Malice Murder: A Judge in Brunswick, Georgia yesterday sentenced a father and son convicted of murdering black jogger Ahmaud Arbery to life without the possibility of parole plus 20 years.

  Travis McMichael, 35, his father, Gregory McMichael, 66, had both been convicted of “malice murder” under Georgia law. Notably, neither stood to face the judge for sentencing. 

  Their neighbor, William “Roddie” Bryan, 52, who was convicted of the somewhat lesser charge offelony murder, was sentenced to life without the possibility of parole until he’s 82.

  The three men had chased the 25-year-old Arbery through their neighborhood for five minutes, saying later they suspected he may have committed a crime. Dramatically, the judge left the court silent for just one minute to illustrate how long the chase had been. 

  The racism in the case was evident throughout the trial. Last fall, defense lawyer Laura Hogue said in court that, “Turning Ahmaud Arbery into a victim after the choices that he made does not reflect the reality of what brought Ahmaud Arbery to Satilla Shores in his khaki shorts with no socks to cover his long, dirty toenails.”

  Arbery was wearing running shoes when he was murdered and no one ever would have seen his toenails if he had not been naked and dead on a mortuary slab.

  In a victim statement yesterday before the sentences were passed, Arbery’s mother heartbreakingly said, “I wish he would have cut and cleaned his toenails before he went out for that jog that day. I guess he would have if he knew he would be murdered.”

Viral News: Nearly 650,000 new cases of Covid-19 were reported in the US yesterday. The rate of new cases is up 228 percent over the past two weeks with the US on the brink of recording 60 million cases since the start of the pandemic.

  In Florida, where mask wearing and measures to fight the pandemic have become matters of political resistance, the state registered nearly 400,000 new cases over the past seven days. As the highly infectious omicron variant sweeps through the state, 31% of COVID-19 tests in the past week have come back positive.

Shoot to Kill: Kazakhstan’s authoritarian leader said yesterday that he ordered the nation’s security forces to “fire without warning” in order to end two days of violence after peaceful protests devolved into violence.

  “We hear calls from abroad for the parties to negotiate to find a peaceful solution to the problems,” President Tokayev said in an address to his country. “What negotiations can there be with criminals and murderers,” he said. “They need to be destroyed and this will be done.” Security forces say they have already killed dozens of anti-government rioters in the country’s primary city, Almaty.

The Obit Page: The beloved actor Sidney Poitier, who established himself as the first black star in American movies and opened the gates for many actors to follow, has died at age 94. He changed life for black Americans both on screen and off.

  Poitier made his name in the 1960s with such movies as “To Sir With Love,” “In the Heat of the Night” and “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner,”

  He was the first black man to win the Oscar for Best Actor with the 1963 “Lilies of the Field” in which he plays a man who stops to ask some immigrant nuns for water for his car and ends up staying to build them a chapel. 

  Starting in the throes of the American civil rights movement, Poitier played characters who strained against racial barriers. In the 1967 “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner” he was a black doctor engaged to a white woman, to the shock of her parents.

  Opposite Rod Steiger as a bigoted Mississippi sheriff, Poitier played a Philadelphia detective named Virgil Tibbs who gets roped into a murder investigation with Steiger, who diminished Tibbs addressing him only by his first name. In a famous line, Tibbs declares, “They call me Mr. Tibbs!” 

  Poitier said of his choice of roles in a 1967 interview that, “If the fabric of the society were different, I would scream to high heaven to play villains and to deal with different images of Negro life that would be more dimensional. But I’ll be damned if I do that at this stage of the game.”

Count Them Out: Cyber Ninjas, the Florida firm that conducted the discredited review of Arizona’s 2020 presidential vote has declared that it’s out of business. Cyber Ninjas had fed the Trump claim that the vote was rigged.

  Buried in litigation and a $50,000-a-day fine for failing to meet a court order to turn over records to the Arizona Republic, Cyber Ninjas declared it was insolvent and laid off all its workers. Judge John Hannah suggested that the shutdown might be designed “to leave the Cyber Ninjas entity as an empty piñata for all of us to swing at.” 

The Spin Rack: As they heard arguments yesterday, the Supreme Court’s conservatives seemed ready to block some or all of the Biden administration’s regulations aimed at increasing coronavirus vaccinations. — Snow and rain forced closure of sections Washington state’s two major highways, Interstate 90 and Interstate 5. Flooding also swamped roads throughout Western Washington and Oregon. — Fighting bad weather and Covid, the airlines have cancelled 27,000 flights since trouble began on Christmas Eve. 

Strong Words: House Speaker Nancy Pelosi invited President Biden to deliver his State of the Union address on March 1^st. We’re pretty sure that despite all evidence, he’ll declare that the state of the union is strong.

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