Neil Vigdor

The shooting occurred at 8:29 p.m. in the third quarter of a playoff game at Pleasantville High School, which is just outside Atlantic City and was hosting Camden High School.

The sequence of events was captured on video by local news media covering the game.

“Unlike some of the shootings that have occurred on school premises throughout the country, this incident had nothing to do with the students of Pleasantville High School or Camden High School,” Damon Tyner, the Atlantic County prosecutor, said in a statement. “The venue simply presented an opportunity for criminals to pursue their own form of petty vengeance against one another.”

Authorities released no specific motive for the attack.

One victim, a 27-year-old man, was in stable condition and will undergo surgery, officials said.

At a news conference Saturday, police identified the adult victim as Ibn Abdullah. The gunman targeted Abdullah, who was in custody at the hospital after having been charged with an unlawful weapons offense, police said. They did not specify if his charges were in connection to the shooting.

The 10-year-old, who was also shot, was in critical condition. A third victim, a 15-year-old, was treated for a graze wound and released from a hospital.

One of the five suspects, 31-year-old Alvin Wyatt of Atlantic City, was charged with three counts of attempted murder, unlawful possession of a weapon and possession of a weapon for an unlawful purpose, the Atlantic County prosecutor’s office said in a statement.

The other four men, Shahid Dixon, 27; Tyrell Dorn, 28; Vance Golden and Michael Mack, 27; all of Atlantic City, and Vance Golden, 26, of Pleasantville, were charged with unlawful possession of a weapon.

“We are able to confirm that no Camden High students were injured or otherwise harmed during the incident,” Camden Schools said in a tweet Friday night.

“A very special thank-you to our coaches, faculty, and staff who were on-site and acted quickly to ensure the safety of all our students,” the school system said. “Our thoughts and prayers are with the Pleasantville community in the wake of this unfortunate event.”

The Pleasantville Schools superintendent did not immediately return a request for comment Saturday.

Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J. and a candidate for president, called the shooting “horrific” on Twitter on Saturday.

“Praying for everyone at this high school football game in NJ last night &amp; the 2 people who were seriously injured by gunfire,” he said, adding the shooting was “not normal.”

“When people are shot in church, schools, movie theaters &amp; football games we need to take action to change our gun laws,” he added.

This article originally appeared in

5 Charged in Shooting at New Jersey High School Football Game

Five men were charged Saturday in connection with a shooting at a high school football game in New Jersey on Friday night that injured three people, including a 10-year-old child, authorities said.

The fire, known as the Getty fire, forced officials to seal off main interchanges of the 405 by midmorning. Off-ramps through the Sepulveda Pass, near where the fire started, were closed.

The growing blaze caused the Los Angeles Unified School District, Santa Monica-Malibu Unified School District, and many private schools to close before classes were to begin. The University of California, Los Angeles and Santa Monica College also canceled classes.

“This is a fire that quickly spread,” said Mayor Eric M. Garcetti of Los Angeles at a news conference shortly after 7 a.m. local time. “It is now over 500 acres, but we luckily had a lot of amazing heroes that were in our fire stations who rolled out immediately. We have over 500 firefighters that are on the line right now, in some of the most challenging topography of Los Angeles.”

He said at least five homes had been lost. Ralph M. Terrazas, chief of the Los Angeles Fire Department, said he expected that number to rise.

The Getty fire, which was reported to emergency responders at 1:34 a.m. in a 911 call, prompted an emergency declaration from Garcetti. Neighborhoods covered by mandatory evacuation orders include Brentwood, Mountaingate and West Los Angeles. In all, more than 10,000 residential and commercial structures are in the evacuation zones.

Brian Humphrey, a spokesman for the Los Angeles Fire Department, said there were no reports of serious injuries or fatalities as of about 9 a.m. local time.

Among the evacuees was Los Angeles Lakers forward LeBron James. “Had to emergency evacuate my house and I’ve been driving around with my family trying to get rooms,” he said in a Twitter message.

Firefighters scramble to protect a major art museum.

The Los Angeles Fire Department dispatched crews to protect the Getty Center, home to priceless artworks and a new exhibition of Edouard Manet’s paintings.

