Black Lives Matter protests: push for justice and police reform continues – live updates | US news

The University of Virginia has announced it is changing the logos it uses for its athletics teams, just two months after they were unveiled. They had been criticised for a design element that referred to the school’s history with slavery.

Objections were raised to the serpentine curves put on the handles of the sabres that were meant to mimic “the design of the serpentine walls” that long stood on the campus.

Athletic Director Carla Williams said she decided to change the logos after she was “made aware of the negative connotation between the serpentine walls and slavery.”

Historians pointed out that former President Thomas Jefferson designed the original eight-foot-high walls to muffle the sounds of slaves and hide them from public view.

“There was no intent to cause harm, but we did, and for that I apologise to those who bear the pain of slavery in our history,” Williams said.

The school has redesigned the detail in the logos to remove the curved handle. Fans who purchased clothes with the logos between 24 April and 14 June who are interested in exchanging them for the newly altered ones are being asked to email the athletics department.

Donald Trump is up and tweeting about a record increase in retail sales.

My colleague Jasper Jolly has looked at the figures for us on our live business blog.

US retail sales rose by 17.7% in May, more than double the average bounceback expected by economists.

Sales had slumped in April by 14.7%, according to a revised reading from the US Census Bureau, but Americans increased spending by more than $70bn in May.

Spending in May was just shy of March levels at $485bn, although still well below the $516bn spent in May 2019.

Incidentally, The Hill’s Jonathan Easley is reporting that Donald Trump Jr. will interview his father Donald Trump on Team Trump’s online show “Triggered” this week – it will air Thursday night. Possibly not going to be the most hard-hitting interview of Trump’s re-election campaign.

Elizabeth Warren has just endorsed Jamaal Bowman for the 16th Congressional District of New York.

Bowman is challenging longtime New York Rep. Eliot Engel in the New York primary elections on 23 June.

CNN had a copy of the endorsement in advance, reporting Warren’s statement as: “[Bowman] is exactly the kind of person we need in Congress fighting for big, structural change. Whether it’s fighting for high-quality public schools, affordable housing, or rooting out systemic racism, Jamaal Bowman will be a champion for working people in Washington.”

Bowman promises “big, structural change” rather than “nibbling around the edges.”

Hillary Clinton yesterday endorsed the incumbent Engel, who has been a congressman since 1989.

Gerald Bostock was one of the lead plaintiffs in the case that the Supreme Court adjudicated yesterday, leading to the ruling that the 1964 civil rights law bars employers from discriminating against workers based on sexual orientation or transgender status.

Bostock, an award-winning child social services coordinator, was fired from his job in Georgia after his boss discovered he had joined a gay softball league.

He was on television this morning, talking about the case and the struggle to get equality. You can watch a clip here:

The killing of George Floyd has seen protests all around the world, including in the UK. Today photographer Henry J Kamara has published a picture essay for us looking at what it was like to experience the protests in London.

The protest movement has started a national debate in the UK about statues and memorials, which led to ugly clashes at the weekend as far-right activists sought to defend monuments which they claimed were being targetted.

One such monument was in Mowbray Park in Sunderland, in the north-east of England. The statue is of General Havelock – a major figure in crushing rebellion in India in 1857 when it was under British rule. That statue appears to have been vandalised overnight with the words “racist” and “parasite” daubed on to it.

Less successfully, and to some considerable ridicule on social media, a group of men has also been somewhat inexplicably defending the Nuneaton statue of 19th century novelist Mary Ann Evans – she is ofter better known by her pen name George Eliot.

The Associated Press is reporting that it has seen a draft text of a resolution that might be presented by African nations to the United Nation’s top human rights body which specifically addresses “systemic racism” in the US.

It could become the centrepiece for an urgent debate scheduled for Wednesday at the Geneva-based Human Rights Council.

The text calls for a Commission of Inquiry to look into “systemic racism” and alleged violations of international human rights law and abuses against “Africans and of people of African descent in the United States of America and other parts of the world recently affected by law enforcement agencies,” especially encounters that resulted in deaths.

The goal would be “to bringing perpetrators to justice,” said the text, circulated by the Africa Group. The AP says that the breadth of support for the measure was not immediately clear.

The US embassy in Seoul in South Korea has generated some headlines in the last few hours after it has taken down a Black Lives Matter and a Pride banner that were hanging on the building.

Embassy staff will probably be a little busier than they expected today, after North Korea earlier blew up a liaison office set up to improve communications with the South in a row over defectors’ plans to send anti-Pyongyang propaganda leaflets across the border. Video of the building’s destruction has now emerged.

A new poll of swing state Michigan shows Democratic nominee Joe Biden pulling ahead of incumbent Donald Trump in one of November’s key battlegrounds. The state switched from Obama to Trump in 2016.

The poll by the Detroit Free Press shows Biden leading Trump 55%-39% in Michigan, a 16-point margin.

But perhaps what is more striking is that the poll was carried out only a day after a similar exercise by EPIC-MRA of Lansing delivered Biden a 12-point lead. It implies that Biden is pulling away from Trump at a fast pace as the national protests and coronavirus outbreak continue.

