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An order was signed late Sunday authorizing the release of offenders serving certain types of sentences in county jails.

1,000 inmates will be released from N.J. jails to curb Coronavirus risk

By COVID-19 (Coronavirus), News & Current Affairs

No other state is thought to have taken such sweeping action to reduce its jail population in response to the pandemic. By Tracey Tully, NYT — New Jersey will release as many as 1,000 people from its jails in what is believed to be the nation’s broadest effort to address the risks of the highly contagious coronavirus spreading among the incarcerated. New Jersey’s chief justice, Stuart Rabner, signed an order late Sunday authorizing the…

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National Guard during the 1919 Chicago Race Riots.

Plots Against America?: Jim Crow was Homegrown Fascism

By Commentaries/Opinions

By Guy Lancaster, HNN — Note: this essay quotes a sign attached to the body of a man lynched in 1919, which uses a racial slur. HBO’s recent release of a prestige adaptation of Philip Roth’s 2004 novel The Plot Against America makes it worthwhile to examine whether fascism is really so alien to the United States as many wish to believe. In Roth’s novel, a Jewish extended family in Newark experiences fascism’s arrival…

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Cuban doctors prepare to leave for Italy to provide medical aid.

Cuba’s Coronavirus Response Is Putting Other Countries to Shame

By COVID-19 (Coronavirus), Editors' Choice

Cuba is caricatured by the Right as a totalitarian hellhole. But its response to the coronavirus pandemic — from sending doctors to other countries to pioneering anti-viral treatments to converting factories into mask-making machines — is putting other countries, even rich countries, to shame. By Ben Burgis, Jacobin — Last week, the MS Braemar, a transatlantic cruise ship carrying 682 passengers from the United Kingdom, found itself momentarily stranded. Five of…

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Chuck Schumer

Democrats Are Handing Donald Trump the Keys to the Country

By COVID-19 (Coronavirus), Editors' Choice

The Senate coronavirus bill is shocking. By Zach Carter, Huffpost — The emergency coronavirus legislation that the Senate agreed to on Tuesday can only be described as an outrage. It is not an economic rescue package, but a sentence of unprecedented economic inequality and corporate control over our politics that will resonate for a generation. It represents a transfer of wealth and power to the super rich from the rest of us,…

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Celebration of the Abolition of Slavery in the District of Columbia by the Colored People, in Washington, April 19, 1866,”

Since Emancipation, the United States Has Refused to Make Reparations for Slavery

By Reparations

But in 1862, the federal government doled out the 2020 equivalent of $23 million – NOT to the formerly enslaved but to their white enslavers. By Kali Holloway, The Nation — In 1870 a black woman named Henrietta Wood sued the white deputy sheriff who, nearly two decades earlier, kidnapped her from the free state of Ohio, illegally transported her to slaveholding Kentucky, and sold her into a life of enslavement that…

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