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https://www.nationthailand.com/news/30404744

Medical examiner says police restraint, neck compression ‘more than Mr. Floyd could take’

InternationalApr 10. 2021Hennepin County Medical Examiner Andrew Baker

By The Washington Post · Holly Bailey, Mark Berman, Lenny Bernstein

MINNEAPOLIS – The medical examiner who performed George Floyd’s autopsy testified Friday that the pressure police applied to the Black man’s neck and back while he was pinned to the ground proved more than his already stressed heart could withstand.

Hennepin County Medical Examiner Andrew Baker testified that Floyd’s coronary arteries were narrowed, indicating “very severe underlying heart disease.” Floyd also had “hypertensive heart disease, meaning his heart weighed more than it should,” Baker said.

“Now, in the context of an altercation with other people, that involves things like physical restraint, that involves things like being held to the ground,” Baker testified. “Those events are going to cause stress hormones to pour out into your body, specifically things like adrenaline. And what that adrenaline is going to do is it’s going to ask your heart to beat faster. It’s going to ask your body for more oxygen so that you can get through that altercation.

“And in my opinion, the law enforcement subdual restraint and the neck compression was just more than Mr. Floyd could take by virtue of those heart conditions,” said Baker, who ruled Floyd’s death a homicide.

Former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin was charged with murder after video showed him, at the time serving on the Minneapolis force, with his knee on Floyd’s neck for nine minutes and 29 seconds. Chauvin’s defense has argued that Floyd died because of his compromised health and drug use, not Chauvin’s knee on his neck, making his cause of death a central question in the case.

Testifying Friday, Baker rebutted a core part of that argument. His autopsy report last year noted that heart disease as well as fentanyl and methamphetamine use were all noted in Floyd at his autopsy. Baker testified Friday that these were “not direct causes” but “contributing causes” to Floyd’s death.

“I would still classify it as a homicide today,” Baker said.

Baker’s remarks capped an arduous second week of testimony in the case, which began with several Minneapolis police officers taking the stand to rebuke their former colleague and ended with medical experts who have conducted thousands of autopsies placing the blame for Floyd’s death on the police.

The week was bookended by two of the most widely anticipated individual testimonies, those of Baker and the police chief who fired Chauvin.

Using those men’s accounts, prosecutors sought to push against what may be Chauvin’s two primary defenses in the case: that he was following his training and that Floyd’s death could be blamed on causes other than the actions of the former officer.

Chauvin’s defense is expected to begin fully making its case next week, calling its own witnesses and seeking to sway jurors before they are sequestered to begin deliberations. Chauvin is charged with second-degree murder, third-degree murder and second-degree manslaughter.

Baker’s testimony also offered a reminder that Chauvin’s legal jeopardy may not end when the jury here renders a verdict. Baker said he has twice testified before a federal grand jury investigating Floyd’s death.

A person close to the case said a federal civil rights investigation into Floyd’s death is looking at Chauvin as well as the other officers at the scene on May 25, 2020. Those officers – Alexander Kueng, Thomas Lane and Tou Thao – also were fired and are to stand trial this summer on charges of aiding and abetting murder.

Baker testified that he conducted Floyd’s autopsy the day after his death. He said that to avoid influencing his finding, he had specifically chosen not to watch the viral video of Floyd struggling under Chauvin’s knee until after he had completed the autopsy.

Baker declared Floyd’s death a homicide in June, deeming the cause of death to be “cardiopulmonary arrest complicating law enforcement subdual, restraint, and neck compression.” Baker explained that “complicating” means it occurred in the presence of.

Baker’s report also noted heart disease, fentanyl use, methamphetamine use and Floyd’s recent coronavirus infection as significant conditions.

Chauvin’s defense has argued that the death of Floyd should be blamed on drug his use and his health problems. In a filing last year, they wrote that Floyd “most likely died from an opioid overdose.”

Medical experts disputed that idea, particularly the suggestion that Floyd died of a fentanyl overdose, describing his actions in the widely seen video as incompatible with the opioid’s effects.

Also Friday, Lindsey Thomas, a consulting forensic pathologist testified that in her view, “the activities of the law enforcement officers resulted in Mr. Floyd’s death.”

Thomas, an unpaid expert witness for the prosecution, said that on the basis of the video she reviewed, Floyd’s death was “not a sudden death,” nor was it “the type of death that has been reported in fentanyl overdose” cases.

