Leading figures in the U.K. film production sector told Variety Friday that they continue to have absolute faith in the measures being taken to keep cast and crew safe from COVID-19 on British sets…

In Virginia, officer Kevin McGee wants elected prosecutor Stephanie Morales tossed off the questionable cases he brought against civil rights leaders. ... Two months later, taking advantage of Virginia’s magistrate system, Portsmouth police Sgt. Kevin McGee brought felony charges against 14 defendants ― including state Sen. Louise Lucas (D) ― under a state law banning “injury to” war monuments. Five more defendants were later charged under the 70-year-old law, which originally referred to the Civil War as the “War Between the States. Lucas and several other defendants charged in the case left the scene hours before the worst destruction took place.

Trump wants to pull funding from Stars and Stripes, a newspaper for American troops that began in the Civil War and has been serving our soldiers.

A 44-year-old Mapleton man was arrested Tuesday afternoon on a first-degree arson charge in a string of fires that merged and prompted evacuations near the western Lane County community.

earlier interview here: https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/v7g8vb/man-linked-to-killing-at-a-portland-protest-says-he-acted-in-self-defense

Four hundred years ago Belgian physician Johann Baptist Van Helmont was persecuted by the Roman Catholic Church for promoting the use of the "Powder of Sympathy", a concoction that was supposed to treat wounds by applying it to a dressing that had previously covered the wound. The exact nature of the substance varied, but iron or copper sulfate seem to have been common ingredients. This silliness was first proposed by physician and scoundrel Sir Kenelm Digby, but Van Helmont bought into the idea. Somehow the effect of the powder on the bloody dressing was to be communicated to the blood still in the body. Why these metal sulfates were supposed to have an effect on the blood at all isn’t clear. The Catholic Church interpreted the powder of sympathy idea as the promotion of superstition and persecuted Van Helmont for his beliefs. Actually, Van Helmont did not believe the practice to be supernatural, he thought it was a natural phenomenon.

This summer, Portland has been the site of some of the most massive BLM protests in the country. But it also has deeply racist roots, and, as part of a larger state whose constitution originally banned black people, remains one of the whitest cities in the United States. Portland prides itself as a city of tolerance, but it is not, and never has been, an easy place for BIPOC to live. Its police force, which largely draws from people who do not live in the city, has a history of brutality against black citizens and excessive force in general. Protests asking for reform endured after the initial spark of nationwide engagement, and, as in many places, police reaction to those protests has underlined the need for continued action. As of this writing, the main protest — focused on the Justice Center, in Downtown Portland — has been going for more than 90 days. In this way, Portland — like CHAZ before it — has become the bogeyman of right’s opposition to Black Lives Matter and to liberals/progressives/the left in general. Footage from the protests, overlaid with scare graphics that frame them as war zones, sends a nightly message: This is the future liberals want. Anarchy! Black masks! Organized resistance to illegal use of force! But the protests themselves aren’t the future liberals want. The protests are necessary in order to eventually achieve that future.

The president has repeatedly disparaged the intelligence of service members, and asked that wounded veterans be kept out of military parades, multiple sources tell The Atlantic.

If the current trend continues, the school could see up to 8,000 COVID-19 cases this semester, officials said. Despite an expansive testing program and models that predicted how many COVID-19 cases would pop up on campus, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is confronting a grim reality shared by other colleges attempting to stay open: Partying among undergraduate students is leading to hundreds of more infections than anticipated, jeopardizing the in-person experience for everyone... But Nigel Goldenfeld, a physics professor who helped the school with modeling, said UIUC’s predictions did not take into account the level of noncompliance seen among students in recent weeks. The models did assume that some students would party, go to bars and fail to wear masks. “What is not in the models is that students would actually fail to isolate,” he said. “That they would not respond to methods to reach them by (the public health department). That they would go to a party even if they knew they were COVID positive, or that they would host a party when they were COVID positive.”

“This goes to show you that the left doesn’t do their homework and they’re easily won over by bright shiny objects,” said one Kennedy ally.

