Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms says she wont seek reelection
Atlanta mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms, a Democrat, an early supporter of President Joe Biden who was touted as a potential running mate, said Friday she would not seek reelection this year because she no longer has the fight in her heart to continue in the job for another four years.
During a sometimes emotional news conference at Atlanta City Hall, Bottoms told reporters she had been torn since her early months in office about whether she would seek reelection. Bottoms added the past year has been an exceptionally difficult time to lead the city and that it was time to give voters the opportunity to select a new mayor.
“It is time to pass the baton on to someone else,” Bottoms said, noting that that is why there are elections every four years.
She acknowledged many of the challenges the city has been through over the last three years, including a crippling cyberattack and a federal investigation into alleged corruption in city government that she inherited from the previous administration.
The last year has been especially difficult. “There was last summer. There was a pandemic. There was a social justice movement. There was a madman in the White House,” Bottoms said, referring to former president Donald Trump and the unrest that engulfed Atlanta and other cities following the killing of George Floyd. “And at every turn, and every opportunity, this city rose above and I am so proud of that.”
Bottoms is one of several Black women who created buzz in political circles for their roles as chiefs of the some of the nation’s largest cities. They have largely been praised for their response to the coronavirus pandemic, which has had a disproportionate impact on Black communities. Bottoms in particular drew attention for clashing with Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp, a Republican, who sought to override her decision to keep Atlanta businesses closed after he lifted state coronavirus restrictions sooner than federal health officials recommended.
But Bottoms and other mayors, including Chicago’s Lori Lightfoot, a Democrat, and District of Columbia Mayor Muriel Bowser, a Democrat, also have been criticized by activists for their resistance to calls to defund their police departments and their responses to ongoing incidences of police using lethal force against Black and Latino residents. They also have faced pressure to address the rise in violent crime in their cities.
Bottoms said there was no single reason for why she decided not to seek a second term. She noted she had already raised more than a half-million dollars for her campaign, and had received private polling that showed her easily ahead in the mayor’s race.
“I can be mayor again,” Bottoms said, but added “just because you can do something, doesn’t mean you should do it.”
But Bottoms referred to “a divine voice inside all of us” that helped her reach her decision.
“This is not something I woke up and decided yesterday,” she said. “This is something I have been thinking about for a very long time.”
Bottoms already had at least one high-profile challenger for the Nov. 2 election – Atlanta City Council President Felicia Moore – and the incumbent mayor’s decision not to seek reelection is likely to attract several more candidates.
Rep. Nikema Williams, D-Ga., chair of the Georgia Democratic Party, thanked Bottoms for her leadership and wished her well “as she finishes out her term.” Williams, in a statement, also said the party looks forward to “engaging with voters throughout Georgia’s capital and electing another strong Democratic mayor for the city of Atlanta come November.”
Bottoms, 51, who was elected mayor of Georgia’s capital in 2017, gained a national profile in the wake of last year’s unrest following Floyd’s murder in police custody in Minneapolis. She was praised for a forceful, personal appeal to protesters, including some who had begun vandalizing property in Atlanta’s downtown. “This is not a protest . . . This is chaos. A protest has purpose.”
Just two weeks after Floyd was killed, Bottoms faced her own police crisis when a White Atlanta police officer fatally shot a 27-year-old Black man, Rayshard Brooks, in the parking lot of a Wendy’s restaurant. The shooting intensified the ongoing protests against racial injustice and sparked widespread community outrage.
Bottoms quickly moved to fire the officer, Garrett Rolfe and accepted the resignation of her police chief. But the decision outraged Atlanta police officers, who said they felt abandoned by city leaders.
On Wednesday, Atlanta’s Civil Service Board reversed the decision and reinstated Rolfe, concluding that city leaders had not afforded him due process. The board’s decision has become fodder for Bottoms’s critics, who said it represented her hasty and inconsistent leadership style.
Bottoms defended her actions on Friday, saying she had to act swiftly last summer to avoid further social unrest.
“I firmly believe it was the right decision,” Bottoms said. “If you go back to last summer and the challenges we were facing in this city . . . I firmly believe if I had not made this decision, that this city would have seen much worse.”