Fentanyl-related deaths, she said, tend to be “peaceful” and not involve struggles like those seen in the viral video of Floyd’s encounter with police.

“There’s no evidence to suggest he would have died that night except for the interactions with law enforcement,” Thomas said.

During Thomas’s testimony, color photographs from Floyd’s autopsy were distributed to the jurors and others in the courtroom for review, presumably to avoid having the graphic images projected on a large screen visible to people watching the live stream of the proceedings. The photos included close-ups of Floyd’s face, shoulders and hands, showing scrapes and abrasions.

The photos were distributed again when Baker was on the stand. Chauvin placed the images on his lap, looking at them under the table and showing no visible reaction.

Friday’s testimony unfolded with a new visitor to the courtroom. For the first time since the trial began last month, someone sat in a seat reserved for a member of Chauvin’s family.

The courtroom’s occupancy is limited because of the coronavirus, with one seat reserved for Floyd’s family and one for Chauvin’s. An unidentified woman occupied the Chauvin seat Friday.

At various points during the day, the seat reserved for Floyd’s family was filled by his brothers Rodney and Philonise. A Hennepin County deputy sat in a chair between the seats reserved for the two families.

Baker’s appearance was seen as key to countering the defense’s attempts to break what legal experts call the “chain of causation” connecting Chauvin’s use of force and Floyd’s death.

During his testimony, Baker reiterated what court filings say he has expressed before: that if Floyd were found dead at home, with no other factors and that amount of fentanyl in his system, the death could have been deemed an overdose.

But Baker also noted in his testimony that Floyd was not found in those circumstances.

“Mr. Floyd’s use of fentanyl did not cause the subdural or neck restraint. His heart disease did not cause the subdural or the neck restraint,” Baker said.

Baker also listed several other factors he said did not cause Floyd’s death, including the coronavirus, for which Floyd had tested positive several weeks before dying, and a tumor discovered in his stomach during the autopsy.

Eric Nelson, Chauvin’s attorney, asked whether the placement of his client’s knee would have “anatomically cut off” Floyd’s airway. Baker responded, “In my opinion, it would not.”

At one point, Baker discussed a video call he had with law enforcement officials from the Justice Department, recounting that he told them: “It was the stress of that interaction [with police] that tipped him over the edge.”

Legal experts said the defense’s invocation of Floyd’s drug use fits a pattern seen in other prosecutions of police, in which officers’ attorneys will point to drug use or other perceived issues in the backgrounds of the person who died.

The prosecution sought preemptively to rebut the defense’s argument by calling Floyd’s girlfriend, Courteney Ross, to the stand last week to testify about their struggles with opioid addiction and to make clear his tolerance for the drugs.

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https://www.nationthailand.com/news/30404743

White House border czar to step down this month

InternationalApr 10. 2021Roberta Jacobson

By The Washington Post · Anne Gearan, Nick Miroff, Karen DeYoung

WASHINGTON – The top White House official leading efforts to address the migrant crisis at the U.S.-Mexico border will leave her post at the end of April, the White House announced Friday, stepping down as the administration continues struggling to cope with an influx of unaccompanied minors.

Roberta Jacobson, a former ambassador to Mexico and career State Department official, had been tasked with coordinating the Biden administration’s efforts, a broad and daunting task that led some to call her President Joe Biden’s “border czar.”

Vice President Kamala Harris was recently assigned to oversee the part of Jacobson’s portfolio involving diplomatic outreach to the Central American nations that are home to most of the migrants.

It’s not clear whether that was a factor in Jacobson’s departure, but both U.S. and Latin American officials said that Jacobson had always planned to stay only briefly.

Jacobson, in an interview, expressed dismay over media reports that she had acted in response to Biden’s giving Harris the lead role on the overall border and regional issue.

“I always was only going to stay 100 days,” she said, and had filled a need during the early days when there were relatively few confirmed officials.

“They knew they were going to have to talk to the Mexican government early,” as first-day executive orders on immigration were implemented, and there “were not other people appointed at other agencies,” including the secretary of state, Jacobson said.

Now, she added, “I think it is in quite good shape in terms of policy outlines.”

Jacobson also was a senior member of the Biden transition team focusing on the State Department, and she was working border issues starting right after the election.

National security adviser Jake Sullivan said in a statement that Jacobson’s tenure was long planned to cover only the administration’s first 100 days. He thanked her for “an invaluable contribution to the Biden-Harris Administration and to the United States.”