Capt. Erik Scott, a department spokesman, said the Getty Center, a billion-dollar complex in Los Angeles that houses an art museum with works by Rembrandt, van Gogh, Monet and Degas, was not immediately threatened by the blaze.

Peter Sanders, another spokesman for the department, said the center was surrounded by firefighters, as air tankers dropped red fire retardant on canyons to the west, ahead of the advancing fire, to create a barrier. “There’s no longer an imminent threat to the Getty Center,” he said.

Fast-growing Kincade fire is nearly twice the size of San Francisco.

The Kincade fire in the heart of Sonoma County, north of San Francisco, has doubled in size in 24 hours and was only 5% contained Monday morning. The fire has burned an area nearly twice the size of the city of San Francisco, which covers 47 square miles — and is still growing.

Nearly 100 buildings have been destroyed by the fire, and 16 more damaged, according to Cal Fire, the state firefighting agency. Some 3,400 firefighters were battling the blaze as of Sunday night, public safety officials said.

Cal Fire said firefighters were hoping for a brief reprieve Monday from the high winds that have acted as a dangerous accelerant. But more high winds are in the forecast for Tuesday night into Wednesday.

The fire threatens 80,000 buildings across an expanding evacuation zone, which includes a warning, but not an order, for part of neighboring Napa County.

Two firefighters suffered burns, and one of them was airlifted to U.C. Davis Medical Center for treatment, authorities said.

All 40 Sonoma County public school districts and eight independent charter schools in the county have closed through Tuesday because of the uncertain availability of power, evacuations of students and staff, fire threats and air quality concerns, county officials announced.

Classes were also canceled at the University of California, Berkeley; California State University Maritime Academy in Vallejo; Dominican University of California in San Rafael; Santa Rosa Junior College; and Sonoma State University in Rohnert Park.

Power company braces 500,000 customers for next shutdown.

Pacific Gas and Electric officials said the power company notified 500,000 customers in Northern California on Sunday that they might have their power shut off Tuesday, with much of the same footprint affected as this weekend’s shut-offs.

Some customers might not have their power restored before the next shut-off, said Andy Vesey, the chief executive of PG&amp;E;, who said during a news conference Sunday night that public safety was paramount.

“We look for the highest risk zones where we have the potential for catastrophic wildfire,” Vesey said. “We will not roll the dice when it comes to public safety.”

Those potential shut-offs, which could affect 32 counties throughout the state, were announced within hours of the power cuts Sunday that affected nearly 3 million people, the largest fire-prevention blackouts in California history.

The new round would be the fourth time this month that the company has intentionally turned off electricity to large numbers of customers, some of whom had power for only a few hours between earlier blackouts.

PG&amp;E;’s policy of preemptively cutting power in the hope of preventing its lines and equipment from causing fires — as has happened several times in recent years — has angered customers, regulators and politicians. Leaders in the Democratic-controlled state Senate have organized a panel to review PG&amp;E;’s actions.

Vesey said he had spoken to customers whose power had been shut off at a community resource center set up by the utility and acknowledged their discontent.

“You’re right — what we do is not popular,” Vesey said during a news conference Sunday night. “I will not tell you that people congratulated us. People are angry.”

The best scientific explanation: Bad trends plus bad luck

Adam Sobel, an atmospheric scientist and director of the Initiative on Extreme Weather and Climate at Columbia University, gives an explanation:

This increasingly awful fall fire season follows hard on the previous two, in 2017 and 2018, both of which were worse than any in recent memory. Some of the same regions, and people, are being affected repeatedly in quick succession. Psychic trauma is surely compounded significantly for these residents, not to mention the firefighters on the front lines.

How should California residents think about the future, when the present is, suddenly and persistently, not only far outside their prior experience, but also, in its scale and velocity at least, beyond what science had predicted?

It’s an increasingly common experience, occurring with other kinds of events as well. Heavy rain events are becoming heavier around the world, but known climate trends can’t explain the repeated 500-or-more-year floods that Houston has seen in the last few years.

In the case of the increasingly frequent wildfire disasters in California, I argued the other day that they have multiple causes: poor maintenance by PG&amp;E;, expanded human settlement at the margins of fire-prone woodlands, and global warming. But I don’t think any of them explains either the suddenness or the persistence of the change that Californians have experienced in the last three years.

