United States – Page 13

Racial tensions flare after police killings in US

The murders of two New York City officers ambushed in their car in Brooklyn by a man claiming to be retaliating for police killings of unarmed black men prompted calls to tamp down racial tensions.

The ambush of Officers Rafael Ramos, 40, and Wenjian Liu, 32, followed online postings by the man, identified by police as Ismaaiyl Brinsley, referring to the deaths of Eric Garner of Staten Island and Michael Brown of Missouri. In both cases, grand juries declined to charge police with wrongdoing, prompting nationwide protests.

The two officers probably never even saw Brinsely before he shot them from behind. One local who walked up to the crime scene later said that “a lot of people were clapping and laughing,” saying “serves them right.”

A fugitive trying to evade an arrest warrant shot a third white Tampa-area police officer and then ran him over early Sunday, killing the officer, police said.

The black fugitive crashed his car into a pole and another vehicle after running over Tarpon Springs officer Charles Kondek. He was arrested on suspicion of first-degree murder.

The shooting did not appear to have any connection to the ambush killings of two New York police officers a day earlier.

Condek, 45, had been with the local force for 17 years. Originally from New York, Kondek previously served on the New York City Police Department for more than five years, authorities said.

Kondek was the father of six children.

#BlackLivesMatter storm Mall of America

On one of the busiest shopping days of the year, thousands of #BlackLivesMatter protesters packed the Mall of America outside Minneapolis on Saturday to call for police reform in the wake of the officer-involved deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner.

“I’m getting my feelings out and I’m letting the world know that we’re not going to take this anymore,” Emma Eubanks, a 18-year-old protester told Fusion just before the event began.

Upon hearing the news that two police officers had been killed in New York by a fugitive gunman, Eubanks (who is the subject of the video above), said she “didn’t condone violence” and that her heart was with the families of the slain officers. She worried that the killings could “provoke a wave of anger and hate” against black activists and those pushing for police reforms.

The mall had sent a letter to organizers warning that anyone protesting in in the mall could be “removed, arrested and banned.” As demonstrators gathered near the rotunda, an electronic billboard flanked by large Christmas trees switched from holiday shopping themed messages to an ominous warning, written in all-caps.

Protesters ignored the sign, and chants of “hands up, don’t shoot” drowned out police calls to disperse.

They held “die-ins,” laying down in front of stores when police approached.

Later, the protests broke up into smaller groups and marched through the mall.

Police blocked off certain areas, but avoided mass arrests.

Michael McDowell, a 20-year-old protester from Minneapolis told Fusion the protesters selected the Mall of America because “if we’re spending our dollar…they should step up.”

He and other organizers want said they were pushing for more direct community control over police departments.

“We want to make sure that there’s some solid policy around community control over police,” he said, “so community deciding what cops get hired in their communities and essentially making sure that the cops that get hired are from the community.”

Organizers said 20 people were arrested and cited with trespassing. Fusion saw what appeared to be a couple of handcuffed protesters being walked out the building by police.

Minnesotans weren’t the only ones to stage protests on Saturday. Protesters staged a die-in in Park City, Utah, and Baltimore, as well.

Source: fusion.net

No more US sanctions for Cuba

White House says measures will “end our outdated approach,” promote change in Cuba consistent “with US national security interests”

Oddly, during a week when President Obama prepares to launch new sanctions against Venezuela and Russia, The White House admits that sanctions do not work.

“It is clear that decades of US isolation of Cuba have failed to accomplish our enduring objective of promoting the emergence of a democratic, prosperous, and stable Cuba,” the Obama administration declared.

Diplomatic relations between the United States and Cuba were severed in January 1961 after the rise of Fidel Castro and his Communist government.

Obama has now instructed Secretary of State John Kerry to immediately initiate discussions with Cuba about reestablishing diplomatic relations and to begin the process of removing Cuba from the list of states that sponsor terrorism, which it has been on since 1982, the White House said.

In coming months, the US “will re-establish an embassy in Havana and carry out high-level exchanges and visits between our two governments as part of the normalization process”.