The downside for police, who have rushed to embrace Ring usage nationwide as the Amazon subsidiary aggressively marketed itself to and sealed partnerships with local departments, is that networked cameras record cops just as easily as the rest of us. Ring’s cameras are so popular in part because of how the company markets their ability to detect motion at your doorstep, providing convenient phone alerts of “suspicious activity,” however you might define it, even when you’re out of the house. But sometimes the police are the unannounced, unwanted visitor: “Subjects likely use IoT devices to hinder LE [law enforcement] investigations and possibly monitor LE activity,” the bulletin states. “If used during the execution of a search, potential subjects could learn of LE’s presence nearby, and LE personnel could have their images captured, thereby presenting a risk to their present and future safety.” The document describes a 2017 incident in which FBI agents approached a New Orleans home to serve a search warrant and were caught on video. “Through the Wi-Fi doorbell system, the subject of the warrant remotely viewed the activity at his residence from another location and contacted his neighbor and landlord regarding the FBI’s presence there,” it states.

David Graeber, the anthropologist who was influential in the Occupy Wall Street movement and is believed to have coined the phrase, “We are the 99%,” has died at age 59. Graeber’s death was confirmed on the morning of September 3 by his wife, Nika Dubrovsky. Dubrovsky tweeted, “Yesterday the best person in a world, my husband and my friend . @davidgraeber died in a hospital in Venice.” Graeber was a professor of anthropology at the London School of Economics and wrote the book Debt: The First 5000 Years which was published in 2011. His other books include 2015’s The Utopia of Rules and 2018’s Bullshit Jobs: A Theory. In addition to his involvement with Occupy Wall Street, Graeber was also known for his activism with the Global Justice Movement. On his Twitter page, Graeber described himself as “an anthropologist, sometimes I occupy things & such. I see anarchism as something you do not an identity so don’t call me the anarchist anthropologist.”

An ex-soldier has been sent to prison for murdering Slovakian journalist Ján Kuciak and his fiancée, but a notorious businessman accused of masterminding the killings was cleared in a shock outcome to a case that has reshaped the country’s political landscape. Tomas Szabó was sentenced to 25 years in a maximum-security facility for the killings of Kuciak and Martina Kušnírová, who were shot dead in their home east of Bratislava in February 2018 both aged 27. But Marian Kočner, once one of the most powerful people in the country, and his former lover were both cleared of ordering the killings during the hearing on September 3, at the culmination of one of the most high-profile trials in Slovakian history. Long a fixture in the local tabloids due to his extravagant wealth and rumored connections to organized crime, Kočner was only found guilty of one count of possessing ammunition, which he had already admitted. He was handed a 5,000-euro fine. The parents of Kušnírová and Kuciak shed silent tears after the verdicts were read out to the court, then hurried out past the crowds of journalists that were waiting outside the courtroom after the hearing ended.

France will spend 100 billion euros to help pull its economy out of one of Europe’s worst coronavirus-induced slumps, under a recovery plan that revives pro-business reforms championed by President Emmanuel Macron with a greener tinge. The $118 billion stimulus equates to 4% of gross domestic product, meaning France is ploughing more public cash into its economy as a percentage of GDP than any other big European country, an official said ahead of its formal launch later on Thursday. France’s recession, marked by a 13.8% second quarter GDP contraction that coincided with a COVID-19 lockdown and expected to generate an 11% drop in 2020 as a whole, has also been one of the region’s deepest. Focused mainly on boosting companies and running over two years, the stimulus package earmarks 35 billion euros to make the economy more competitive and 30 billion to promote greener energy policies.

Even before those questionable COVID-19 waivers, college athletes were subject to all kinds of overbearing, strange, intrusive, discriminatory and legally dubious team rules. Here's what we discovered from just last season.

Republican Senator Rand Paul on Friday called on the FBI to investigate a crowd of protesters that swarmed him as he departed the White House after listening to U.S. President Donald Trump accept his party's nomination for re-election. "I believe there are going to be people who were involved with the attack on us that actually were paid to come here and are not from Washington, D.C., and are sort of paid to be anarchists," Paul said. "The FBI needs to investigate but the only way you can do it is you have to arrest people."

Body camera video shows that Daniel Prude was complying with police when they knelt on his back and pushed his face to the ground for so long that he stopped breathing.

About what you'd expect.

It’s been a big week for Trump’s politicization of the Department of Justice. Days after the president announced that the DOJ would establish a joint-operation center to “investigate violent left-wing civil unrest,” the White House published a memo announcing a review process for federal funding that would limit federal funding to “anarchist jurisdictions.” “My Administration will do everything in its power to prevent weak mayors and lawless cities from taking Federal dollars while they let anarchists harm people, burn buildings, and ruin lives and businesses,” Trump tweeted. “We’re putting them on notice today.”

Proving that, as always, she knows when to choose her battles.