Sullivan credited Jacobson with “having shaped our relationship with Mexico as an equal partner, having launched our renewed efforts with the Northern Triangle nations of El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras, and having underscored this Administration’s commitment to re-energizing the U.S. immigration system.”

Still, her departure is striking, coming as the Biden administration is struggling to address a surge of would-be migrants to the border, drawn in part by President Biden’s more lenient immigration policy, and amid heavy Republican criticism of the administration’s approach. The administration has wrestled in particular with how to handle a large number of unaccompanied children who are showing up at the border.

The number of unaccompanied minors crossing into the United States began rising last fall, as former president Donald Trump’s tenure was coming to a close. They soared after Biden took office and his administration announced that it would not use a Trump-era public health order to return the unaccompanied teens and children to their home countries.

Last month, border authorities took 18,890 minors into custody, up from 5,858 in January.

March was the busiest month along the U.S.-Mexico border in nearly two decades, and U.S. authorities took 172,331 migrants into custody, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection statistics released Thursday that provide a stark measure of the challenges facing the Biden administration.

White House press secretary Jen Psaki was asked earlier Friday whether the rising numbers might cause the administration to again evict and turn back children under Trump’s public health order.

“The reason for accepting these children is that we feel it is not the humane step to send these kids back on their treacherous journey,” Psaki said. “Our focus is on addressing the needs, opening up shelters, ensuring there is access to health and educational resources, expediting processing at the border. And those are the steps we feel that are most effective from a policy standpoint.”

Jacobson spoke to reporters at the White House last month and acknowledged the significant challenge of addressing the flow of families and unaccompanied children.

“President Biden has made clear from day one that he wants to change our immigration system,” she said then. “Doing so means truly building back better, because we can’t just undo four years of the previous administration’s actions overnight.”

She and other Biden officials have sharply blamed the Trump administration for its hostility to migrants, saying they damaged the system in ways that take time to fix.

“Those actions didn’t just neglect our immigration system; they intentionally made it worse,” Jacobson said. “When you add a pandemic to that, it’s clear it will take significant time to overcome.”

She said then “the border is not open” and spoke at length in Spanish to urge would-be migrants not to make a dangerous trip with little likelihood of successful entry.

But Republican and some Democratic critics say Biden’s own policies have created the problem, and GOP lawmakers have held events at the border to make their point.

Jacobson came out of retirement to join the Biden administration as a “border coordinator” who could leverage her experience and extensive contacts in Mexico.

As border crossings jumped in the weeks after Biden’s inauguration, Jacobson took the lead in negotiations with Mexico and in the U.S. efforts to get the government of Andrés Manuel López Obrador to tighten immigration enforcement.

Last month Mexican authorities deployed more national guard troops and other security forces along the country’s southern border with Guatemala, the result of a negotiation in which the Biden administration agreed to send millions of surplus coronavirus vaccines made by AstraZeneca. Jacobson played a lead role in the talks, which officials in both countries insisted did not amount to a quid pro quo.

The number of migrants taken into custody by U.S. border agents is the highest level in nearly 20 years, including record numbers of teenagers and children arriving without parents. The Biden administration has responded by adding thousands of emergency shelter beds for the minors, while pledging to redouble efforts to address the “root causes” driving Central Americans to head north.

Jacobson issued one of the strongest statements by any Biden official last month, when asked about the administration’s message to asylum seekers.

“The message isn’t, ‘Don’t come now.’ It’s, ‘Don’t come in this way, ever,’ ” she told Reuters in an interview. “The way to come to the United States is through legal pathways.”

Biden has pledged to try to stem the flow of migrants at the source by helping create stability and economic opportunity in Central America and Mexico. That longer-term effort is now Harris’s remit, and she distinguishes her role from that of Jacobson and other officials dealing with the more immediate humanitarian and logistical crises facing migrants who have made their way to the border.

Earl Anthony Wayne, who served as U.S. ambassador to Mexico until 2017, called Jacobson “one of the United States’ most experienced experts on Mexico.”

“She has a range of contacts there and a deep understanding of Mexican politics,” said Wayne. “Those are valuable assets to have at this time, so it will be important for the administration to find someone who can bring the expertise and skills that she has demonstrated over her years of service.”

The Biden administration appears to be spending at least $60 million per week to care for the more than 16,000 migrant teenagers and children in shelters operated by the Department of Health and Human Services, The Washington Post reported Thursday.