The US will thus lift sanctions on Cuban nationals outside Cuba.

The initial step will involve US-Cuba Migration Talks in January after which institutions will be allowed to open accounts at Cuban financial institutions for authorized transactions and US credit, debit cards permitted for use by travelers to Cuba.

But in 2010, the same Obama administration warned the world against Cuba:

Recent events in Cuba, including the tragic death of Orlando Zapata Tamayo, the repression visited upon Las Damas de Blanco, and the intensified harassment of those who dare to give voice to the desires of their fellow Cubans, are deeply disturbing.

These events underscore that instead of embracing an opportunity to enter a new era, Cuban authorities continue to respond to the aspirations of the Cuban people with a clenched fist.

Today, I join my voice with brave individuals across Cuba and a growing chorus around the world in calling for an end to the repression, for the immediate, unconditional release of all political prisoners in Cuba, and for respect for the basic rights of the Cuban people.

During the course of the past year, I have taken steps to reach out to the Cuban people and to signal my desire to seek a new era in relations between the governments of the United States and Cuba. I remain committed to supporting the simple desire of the Cuban people to freely determine their future and to enjoy the rights and freedoms that define the Americas, and that should be universal to all human beings.

Will John Brennan sink the Obama?

Just hours before he publicly responded last week to the Senate Intelligence Committee report accusing the Central Intelligence Agency of torture and deceit, John O. Brennan, the CIA’s director, stopped by the White House to meet with President Obama.

Ostensibly, he was there for an intelligence briefing. But the messages delivered later that day by the White House and Brennan were synchronized, even down to similar wording, and the larger import of the well-timed visit was hardly a classified secret: After six years of partnership, the president was standing by the embattled spy chief even as fellow Democrats called for his resignation.

Brennan, 59, who spent much of his career as an Arabic-speaking CIA officer, has been a central figure in Mr. Obama’s world since the beginning of his presidency.

Irritated advisers to Obama believe Brennan made a bad situation worse by battling Democrats on the committee over the torture report during the past year. Some who considered Brennan the president’s heat shield against the agency when he worked in the White House now worry that since being appointed director, he has “gone native,” as they put it.

Several Obama advisers said privately that Brennan made a mistake by letting the situation grow so toxic.

But in the 67 years since the CIA was founded, few presidents have had as close a bond with their intelligence chiefs as Obama has forged with Brennan. It is a relationship that has shaped the policy and politics of the debate over the nation’s war with terrorist organizations, as well as the agency’s own struggle to balance security and liberty.

And the result is a president who denounces torture but not the people accused of inflicting it.

“He was a pretty good analyst. He was a bright guy,” said a former CIA officer of Brennan. “But he always had a reputation of sucking up to power and moving in the direction of power and not being able to exercise any independence.”

Brennan managed “kill lists” for drone strikes and could order air attacks in Yemen without getting further approval from the president. “Brennan’s control over his area was as complete as anyone’s control over anything in the White House,” another former senior official said.

He came to be identified with the escalation of America’s secret war in Yemen and the successful raid that killed Osama bin Laden, but he was also an ally of those resisting more hawkish policies in Afghanistan and Libya, and advocated freeing wrongly held detainees at Guantánamo.

Last week Brennan became the agency’s prime defender, much to the chagrin of some of the president’s allies.

Source: NYT

US agency infiltrated Cuban music scene for ‘social change’

For more than two years, a US agency secretly infiltrated Cuba’s music scene, recruiting unwitting rappers to spark a youth movement against the government, according to documents obtained by The Associated Press.

The idea was to use Cuban musicians to build a network of young people seeking “social change,” documents show. But the operation was amateurish and profoundly unsuccessful.

On at least six occasions, Cuban authorities detained or interrogated people involved in the program; they also confiscated computer hardware, and in some cases it contained information that jeopardized Cubans who likely had no idea they were caught up in a clandestine U.S. operation. Still, contractors working for the U.S. Agency for International Development kept putting themselves and their targets at risk, the AP investigation found.