When it comes to the weather, and the climate, my views here are strongly informed by discussions with my colleague Park Williams, an expert on wildfire and climate whose research is directly relevant. That research shows that the area burned by fires each year in the summer months has increased drastically, and this is consistent with the influence expected from global warming.

But, as explained by Park in his recent research article, and in The Times on Friday, the headline-making fires of the last three years have all occurred in fall. In that season, temperature has a role, but other factors are likely to be more important — first and foremost, the dry Diablo and Santa Ana winds.

Those are mainly fall and winter phenomena, and clearly critical factors in the recent and current fires. But these winds are actually projected to occur less frequently as the climate warms (with no clear trend yet apparent in the observations). So the fires may be attributable to weather, but the most critical aspect of the weather isn’t directly attributable to human activity — nor, as far as I can tell, to any other, identifiable, larger cause.

My guess is that the best scientific answer goes something like this. The sparking might have gotten worse over time. But more important, in the last three years, it has encountered the hot, dry downslope winds markedly more often. And global warming is probably making those winds a little hotter, but the wind events themselves, the most important proximate causes, may well be only explainable, ultimately, as “natural variability.” That means they are inherently unpredictable. Bad luck, in other words. If this is true, it would suggest a decent chance that next year shouldn’t be as bad.

Or maybe the causes are in principle knowable, but current science just doesn’t know them. Maybe climate change is proceeding more rapidly and dangerously than we understand.

But it’s still good to understand what the limits of our knowledge are. That should keep us humble about our place on the Earth.

In the East Bay, the smell of smoke fills every room.

Thomas Fuller, San Francisco bureau chief of The New York Times, writes from his home in the East Bay. He lost power, along with hundreds of thousands of others.

At my house 25 miles from San Francisco in the hills of the East Bay, I woke up this morning at 4:30, walked with a flashlight across a spaghetti tangle of extension cords in the hallway and slipped into the backyard to turn on the generator. Nothing works in the house without it. Across Northern California on Monday around 2 million people were out of power. Only some of us were lucky enough to have a fallback.

As the Kincade fire in Wine Country forced the evacuation of nearly 200,000 people over the weekend, residents farther south scrambled to find gasoline. My neighbors messaged each other about which roads were safe to take to avoid the half-dozen spot fires that ignited in our area. In the town adjacent to mine, Lafayette, a fire destroyed a sports facility and threatened a hillside neighborhood. Another fire near the Carquinez Bridge shut down an interstate. At one point Sunday, four fires were burning simultaneously within 20 miles of my house.

On Monday morning the smell of smoke filled every room of my house.

The ferocious winds that propelled the fires bent saplings in half and knocked down mature trees, blocking a road near my house and injuring several people at a farmers’ market in nearby Martinez.

I’ve noticed that neighbors are using the word apocalyptic much more casually these days. The winds, which in some cases reached hurricane-level speeds, added to a feeling of chaos and powerlessness. At night, neighborhoods without power look eerily uninhabited.

We have taken for granted the convenience of flipping on a light switch or of checking email. In the bedroom communities of San Francisco and Silicon Valley the fires and blackouts have turned assumptions upside down. Pharmacies, supermarkets and restaurants are closed during the blackouts. On Sunday even the open space around us was closed — the regional park district announced it was off-limits because of extreme winds. We filled our bathtub after warnings that the water utility may need to shut down its pumps. One man said he had tried to go to six gas stations, all of them closed.

The extraordinary is becoming routine. Pacific Gas &amp; Electric says it may shut off power again this week, starting Tuesday when strong winds are expected to return.

Evacuations Jam a Major Freeway as Kincade and Getty Fires Rage

A brush fire that broke out early Monday morning on the western side of Los Angeles quickly consumed 500 acres, created gridlock on Interstate 405, the nation’s busiest highway, and resulted in mandatory evacuations.

The growing blaze caused the Los Angeles Unified School District, Santa Monica-Malibu Unified School District, and many private schools to close before classes were to begin.