In her remarks Friday, Bottoms vowed to address the spike in crime, which has drawn criticism from her one-time ally, former mayor Kasim Reed. During a recent radio interview, Reed did not mention Bottoms by name, but said the level of crime across the city was “unacceptable.”
Reed’s outspokenness stunned political observers, some of whom saw it as pointed criticism of Bottoms’s leadership. Reed and Bottom had been close politically, with Bottoms serving in Reed’s administration before becoming mayor.
“For Reed to come out as directly as he did about crime and link it to bad choices or inaction by the current mayor, it’s quite incredible,” Michael Leo Owens, an associate professor of political science at Emory University said this week before Bottoms announced her decision.
Reed was scheduled to speak with The Washington Post on Friday afternoon, but abruptly canceled after Bottoms’s decision became public. Some Georgia political observers believe Reed is now considering whether to enter the race.
According to Atlanta police crime statistics, the city has recorded 44 homicides this year, 16 more than at the same point last year. There were a total of 157 homicides in Atlanta last year, which was the city’s deadliest year in more than two decades.
Assaults, burglaries and auto thefts are also up by at least 30 percent compared to this point last year, crime statistics show.
In recent months, perceptions about crime in northern Atlanta neighborhoods have provided momentum for a campaign to allow Buckhead, a tony majority-White commercial corridor, to form its own municipality.
On Friday, Bottoms said fighting crime would remain a chief focus until she leaves office in January.
“We’ve had a very challenging year in this city and we are unfortunately not alone,” Bottoms said. “Across the country. We’ve seen a spike in crime and it has so much to do with people emerging from this pandemic. I will continue to do everything I can do alongside [Police Chief Rodney Bryant] and the other men and women of this city to make sure that this city is safe. And I’m doing that not because I’m mayor, but because I’m a mother in this city. “
But Moore, the city’s council president, had vowed that Bottoms’s record on public safety issues would be a key tenant of this year’s campaign.
In an interview with The Post earlier this week, Moore said Atlanta was facing a “crisis,” and she blamed Bottoms for not doing enough to boost morale among police officers. Moore also suggested that Bottoms had been too focused on presidential politics and Atlanta’s national image instead of working to develop a more effective crime-fighting strategy.
“I think she has done an excellent job of keeping the national profile up for the city of Atlanta,” said Moore, who announced Friday that she has raised $480,000 for her campaign. “I am going to be a mayor who is going to focus on Atlanta, and making sure we keep our city running and operating safe going forward.”
Bottoms, who first announced her decision in a letter late Thursday night, wrote that she is “not yet certain of what the future holds.”
“It is my sincere hope that over the next several months, a candidate for mayor will emerge whom the people of Atlanta may entrust to lead our beloved city to its next and best chapter,” she wrote in the letter.
Deborah Scott, chief executive of Georgia STAND-UP, said she supported “the hard decision” that Bottoms “had the courage to make.”
She also said it was “a tremendous opportunity” for voters to choose a mayor who will be more responsive to the needs of all city residents. “Atlanta is the most unequal city in the country. It’s not always black-and-white here. It’s about resources and who can afford to live in the city,” said Scott, whose nonprofit advocates for and organizes marginalized communities to push for social and economic justice.
Tanya Washington, a professor at Georgia State College of Law who has lived in Atlanta for 18 years, said she thought Bottoms’s speech Friday was honest and poignant. “It took a lot of courage and grace to step out of the race and to do so early enough in the election cycle to give other people who may not have wanted to run against her the opportunity to throw their hat into the ring,” she said.
Now that she doesn’t have to worry about running for reelection, Washington said, Bottoms can more aggressively tackle issues such as affordable housing, reducing homelessness, gentrification and income inequality.
“I look forward to her making good on a lot of promises she made when she came into office because now she’s liberated to do so,” Washington said.
Published : May 08, 2021
By : The Washington Post · Tim Craig, Vanessa Williams
Washingtonian staff goes on publishing strike after CEOs op-ed about remote work
WASHINGTON – Washingtonian magazine staffers launched a day-long protest on Friday in response to an op-ed written by their boss, who warned that continuing to work from home as the pandemic subsides could make employees less valuable and easier to “let go.”