They also ended up compromising Cuba’s music culture.

Artists that USAID contractors tried to promote left the country or stopped performing after pressure from the Cuban government, and one of the island’s most popular independent music festivals was taken over after officials linked it to USAID.

The program is laid out in documents involving Creative Associates International, a Washington, D.C., contractor paid millions of dollars to undermine Cuba’s government. The thousands of pages include contracts, emails, preserved chats, budgets, expense reports, power points, photographs and passports.

The work included the creation of a “Cuban Twitter” social network and the dispatch of inexperienced Latin American youth to recruit activists, operations that were the focus of previous AP stories.

“Any assertions that our work is secret or covert are simply false,” USAID said in a statement Wednesday. Its programs were aimed at strengthening civil society “often in places where civic engagement is suppressed and where people are harassed, arrested, subjected to physical harm or worse.”

Creative Associates did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The operation was initially run by a Serbian contractor Rajko Bozic. His project was inspired by the protest concerts of the student movement that helped undermine former Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic in 2000.

Contractors would recruit scores of Cuban musicians for projects disguised as cultural initiatives but really aimed at boosting their visibility and stoking a movement of fans to challenge the government.

The Serb homed in swiftly on Los Aldeanos, a popular hip-hop group.

“People marching blind, you have no credibility,” the group rapped in “Long Live Free Cuba!” ”Go and tell the captain — this ship’s sinking rapidly.”

Creative used a Panama front company and a bank in Lichtenstein to hide the money trail from Cuba, where thousands of dollars went to fund a TV program starring Los Aldeanos.

But Cuban officials had figured out what was going on. Within months, a USAID contractor told his handlers that the Cubans said USAID had infiltrated the festival, and soon enough, the Cubans took it over.

In the end, Los Aldeanos moved to South Florida.

Torture: CIA officials will walk free

From Russian roulette to power drills, shackling and other painful and humiliating “enhanced interrogation techniques”, the CIA crossed all lines. Yet despite evidence incriminating the officials, it is highly likely that the perpetrators will walk free.

Although a scandalizing U.S. Senate report over CIA practices has sparked calls for prosecution from human rights groups, chances of affiliated officials being brought to justice seem little as President Barack Obama stated that it is ‘time to move on’.

After the U.S. Senate released a detailed intelligence report criminalizing the Central Intelligence Agency, the UN and several human rights groups called for the prosecution of U.S. officials involved in torture practices.

However, with a black president and the justice department saying it will not press charges, the agents responsible for the violence are likely to go unpunished.

Obama’s top officials, as WikiLeaks cables revealed, secretly worked with GOP operatives to coerce other countries, such as Spain and Germany, to quash their investigations into the US torture of their citizens, and issued extraordinary threats to prevent British courts from disclosing any of what was done.

The Obama administration aggressively shielded Bush officials even from being held accountable in civil cases brought by torture victims, by invoking radical secrecy powers and immunity doctrines to prevent courts even from hearing those claims.

Attorney General Eric Holder announced the closing without charges of the only two cases under investigation relating to the US torture program in 2012.

This decision, the New York Times noted “eliminat[es] the last possibility that any criminal charges will be brought as a result of the brutal interrogations carried out by the CIA”.

White House spokesperson Josh Earnest announced on Wednesday that US President Barack Obama shares the US Department of Justice decision that no prosecutable crime had been committed by the CIA officers.

“The president [Obama] has confidence both in this [US] justice system and in the way it was deployed in this particular situation [CIA officers investigation],” Earnest said when asked if Obama accepts DOJ conclusion that there are no prosecutable crimes committed by the CIA.

White flight in Hartford

The shrinking population of white students in Hartford’s suburbs is complicating efforts to comply with Connecticut’s landmark school desegregation settlement — and even making it harder for some of the capital city’s students to attend new schools created to help meet the racial integration goals set by the American lawsuit 25 years ago.