Those costs are expected to rise significantly over the coming months, according to an analysis of government data obtained by The Post.

With a record number of unaccompanied minors arriving at the border in the past several weeks, HHS quickly filled the 7,700 available beds in its network of permanent shelters, and the administration has raced to set up some 16,000 temporary beds at military bases and other facilities.

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https://www.nationthailand.com/news/30404742

Migrant boy found wandering alone in Texas had been deported and kidnapped

InternationalApr 10. 2021

By The Washington Post · Kevin Sieff, Ismael López Ocampo

The 10-year-old had been lost for hours – crying and shaking as he wandered a vast scrubland- when he saw the Border Patrol officer.

“Can you help me?” the boy asked between sniffles.

The agent recorded the interaction, which was widely shared on the Internet, seen by many as a glimpse into the desperation of unaccompanied children arriving at the U.S.-Mexico border.

But the story behind the video of Wilton Obregon, according to relatives, shows how the Biden administration is putting migrant families in even more peril after they cross the border, in some cases deporting them into the hands of criminal groups.

Wilton and his mother Meylin, 30, crossed the border into Texas last month to seek asylum after fleeing their native Nicaragua. But they were immediately sent back to Mexico under Title 42, a pandemic-era policy that expels migrants who cross the border without allowing to apply for protection.

Hours after being expelled to northern Mexico, they were kidnapped, according to Misael Obregon, Meylin’s brother, who lives in Miami.

Misael received a call from the kidnappers. They wanted $10,000 to release Meylin and Wilton.

“They threaten to hurt them both, or worse,” Misael Obregon said. “These people are capable of anything.”

Misael could only come up with $5,000. He sent the cash through a money transfer company. The kidnappers agreed to release Wilton, but not his mother.

The smugglers then abandoned Wilton after leading him across the border, leaving him to wander through the arid farmland of South Texas looking for assistance, until he found the Border Patrol agent who recorded his encounter with the boy.

“I came looking because I didn’t know where to go, and they can also rob or kidnap me or something,” he told the agent.

Meylin remains in the custody of kidnappers. She called Misael Obregon on Friday morning, crying after seeing the video of her bleary-eyed son.

“Now I’m worried that she’s going to die,” said Obregon, “that she’s not going to make it through this.”

The Nicaraguan government on Friday identified Wilton as being the boy in the video, but it did not mention the kidnapping. It said Nicaraguan police had interviewed the boy’s father, who confirmed that Meylin had told him in their last conversation that she and Wilton were preparing to cross the border together because they were “in danger.”

In a speech, the vice president of Nicaragua, Rosario Murillo, said she had called on Interpol to locate the boy and his mother.

“Our national police, our Ministry of the Interior, have made, and continue to make inquiries to the United States authorities, Mexican authorities to obtain information that lead us to locate Meylin and the child,” she said.

Wilton is currently in U.S. government custody according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection.

The video of the boy was raised at a White House news conference this week. “I don’t have any response from the president directly. What I can convey is, for any of us who have seen that video, it is heartbreaking,” said press secretary Jen Psaki.

Relatives say the boy and his mother were in part fleeing domestic violence in Nicaragua.

Thirty-three percent of families who crossed the border last month were expelled to Mexico, according to CBP statistics.

Biden had long complained about the humanitarian consequences of the Trump administration’s so-called Remain in Mexico policy, which forced asylum seekers to wait for the their court hearings in Mexico. Many of them were kidnapped and abused during their months waiting.

Under Title 42, though, which began under Trump and continues under Biden, asylum seekers are once again in the same desperate situation. It’s unclear how many of them have been kidnapped.

“The Biden administration is winding down one of the Trump administration’s most notorious policies but at the same time it is expelling other asylum seekers back to the very same dangers, attacks and kidnappings through its continued use of the Trump administration’s Title 42 policy to evade U.S. refugee law,” Eleanor Acer, senior director of refugee protection at Human Rights First, said in a statement.

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YouTube pulls video of DeSantis panel discussion urging no masks for children

InternationalApr 10. 2021Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis

By The Washington Post · Meryl Kornfield

YouTube has pulled a video featuring Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican, over allegations it contains misinformation about the coronavirus and mask-wearing.