Cathy Merrill, chief executive of the District of Columbia-centered magazine, shared her concerns about the popularity of remote work in a Washington Post op-ed published Thursday, originally titled: “As a CEO, I want my employees to understand the risks of not returning to work in the office.”
Cathy Merrill, CEO of Washingtonian Magazine at the 2019 White House Correspondents’ dinner after party. Photo for The Washington Post by Evelyn Hockstein.
While some employees may want to “work from home and pop in only when necessary” after the pandemic, Merrill argued, the dynamic may create a “strong incentive” for bosses to convert full-time workers into contractors, who get paid by the hour or output and lack benefits such as health-care coverage and retirement accounts.
“Although there might be some pains and anxiety going back into the office, the biggest benefit for workers may be simple job security,” she wrote in her conclusion. “Remember something every manager knows: The hardest people to let go are the ones you know.”
Washingtonian staffers were shocked. Many perceived the op-ed to be directed in part to them – a veiled threat to their jobs.
The magazine’s assistant photo editor, Lauren Bulbin, called the article “truly terrifying.”
“I feel really humiliated,” she said. “Every single person I know in my life read that op-ed and contacted me about it,” she said. “People I respect in the media industry and beyond came to me and were really shocked that this is where I’m working.”
By Friday morning, many of Washingtonian’s editorial staff of about 25 pledged that they wouldn’t publish anything on the magazine’s website or social media channels for the day. More than a dozen tweeted identical messages: “We want our CEO to understand the risks of not valuing our labor” and “we are dismayed by Cathy Merrill’s public threat to our livelihoods.”
Merrill has spent the hours since the op-ed published doing damage control. About 10 minutes before her employees announced their strike on Twitter, she sent them a memo saying she would not change their health-care coverage, retirement plans or status to contractors.
“My intent was to write about how worried I and other CEOs are about preserving the cultures we built up in our offices,” she told employees. “But I understand that some of you have read it as threatening.”
She echoed that sentiment in a Friday email to The Post. “I have assured our team that there will be no changes to benefits or employee status,” Merrill said. “I am sorry if the op-ed made it appear like anything else.” She added that she was proud of her employees’ work during the pandemic and that the company “embraces a culture in which employees are able to express themselves openly.”
But the magazine’s website remained lifeless as of Friday afternoon; the most recent stories were a day old. Those participating in the work-stoppage include senior editors, top food critics and Web producers.
The action was especially notable because Washingtonian staff have no union, which typically affords employees protection for engaging in collective action such as strikes.
“We felt a little bit of trepidation, but we also understood this was a really public, egregious statement,” writer and Web producer Rosa Cartagena said. “We’re trying to use our public platforms to respond publicly as well, and to share how disappointed we feel by seemingly not being valued by the owner.”
Like many other publications, Washingtonian reverted to remote work during the pandemic last spring. Employees there have been told to begin returning to the office over the next several months, with a hard reopening in the fall.
Staffers at Washingtonian said they were struck by Merrill’s argument that remote work makes it harder to give employees feedback and stunts their professional development, especially because the magazine has published some of its most-read online stories during the pandemic, such as food writer Jessica Sidman’s exposé on working at the Trump International Hotel restaurant.
Merrill has written several essays for The Washington Post’s editorial page, which operates independently from reporters in the newsroom. In March last year, she called the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommendation to halt gatherings for several weeks “a death sentence for small businesses.”
In Thursday’s op-ed, Merrill wrote that she had discussed the downsides of remote work with fellow chief executives and estimated that unofficial office duties such as “helping a colleague, mentoring more junior people, celebrating someone’s birthday – things that drive office culture” made up 20 percent of their work.
“If the employee is rarely around to participate in those extras, management has a strong incentive to change their status to ‘contractor,'” she wrote. “Instead of receiving a set salary, contractors are paid only for the work they do, either hourly or by appropriate output metrics.” She added that would also mean not having to pay for health-care coverage, retirement savings, bonuses and parking.