State education officials are currently negotiating the latest changes to the agreement, reached with the plaintiffs after they won a 1996 Connecticut Supreme Court ruling, but say it is becoming harder to attract white students to Hartford’s schools because they’re living farther away.

About half the students living in the 22 communities subject to the agreement, according to state officials, are non-white. That’s up from about 38 percent in 2008, when the parties negotiated a revised timetable for progress on reducing racial, ethnic and economic isolation. Another revision was made last year.

“The state is in the position of, how do you meet the requirements of the State Supreme Court given the fact that the demographics of the region have changed so completely,” said Kathleen Demsey, state Department of Education’s chief financial officer who worked for years on the issue. “Financially, it’s a burden for this transportation system, money that could be used for education is being used to bus kids.”

But lawyers for the plaintiffs in the case, Sheff vs. O’Neill, say there are still plenty of predominantly white communities in the region that can be drawn from to attract additional students, or where Hartford students can attend school in a racially integrated setting.

“We’ve made some progress but we still think there’s more that can be done,” said Dennis Parker, a lawyer for the plaintiffs and director of racial justice programs for the American Civil Liberties Union.

The issue of changing demographics has come up before. In 2013, the parties redefined the standard for diversity, allowing Asian, American Indian, Alaska Native, Native Hawaiian and other Pacific Islanders to count toward the 25 percent “white enrollment” threshold. Further changes could be among the proposals in this round of negotiations.

The current agreement expires in June. The groups are conducting confidential talks and would not disclose details of the discussions, except to say a decision is expected soon.

Newly released statistics show 47.5 percent of Hartford’s 21,458 minority students are currently enrolled in “reduced-isolation settings,” a marked improvement from 11 percent in 2008. That comes after the state spent about $2.25 billion on new magnets and other programs throughout the region over a 10-year period. Yet the plaintiffs contend that progress falls far short of giving every Hartford student the opportunity to learn in a racially integrated setting.

Attorney Martha Stone said the state could create incentives to encourage suburban school districts to take in more Hartford students and foster more collaborative projects involving different entities, such as the proposed elementary magnet aerospace academy in Rocky Hill.

“There are so many different ideas that have been on the table for years that the state has not taken the initiative on,” Stone said.

Unlike other states where there has been forced busing and redrawn school districts, Connecticut’s settlement relies on voluntary desegregation and additional state funding. Parents inside and outside of Hartford can choose to enter a lottery in order for their children to approximately 45 magnet schools. Meanwhile, Hartford students can also choose to attend suburban public schools.

But the makeup of some suburbs is changing: East Hartford, for example, shifted from 23 percent minority enrollment in 1989, when the lawsuit was first filed, to 84 percent in 2013. Manchester jumped from 12 percent to 60 percent, Windsor from 31 percent to 71 percent, and Bloomfield from 74 to 96 percent.

According to the Department of Education, those four towns have the highest participation in magnet schools. That had the unintended consequence of leaving some magnet school seats empty because of the low number of white applicants made it hard to maintain the desegregation standard.

Last summer, a group of frustrated Hartford parents staged a rally claiming their children didn’t get their first, second or third choices in the lottery.

The Sheff Movement, a coalition of parents, educators and citizens, organized the protest. Phil Tegeler, the group’s staff director, said the state needs to invest more money to expand the number of available classrooms, as well as the number of schools.

“The demand is much greater than the system right now,” he said. “The state needs to be thinking more ambitiously and the state needs to think long-term.”

Source: Yahoo

US racial inequality protests entering fifth day

From Chicago and Miami to Philadelphia and New York, angry race demonstrations in the US are entering a fifth day.

Protesters shut down freeways, chanting “I can’t breathe” and held “die-ins” in the streets. On Saturday, two police officers were injured as demonstrators smashed windows and hurled rocks at police, authorities said.

Black protesters are furious about a grand jury’s decision not to indict a white New York City police officer in the choking death of Eric Garner, an unarmed black man, and took to the streets nationwide late Sunday in a fifth day of demonstrations.

