

  A lawyer for Gonzalez’s family said, “Drunk guy in a park doesn’t equal a capital sentence.”

Viral News: As the coronavirus pandemic winds down, the Centers for Disease Control yesterday relaxed the guidelines for wearing masks. The CDC says fully vaccinated people no longer need to wear a mask outdoors while walking, running, hiking,  biking alone, or in small gatherings. They say masks are still necessary in crowded outdoor venues like sports stadiums. 

Cancel Culture: WW Norton publishers say they will permanently take Blake Bailey’s biography of author Philip Roth out of print because of accusations that Bailey sexually assaulted multiple women and was inappropriate with his students.

  While Norton is being so culturally sensitive, Simon & Schuster is taking heat from its own employees for agreeing to publish two books by former Vice President Mike Pence. Of course the shocker there is that no one knew Pence ever had anything to say, let alone two books worth.

  But the Simon & Schuster editors and other employees are demanding an end to the deal. When the dustup started, they didn’t even know the company also agreed to publish books by former Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway and former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.

  Although people who work in publishing tend to lean to the political left, the industry has always published post-administration memoirs. This time the Trump administration is just too much for the underlings in publishing. But Simon & Schuster says there’s a line they won’t cross. They won’t publish books by authors who claim the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump. We’ll see if the ban includes Trump himself.

The Spin Rack: Two Spanish Journalists filming a documentary about anti-poaching activities in the Western African country Burkina Faso were captured and killed following an ambush on their convoy. — Human Rights Watch released a 213-page report arguing that Israel practices a policy of ethnic supremacy akin to the old South African apartheid that favors Israeli Jews over Palestinians in both Israel and the occupied territories. Accusing Israel of racism is a real hot button. — A man was arrested at New York’s JFK Airport trying to smuggle 35 live finches from Guyana into the US. They were stuffed inside plastic hair curlers lining his coat and around his ankles.

Viral Ignorance: Stupidity is as contagious as coronavirus.

  Picking up on a Fox News story that President Biden’s plan to cut greenhouse gas emissions would require Americans to eliminate 90 percent of the beef from their diets, Texas Gov. Gregg Abbott bravely tweeted “Not gonna happen in Texas!”

  Georgia’s rabid Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene decried Biden as the “hamburglar.”  And Colorado’s pistol packin’ Rep. Lauren Boebert tweeted, “Joe Biden’s climate plan includes cutting 90% of red meat from our diets by 2030. They want to limit us to about four pounds a year. Why doesn’t Joe stay out of my kitchen?”

  He never entered it. The fiction that Biden is proposing the drastic cut in red meat stemmed from a story in Britain’s Daily Mail speculating — repeat — speculating  —- that his greenhouse goals might require Americans to “cut 90 per cent of red meat out of diet” and “eat only 4lbs a year”. 

  Biden never said it or proposed it. The fact -free Fox News picked it up as true and ignorance spread like Covid-19 among Republican politicians who refuse to be vaccinated against stupidity.

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