The op-ed attracted national attention on Thursday night as several prominent journalists tweeted criticisms. By midmorning Friday, The Post had changed the headline on the op-ed to “As a CEO, I worry about the erosion of office culture with more remote work,” removing the language that directed the message at Merrill’s employees.
Washington Post editorial page editor Fred Hiatt said he asked the headline to be changed early on Friday, before he knew about the strike, “to something that I thought better captured the piece.”
Remote work has been popular throughout the pandemic, according to Gallup. A January poll found that nearly half of those surveyed said they would keep working remotely after restrictions lift simply because they preferred it, and 17 percent would still want to stay out of the office because of coronavirus concerns. Only 39 percent said they would want to return to the office.
Other media organizations plan to begin reopening their offices in the coming months. The Washington Post will bring back a limited number of employees back July 6, with a full return anticipated in the fall. The New York Times headquarters will reopen in September, with bosses exploring a “long-term vision for remote working.” CNN doesn’t plan a full return until after the summer.
Nationals flip the power on, blast four homers in 11-4 rout of the Yankees
NEW YORK – Before Friday night, with a month of baseball in the books, the Washington Nationals were perhaps the last team to choose in a home run-hitting contest. That logic cut both ways. Their pitchers had allowed homers at a higher rate than any staff in the league.
Their batters left the park more often than just five other clubs.
But then the Nationals outslugged the New York Yankees – a group known for slugging – in a series-opening 11-4 win in the Bronx. Josh Bell, Yan Gomes, Josh Harrison and Juan Soto went deep, in that order, accounting for eight runs. Harrison’s homer charged a six-run eighth that was helped along by three errors by the Yankees. He hopped out of the box, aware he had scorched Jonathan Loáisiga’s fastball, before trotting home behind Victor Robles (who’d reached on a wide throw by DJ LeMahieu) and Trea Turner (who’d poked a go-ahead RBI single).
Washington’s power stood up to two solo shots from LeMahieu and another by Gary Sánchez, all off starter Patrick Corbin. It was an odd way for the Nationals (13-15) to snap a three-game losing streak, especially since they hit only two homers in 27 innings while being swept by the Atlanta Braves this week.
Soto made his first start since returning from the injured list Tuesday, plugged in as the Nationals’ designated hitter. He’s not yet cleared to play right field because he hasn’t consistently thrown at full strength. But Manager Dave Martinez was relieved to get Soto, the club’s best hitter, more than a single pinch-hit appearance. Soto finished with a groundout, two strikeouts looking, a single in the eighth and a two-run homer to left-center off Luis Cessa in the ninth.
But in a twist, after weeks of searching for a burst of power, the early pop was provided by Soto’s teammates. Bell erased LeMahieu’s first homer with a solo shot off Yankees starter Jameson Taillon in the second. Taillon tested Bell with a high four-seam fastball. Bell lifted it 432 feet to center. Gomes then pushed Washington ahead with a two-run blast to left, his fourth of the season and third of the past week – showing that his bat picks up when playing most days. And his next task was helping Corbin hold down the Yankees (16-16).
For the most part, the pair was able to. A handful of hard-hit balls found the Nationals’ defense. Corbin retired eight straight between the third and sixth before . LeMahieu, though, tagged Corbin with his second homer to start the sixth, also going to the short porch in right. Through six innings, the teams combined for six total hits and five homers. The only other knock was LeMahieu’s one-out single off Corbin in the third.
The surprise, then, was that the Nationals were hanging in this type of game. Their hitters had produced a homer in less than 3 percent of at-bats, a rate that put them in the bottom third of the league. Their pitchers, by contrast, entered with MLB’s worst home run rate for starters and relievers (4.3 percent of all batters faced had put the ball in the seats). On Friday afternoon, with Giancarlo Stanton and Aaron Judge looming in the Yankees’ order, Martinez recognized his staff’s inability to keep hits in the yard. Then Corbin and Tanner Rainey left Stanton and Judge hitless in eight at-bats.