The video is of a March 18 roundtable discussion in Tallahassee the governor hosted with panelists – radiologist and former White House adviser Scott Atlas, Harvard University biostatistician Martin Kulldorff, Oxford University epidemiologist Sunetra Gupta, and Stanford Medical School economist Jay Bhattacharya – who have publicly spoken against lockdowns and other measures enacted to reduce the spread of the virus. The video shared by news station WSTB Tampa Bay was taken down Wednesday because it violated a policy related to “COVID-19 medical misinformation,” according to platform spokeswoman Elena Hernandez.

“We removed this video because it included content that contradicts the consensus of local and global health authorities regarding the efficacy of masks to prevent the spread of COVID-19,” Hernandez wrote in a statement shared with The Washington Post.

At one point during the hour-and-45-minute discussion, DeSantis asks panelists about enforcing mask-wearing for children, which the scientists dispute is effective to prevent the spread of the virus, despite recommendations from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the World Health Organization that children wear masks. The CDC advises mask-wearing for children 2 and up, and the WHO recommends masks for children 12 and above.

“Children should not wear face masks,” Kulldorff said in response to DeSantis’s question. “They don’t need it for their own protection, and they don’t need it for protecting other people either.”

“I think it’s developmentally inappropriate and it just doesn’t help on the disease spread,” Bhattacharya added about mask-wearing for children. “I think it’s absolutely not the right thing to do.”

In a statement shared with The Washington Post on Friday, DeSantis’s spokesman Cody McCloud called the video’s removal “another blatant example of Big Tech attempting to silence those who disagree with their woke corporate agenda,” arguing that the panelists’ academic affiliations qualify them to speak about the crisis.

“Good public health policy should include a variety of scientific and technical expertise, and YouTube’s decision to remove this video suppresses productive dialogue of these complex issues,” McCloud wrote.

After social media platforms were blamed for allowing misinformation to fester amid the 2016 election, the tech giants have cracked down on falsehoods about the coronavirus pandemic, fueling calls for stricter regulations of these companies from conservatives, including DeSantis, who view the scrutiny as overreaching. A video of Atlas was removed by the platform before while he was an adviser to former president Donald Trump, prompting him to compare his plight to those who live in “Third World countries.”

Reactions from Florida politicians largely split along party lines. The state’s top elected Democrat, Agriculture and Consumer Services Commissioner Nikki Fried, tweeted “we should find a governor who doesn’t get banned from @YouTube for endangering children with conspiracies.” Sen. Marco Rubio warned of “unelected gatekeepers of the public square.”

The removal of the video was first reported by the American Institute for Economic Research, the libertarian think tank behind the Great Barrington Declaration, a controversial letter co-signed by three of the panelists that endorses herd immunity. Although the online document claimed that thousands of doctors and scientists had signed it, Britain’s Sky News documented some transparently fake signatories, including “Dr. Person Fakename.”

Despite YouTube’s decision to yank the video, the discussion can still be viewed on Florida Channel, a state-funded live-streaming service.

One of the panelists, Bhattacharya, told The Post that he thought YouTube’s decision was “censorship” and “contrary to American democratic norms of free expression.”

In an email, Bhattacharya wrote that he viewed the discussion as a “policy forum” and raised objections to mask-wearing based on evidence that masks could hinder a child’s ability to learn and interact with others.

The other panelists did not immediately respond to a request for comment Friday evening, but Kulldorff tweeted a link to a Wall Street Journal editorial, which decried the removal, saying it “should not matter” if the information panelists were presenting was false because the discussion “offers a window into the thinking of the Governor and people who influence him.”

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https://www.nationthailand.com/news/30404726

Britain’s Prince Philip, husband of Queen Elizabeth II, dies aged 99

InternationalApr 09. 2021Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip

By The Nation

Prince Philip, the husband of Britain’s Queen Elizabeth II, died aged 99 on Friday morning, according to a statement by the UK monarchy.

“It is with deep sorrow that Her Majesty The Queen announces the death of her beloved husband, His Royal Highness The Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh,” said the statement, published on the UK royals official website.

“His Royal Highness passed away peacefully this morning at Windsor Castle,” it added, referring to the castle located 37 kilometres east of London in the county of Berkshire.

“The Royal Family join with people around the world in mourning his loss,” continued the statement, adding that further announcements would be made in due course.

A Greek prince, the Duke of Edinburgh married Elizabeth in 1947 and remained by his wife’s side throughout her 69-year reign. He earned a reputation for speaking his mind, at the cost of occasional high-profile gaffes. He is also credited with helping modernise the British monarchy in the era after World War II.