Officers used smoke and tear gas after crowds refused to disperse. Six people were arrested Saturday in Berkeley, bringing to at least 300 the number of people arrested across the country during the protests following the decision not to indict Officer Daniel Pantaleo.

Marchers in Berkeley, California, chanted: “Shut it down for Michael Brown.” The white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri who shot Brown, was also aquitted.

In Chicago, about 100 churches organized peaceful rallies throughout the day while in Miami protesters marched onto interstate 195, shutting down the causeway in both directions.

In Philadelphia, about 200 protesters and clergy staged a “die-in,” in which demonstrators lie down on the street, outside the South Philadelphia Sports Complex following the Philadelphia Eagles and Seattle Seahawks game.

Fans leaving the stadium could be heard jeering at the protesters. A black protester said such taunts show work remains to be done on educating people about racial inequality.

In Miami protesters marched onto Interstate 195, shutting down the road in both directions.

Black pro athletes joined in with their own form of protest Sunday: Davin Joseph, an offensive lineman for the St. Louis Rams, penned “I can’t breathe” on his cleats, and Johnson Bademosi, a defensive back for the Cleveland Browns, wore a shirt with the same message penned on the back. That followed Derrick Rose, a point guard for the Chicago Bulls, who on Saturday night also wore a shirt bearing the words during a pre-game warm-up.

Thousands of white Americans protest racial inequality

Thousand have taken to the streets to protest racial inequality in the US, while thousands more whites have joined a Twitter campaign to publicly confess their sins before the law, in an effort to shatter the criminal stereotyping of African-Americans.

In an attempt to expose police racial prejudice across the United States, Caucasian Twitter users spilled their wrongdoings to the world in a series of confession they have got away with that they believe African-Americans probably would not.

Using the #CrimingWhileWhite, some people recalled them getting away with a number of offences, including grand theft auto, driving violations, and drugs abuse.

Meanwhile, for the second night in a row, thousands of protesters overran the streets of New York, shutting down several major arteries of the city as they expressed outrage over a grand jury decision not to indict an officer for the death of an unarmed black man.

In the aftermath of racial violence that erupted in Ferguson, the latest social media campaign follows other recent high-profile incidents of police’s lethal brutality against black men and the perceived lack of punishment for the white officers responsible.

Michael Brown was shot six times by a white policemen in Ferguson, Missouri in August.

The cases involve Eric Garner who was killed by a chokehold by an NYPD officer in July and 12-year-old Tamir Rice, who was killed in Cleveland in November.

Daily Show host targets Indians in vain

Comedian John Oliver’s efforts to take down India’s newly elected prime minister, Narendra Modi, has come to naught.

Time magazine in its annual TIME’s Person of the Year 2014 survey has just come up with Narendra Modi as the winner.

Oliver, much tweeted and adored by Cultural Marxists and Boerhaters in South Africa after his efforts to smear Afrikaners as all being white racists and thus deserving of ethnic cleansing, did not hesitate to indulge in a racist diatribe against Indians.

The rising tide of farm killings targeting white Afrikaners, and noted by organisations such as Genocide Watch, must have worried British-born Oliver enough to warrant a whole show justifying the killing spree.

The Prime Minister of India is currently toppling the 2013’s top contestant, Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, the Egyptian President, despite Oliver’s best try to make Modi and all Indians look ridiculous.

After Modi quoted the famous Star Wars line, “May the force be with you,” in his speech in Central Park, with Wolverine (aka Hugh Jackman) by his side, Americans were smitten.

Modi had been banned from entering the US in 2005, for purportedly failing to intervene as chief minister of Gujarat state during 2002 riots in which Hindu mobs attacked minority Muslims.

According to the International Religious Freedom Act, which the US Congress passed in 1998, “foreign officials responsible for “severe violations of religious freedom” aren’t eligible for visas. Indian courts have since cleared Hindu-nationalist Modi of wrongdoing.

A recent survey by the National Council of Applied Economic Research and the University of Maryland, United States, spanning 42,000 households has found that 25% of Indians practiced caste untouchability in some form. This, despite the Constitution having banned the practice 64 years ago.