“With the way these guys swing the bats, you’ve got to hit your spots, and you’ve got to get ahead,” Martinez said of the Yankees. “You’ve got to really focus on getting ahead of these hitters. Because all the way down that lineup, these guys can hit the ball a long way.”
The count was even, 1-1, on LeMahieu’s homer in the first. With the next two, Corbin was actually ahead. Of the three critical pitches, only the third – the one resulting in LeMahieu’s second homer of the night – was well inside the strike zone. Otherwise, Corbin was beat even when he was hitting his spots.
But the box score doesn’t recognize those details. It just read 3-3 as the seventh passed without a run. Then it read 7-3, the Nationals leading, once Harrison’s homer flew over the left field fence. That ticked to 8-3 after Kyle Schwarber singled in Soto. It ticked to 9-3 because Gomes’s grounder rolled below shortstop Gleyber Torres’s glove. By the time Soto’s blast left the park in the ninth it was a tried-and-true blowout.
Florida man tried to track his robbery victim by attaching an iPhone to his car, police say
Hed been at the Millenia Mall in Orlando, Fla., for less than an hour when he allegedly zeroed in on the shopper with the bags from Gucci and Louis Vuitton. Now Derrick Maurice Herlong followed closely behind as the man he was planning to rob loaded his purchases into the trunk of a silver Lexus and drove toward downtown, police said.
At some point, the man stopped at a 7-Eleven. That’s when, according to a chain of events described in an arrest affidavit, Herlong and an accomplice took an extraordinary step to make sure they didn’t lose him: They attached a homemade tracking device – an iPhone rigged with magnets – to the bottom of the man’s car.
Minutes later, the pair cornered the man as he entered a gathering at a nearby apartment, robbing him at gunpoint, stealing his car and fatally shooting another man, 32-year-old Jacaris Rozier, according to police.
Orlando police documents released Thursday detail how investigators identified Herlong, 37, as the suspect in the Feb. 19 killing of Rozier. Herlong has pleaded not guilty to murder, home invasion, carjacking and grand theft, records show. His defense attorney declined to comment on the charges Friday.
The documents, first reported by Orlando’s News 6, also offer a window into the highly unusual method Herlong is said to have used to surveil his victim and are bound to raise some concerns for the privacy-conscious.
According to the arrest warrant, Herlong laid the groundwork for his alleged crimes weeks earlier at a Panda Express restaurant in another part of town. Investigators said he stole a purse and wallet from a worker there in late January, then used her identification to buy the iPhone at a Metro PCS store.
On Feb. 18, Herlong or someone associated with him activated the phone using an iCloud account in the restaurant worker’s name, according to the affidavit. Investigators said they confirmed the timeline using surveillance footage, receipts and interviews. They also said they found Herlong’s number in the device.
The following day, Herlong staked out the victim at the Millenia Mall, according to police, who said surveillance footage showed him with two accomplices, neither of whom was identified.
When homicide detectives canvassed the shooting scene in the city’s Thornton Park neighborhood, they found the victim’s Lexus nearby. As the vehicle was being loaded onto a tow truck, the truck’s driver noticed a small nylon bag hanging from the undercarriage, police said.
The affidavit described the contents: “Attached to the bag were two magnets. Inside the bag was an Apple IPhone set to ‘do not disturb’ and wrapped in a sealed Ziploc bag. The phone’s battery was close to or at full charge, indicating it had been placed there recently.”
Within a week, investigators linked the iPhone to Herlong, according to the affidavit.
The suspects “targeted [the victim] for a robbery due to his purchases of high end, expensive items,” police said in the affidavit. “They could be seen making overt efforts to follow [the victim] away from the mall as they tried to find a suitable location to commit the robbery.”
“In an additional effort to ensure they did not lose their quarry, the group used a new Apple IPhone, as an improvised vehicle tracker, placing it on vehicle at an opportune time,” police said. They added that only someone with access to the iCloud account created in the restaurant worker’s name would be able to track the phone.