A note of caution – the poll is of 600 people and carries a four-point margin of error, so may just be a stat blip in the state – but you would imagine it will be raising eyebrows in the Trump re-election campaign HQ.

Minnesota Democratic Congresswoman Ilhan Omar has announced the death of her father due to complications from Covid-19. In a statement, Omar said Nur Omar Mohamed died on Monday.

“No words can describe what he meant to me and all who knew him,” Omar said in her statement. “My family and I ask for your respect and privacy during this time.”

Since her election in 2018, Omar has been at the forefront of promoting progressive policies, and a frequent target of attacks from Donald Trump.

One story that has developed overnight is about the NYPD police and Shake Shack. Three officers were hospitalised after having drunk milkshakes from there.

The NYC Police Benevolent Association then made a claim that the officers may have been poisoned with bleach. The NYPD launched an investigation after the officers fell ill – and has dismissed the claim, saying that there was no criminality by Shake Shack employees. Investigators say that a cleaning solution wasn’t fully cleared from the milkshake machine, which is how it may have got into the drinks.

This all appears to have passed the president’s son by. Donald Trump Jr angrily tweeted demanding that Democrats comment on the “poisoning” – and then rapidly deleted the false claim.

My colleague Sam Levin in Los Angeles has been looking at the years of pressure for reform that Black Lives Matter has put on law enforcement in the US, finding that not all of the reforms that have been enacted have the desired or expected impact.

Research into the use of body cameras by police officers has shown no statistical difference in behaviors or reduction in force when the cameras are on. Body cameras also haven’t stopped egregious killings, have rarely led to discipline or termination, and have almost never yielded charges or convictions.

It’s worth reading the piece in full for a reminder of the extent to which forces repeatedly seem to step outside their own guidelines about the use of force.

In Austin, policy dictates that officers may use beanbag rounds to de-escalate potentially deadly situations or “riotous behavior” that could cause injury. But at one of the early protests after George Floyd’s death, police fired a beanbag round at a 16-year-old boy’s head, even though he was alone on a hill far from officers, and appeared to be watching the events. His brother said the ammunition fractured his skull and required emergency surgery.

You can read it in full here: ‘It’s not about bad apples’: how US police reforms have failed to stop brutality and violence

Associated Press is reporting that the Justice Department has set new dates to begin executing federal death-row inmates following a months long legal battle over the plan to resume the executions for the first time since 2003.

Attorney General William Barr directed the federal Bureau of Prisons to schedule the executions, beginning in mid-July, of four inmates convicted of killing children. Three of the men had been scheduled to be put to death when Barr announced the federal government would resume executions last year, ending an informal moratorium on federal capital punishment.

“The American people, acting through Congress and Presidents of both political parties, have long instructed that defendants convicted of the most heinous crimes should be subject to a sentence of death,” Barr said in a statement. “The four murderers whose executions are scheduled today have received full and fair proceedings under our Constitution and laws. We owe it to the victims of these horrific crimes, and to the families left behind, to carry forward the sentence imposed by our justice system.”

The move is likely to add a new front to the national conversation about criminal justice reform and raise interest in an issue that has largely lain dormant in recent years. The Justice Department had scheduled five executions set to begin in December, but these were halted after legal challenges. The department wouldn’t say why the executions of two of the inmates scheduled in December hadn’t been rescheduled.

Three of the executions are scheduled for July, with one in August. The Justice Department said additional executions will be set at a later date.

From Albany in New York, to Wilmington in North Carolina, a New York Times study has been published this morning identifying 96 cities in the US where teargas has been used against protesters since 26 May.

The report observes that:

If used appropriately, it drives people to flee the gas, which irritates their eyes, skin and lungs without causing serious, long-term injuries in most. But in cases where law enforcement misuses the agent, it can cause debilitating injuries.

It goes on to quote Balin Brake, a 21-year-old student who lost an eye after being hit by a tear gas canister. “I’m angry that I was protesting police brutality and fell victim to police brutality,” Mr. Brake told the New York Times.

There’s a map as well, so you can see which states have – and haven’t – deployed teargas.

Read it here: New York Times – Here are the 96 US cities where protesters were tear-gassed

There’s some very dramatic pictures coming in of the protest at Albuquerque against the statue of Spanish conquistador Juan de Oñate. A man was shot and is now in hospital in a condition described as critical but stable.

Protesters at one point were using a chain to try and bring the statue down.

Albuquerque police detained members of the New Mexico Civil Guard on the site.

“The shooting tonight was a tragic, outrageous and unacceptable act of violence and it has no place in our city” the mayor, Tim Keller, said in a statement.

After the unrest the city has said that the statue would be removed until officials determine the next steps.

Earlier on Monday, another statue of Juan de Oñate, was removed from outside the cultural centre in Alcalde, New Mexico

Good morning, welcome to our live coverage of US politics and the Black Lives Matter protests taking place across the country. Here’s some of the key points from yesterday and overnight.

You get in touch at martin.belam@theguardian.com – I’ll be with you for the next couple of hours.