By caste-groups, Brahmins topped the list with 27% admitting to it, followed by non-Brahmin forward castes (25%) followed by other backward classes (33%).

By religions, Hindus were the biggest believers in the system (30%). The findings also found that the practice was most common in the Hindi heartland of the country, with more than 45% of the respondents from Madhya Pradesh, Himachal Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Rajasthan and Bihar owning up to the practice.

London protest against Ferguson verdict

Hundreds, mostly white people have gathered around the US Embassy in London, condemning the grand jury verdict not to charge US white police officer who killed African-American teenager Michael Brown in Ferguson, BBC reported Thursday.

The Stand Up To Racism and London Black Revolutionaries Group organized protests around the US Embassy in London, condemning the grand jury verdict over Darren Wilson, a police officer who shot an African-American teenager in Ferguson.

According to the news agency, the protest campaign was organized by Stand Up To Racism and London Black Revolutionaries Group.

The vigil is intended to raise protest against non-indictment verdict for the US police officer Darren Wilson, which was delivered by the grand jury in Ferguson on Monday, the statement on the Stand Up For Racism official website says. The statement adds that the US jury’s decision comes on the day of similar incident in Cleveland, where a policeman shot dead 12-year-old African-American Tamir Rice, who was carrying a toy gun.

The court decision not to charge Wilson over the August 9 shooting has led to a wave of protests across the United States, raising issues of race discrimination and police brutality within the US law enforcement system. Demonstrations took place in 38 US states, Washington DC and over 170 other US cities on Tuesday.

From America’s black father to accused sexual predator

Bill Cosby has dominated headlines for much of the last month as accusations of sexual assault pile up.

More than a dozen women have accused Cosby, many of whom say he drugged them first.

Their stories paint a starkly different picture of the black father beloved by millions as Dr. Huxtable — the sweet, sweater-wearing dad on the sitcom, “The Cosby Show.”

New York Times columnist David Carr meanwhile has taken a number of writers and mediates — including himself — to task for turning a blind eye to the numerous allegations of sexual assault leveled against Bill Cosby, and he’s already elicited one mea culpa in response.

In addition to admitting his own accountability, Carr called out Ta-Nehisi Coates, who penned a lengthy essay on the comedian in The Atlantic in 2008; Kelefa Sanneh, who wrote a New Yorker profile on Cosby in September; and Mark Whitaker, who wrote an extensive biography on Cosby published just two months ago; noting that they all failed to properly address the accusations, despite the fact that they were “carefully and thoroughly reported” in Philadelphia magazine, People magazine and Today in 2005 and 2006.

“We all have our excuses, but in ignoring these claims, we let down the women who were brave enough to speak out publicly against a powerful entertainer,” Carr wrote in a Monday column. “Mr. Whitaker has said he didn’t want to put anything in the book, which he wrote with Mr. Cosby’s cooperation, that wasn’t confirmed — which of course raises the question of why he wouldn’t have done the work to knock down the accusations or make them stand up. And given that the accusations had already been carefully and thoroughly reported in Philadelphia magazine and elsewhere, any book of the size and scope of Mr. Whitaker’s should have gone there.”

Whitaker took to Twitter on Monday afternoon to respond to Carr’s column, admitting that he should’ve investigated the allegations more thoroughly.

Carr noted that Coates also revisited his Cosby coverage on The Atlantic’s website and admitted that at the time he wrote the piece, he “believed that Bill Cosby was a rapist,” but included only “a brief and limp mention of the accusations against Cosby.” Coates went on to write, “I regret not saying what I thought of the accusations, and then pursuing those thoughts. I regret it because the lack of pursuit puts me in league with people who either looked away, or did not look hard enough. I take it as a personal admonition to always go there, to never flinch, to never look away.”