A search of Herlong’s apartment in the city’s southwest turned up several bags and articles of clothing from Gucci and Louis Vuitton, along with a Metro PCS receipt bearing the restaurant worker’s name and boxes for the phone, according to police. They also found during a search of his Mercedes SUV an assault-style rifle that matched the description of the weapon used in the shooting, the affidavit says.
Officers also found more than a dozen cellphones on the property, including multiple Androids and prepaid Tracfones, records show.
Turning an iPhone into an improvised tracking device is relatively simple – a quick Google search turns up many tutorials on how to do it. It’s illegal to spy on a person with a GPS phone without their consent, but there are legitimate reasons for using the devices, such as tracking personal belongings.
Private investigators sometimes use prepaid phones and other devices to monitor suspected cheating spouses, operating in a legal gray area in which they try to skirt laws against nonconsensual GPS tracking. Domestic abusers also sometimes monitor their partners’ devices to keep track of their whereabouts.
But Bill Marczak, an expert in surveillance at the University of California at Berkeley, said he was unfamiliar with any cases involving a suspect using a cellphone to track a victim. It may not even be that efficient, he said.
“Haven’t heard of this modality of ‘planting a cell phone on someone’ being used by criminals before,” he said in an email. “I don’t immediately see why someone would prefer to plant an iPhone rather than a purpose-built GPS tracker (which would be cheaper, and have much longer battery life than the iPhone).”
Herlong’s next scheduled court appearance is a pretrial hearing on Oct. 26. He could face 25 years or more in prison if convicted on the second degree murder charge.
และก็เป็นไปตามที่ไซรัสคาดการณ์ไว้ เพราะไม่เพียงแต่อินเดียเท่านั้นที่ต้องการวัคซีนจาก Serum Institute of India (SII) แต่ประชากรในแถบประเทศแอฟริกาก็ต้องการซื้อวัคซีนของ ไซรัส ซึ่งมีหลากหลายประเภท เช่น วัคซีนป้องกันบาดทะยัก วัคซีนแก้พิษงู และวัคซีนโรคคอตีบ
คืนวันเสาร์นี้เวลา 23.30 น.ตามเวลาท้องถิ่น ซึ่งตรงกับ 10.30 น.ตามเวลาไทย อีลอน มัสก์ มหาเศรษฐีชื่อดังเจ้าของบริษัทรถยนต์ Tesla จะปรากฏตัวใน Saturday Night Live รายการคอเมดีและวาไรตีโชว์ยอดฮิตของสหรัฐ
เมื่อสัปดาห์ที่แล้วมัสก์ทวีตบอกใบ้ว่าจะร่วมรายการนี้ว่า “The Dogefather SNL May 8” ซึ่งตีความกันว่าเป็นการล้อกับภาพยนตร์ชื่อดังอย่าง The Godfather
Pfizer เผยมีแต่ประเทศร่ำรวยเท่านั้นที่สั่งวัคซีน Pfizer ส่วนประเทศยากจนไม่สั่ง แม้บริษัทพยายามติดต่อแล้ว
องค์การอนามัยโลกอนุมัติให้ใช้วัคซีน Sinopharm ของจีนเป็นกรณีฉุกเฉิน
ยารักษาโรคเป็นหนึ่งในปัจจัย 4 ที่มนุษย์ขาดไม่ได้ ยิ่งหากเป็นวัคซีนต้านโรคด้วยแล้ว ยิ่งเป็นยอดปรารถนาของผู้คนที่ไม่ต้องการให้ตัวเองต้องทนทุกข์จากการเจ็บไข้ได้ป่วย
นักลงทุนลุ้นการปรากฏตัวของ อีลอน มัสก์ ในรายการตลก SNL คืนวันเสาร์นี้ดันราคา Dogecoin ให้พุ่งอีกครั้ง
วิกฤตขาดแคลนชิปที่ยังไม่ดีขึ้นบีบบังคับให้ผู้ผลิตรถยนต์ตัดฟีเจอร์ล้ำๆ ออกเพื่อให้การผลิตเดินหน้าได้ 
รัสเซียประกาศทดสอบซูเปอร์นิวเคลียร์อานุภาพร้ายแรงถล่มรัฐเท็กซัสได้ทั้งรัฐ