Sanneh does not seem to be active on Twitter, but appeared on an MSNBC segment over the weekend to discuss the Cosby allegations, telling host Melissa Harris-Perry, “It’s easy to look at the Huxtable family and say ‘oh, that must be what Bill Cosby is like’ … Just because a comedian has politics we agree with, just because a comedian makes work we agree with, doesn’t mean, necessarily, they’re not capable of what Bill Cosby’s accused of.”

Ferguson launches race war

Monday night on MSNBC’s “The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell,” Missouri State Sen. Maria Chappelle-Nadali (D) said of the riots after the grand jury announcement that Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson will not face charges for fatally shooting Michael Brown, “This is St. Louis’s race war. We didn’t have a race war like other cities throughout the U.S. This is our race war.”

Sen. Maria Chappelle-Nadali is black. “I have to tell you that there has been systematic racism, institutionally in state government for decades, including my own state party. So what we are looking at right now is a symptom of racism that has been swept under the rug for decades. and I am so glad now that the truth is out, and I’m very grateful to your network for telling the truth in reporting the truth of what’s going to go down in the coming days.

“As it was said earlier today, and because of the systematic racism that we have in our state government, and our state party, and we do not bring the truth to bear, then we will not recover from what we are going on. What we are experiencing right now, and I have to tell you, this is St. Louis’s race war. We didn’t have a race war like other cities throughout the this is our race war. country. and people have to be open, and they have to be honest. and they have to earnest, and they have not been earnest for decades. I know people in my own party, in my own government structure who disregard things that we say and how we feel, and we are not going to allow it anymore,” she added.

A crowd gathered around a car from which the verdict was being broadcast on a stereo. When the decision was announced, Michael Brown’s mother, Lesley McSpadden, who was sitting atop the car, burst into tears and began screaming before being whisked away by supporters.

The crowd erupted in anger, converging on the barricade where police in riot gear were standing. They pushed down the barricade and began pelting police with items, including a bullhorn. Police stood their ground.

As the night when on, at least seven Ferguson-area businesses were set on fire. Several more were hit by looters. Fires were reported at the Fashions R Boutique, Title Max loan center, AutoZone, Walgreen’s, Public Storage, Little Caesars and others.

The county police department is also saying that officers reported heavy automatic gunfire. Police cars were been vandalized and several gunshots were heard on the streets.

A KMOX News vehicle was also damaged while covering protests in south St. Louis.Ferguson Police responded to protesters with smoke and pepper spray.

Protesters insisted it was tear gas. Video shows protesters setting fires and breaking store windows. Protesters were also throwing bottles and rocks at officers.

Video shows protesters setting fires and breaking store windows. Protesters were also throwing bottles and rocks at officers.

Demonstrations are also taking place in a number of large cities across the country, including outside the White House in Washington, DC.

New York protesters are causing havoc to the city’s transport systems and have already taken over three bridges, which have all been shut down.

Despite sub-zero temperatures in the Windy City Chicago, protesters are out in force and have already shut down a major intersection in the city center.

There are reports that protests in the West Coast city of Oakland are beginning to turn violent. They have started to light fires on the city’s main streets, while police are maintaining a heavy and visible presenc

Denying black hair is racist, court hears

Gabriel Aubry made “completely and totally unacceptable” racial slurs against Halle Berry, a court has been told.

The 48-year-old actress, who dated the French-Canadian model between 2005 and 2010, has taken her former lover to court, claiming he straightened the naturally curly hair of their daughter Nahla – who was born in 2008 – and lightened it over the past 12 months.

A source close to Halle also told MailOnline that Gabriel had used racially abusive language towards Halle – claiming he called her the N word.

“Halle kept asking and asking Gabriel about Nahla’s hair and he kept denying it.

“What does this say to a six year old who’s half black? Her father is denying her identity.

“Halle then filed the court papers and Nahla’s curls came back.”

In her testimony to the court, Halle said: “I strongly feel that Gabriel’s same underlying attitude is at the root in the changes, which only he could have been causing to our daughter’s hair.”

Since splitting from Gabriel, Halle has married French film actor Olivier Martinez, with whom she has a son, Maceo.

Source:BANG Showbiz and IOL