He said at least five homes had been lost on Tigertail Road, which is just west of the 405 freeway. Ralph M. Terrazas, chief of the Los Angeles Fire Department, said he expected that number to rise.

Among the evacuees is Los Angeles Lakers forward LeBron James. “Had to emergency evacuate my house and I’ve been driving around with my family trying to get rooms,” he said in a Twitter message.

Capt. Erik Scott, a spokesman for the Los Angeles Fire Department, said the Getty Center, a billion-dollar complex in Los Angeles that houses an art museum with works by Rembrandt, van Gogh, Monet and Degas, was not immediately threatened by the blaze.

He added that no injuries had been reported as of about 4:30 a.m. local time and that the flames were moving west.

Thomas Fuller, San Francisco bureau chief of The New York Times, writes from his home in the East Bay. He lost power, along with hundreds of thousands of others.

‘Just tell me where to go,’ says a chef feeding firefighters.

As ash rained down and evacuation sirens sounded south of Windsor, a Sonoma County town where all residents have been ordered to leave because of the Kincade fire, Cameron Dailey jumped on the hood of a pickup truck and craned his neck to see which way the fire was blowing.

Dailey, 29 — a sous chef at Tips Roadside, a restaurant outside Santa Rosa — and some fellow employees spent the long and unpredictable weekend helping to run a generator-powered food truck near the fire line, serving burritos filled with tri-tip steak and pico de gallo to exhausted firefighters.

“I’m down to keep cooking,” Dailey said Sunday as fire engines and sheriffs’ SUVs raced past with their lights on. “Just tell me where to go.”

Dailey and his co-workers still had power at home in the cities of Sonoma and Santa Rosa, but the situation was deteriorating in towns farther north.

California National Guard troops, activated to help with the fire response, joined sheriffs’ deputies at some evacuation checkpoints near Windsor. Tan Humvees and soldiers in fatigues could be seen blocking some roads leading into the smoke-shrouded hills above the town. Streets that had been jammed with evacuation traffic Saturday were mostly deserted by Sunday afternoon, although there were still cars parked in many driveways.

Getty Fire Forces Evacuations in West Los Angeles as Kincade Fire Burns

A brush fire that broke out early Monday morning on the western side of Los Angeles quickly consumed 500 acres, created gridlock on the 405, the nation’s busiest highway, and resulted in mandatory evacuations.

Fonda, 81, was among 16 people charged with unlawfully demonstrating on the East Front of the Capitol, a misdemeanor under a Washington law prohibiting protesters from obstructing public building entrances, Capitol Police said.

She had just finished speaking as part of a Fire Drill Fridays protest, the first of a weekly series of planned climate change demonstrations, when she was taken into custody at 11:50 a.m. local time. Fonda was later released on her own recognizance.

With the Capitol Dome as a backdrop, Fonda said she wanted to show solidarity with young climate change strikers such as Greta Thunberg, the Swedish teenager who sailed across the Atlantic Ocean in an emissions-free yacht to draw attention to global warming. She said she became inspired after reading the best-selling book “On Fire: The (Burning) Case for a Green New Deal” by Naomi Klein about climate change over the Labor Day weekend.

“We have to ensure that the climate crisis remains front and center,” Fonda said. “I’ve been feeling that I wasn’t doing enough.”

Fonda vowed to return to the Capitol, saying that she was moving to Washington for the next four months out of a sense of urgency and moral outrage.

“The same toxic ideology that took this land from people who already lived here, that kidnapped people from Africa, turning them into slaves to work that stolen land, justified it by saying that those kidnapped and displaced people were not human beings, cut down the forests and exhausted the natural world just as it did the people — this foundational ideology is the same one that has brought us the human-driven climate change that we’re facing today,” she said.

The arrest of Fonda, a two-time Academy Award best actress winner and fitness video siren, recalled her rebellious liberal activism during the 1960s and 1970s, for which she has received both acclaim and criticism over the decades.

She had been active in the Black Panthers and started a vaudeville troupe with fellow actor Donald Sutherland as an alternative to the USO-sponsored shows of Bob Hope for entertaining soldiers.

Fonda’s 1972 visit to North Vietnam, where she had urged American pilots to stop the bombings during the war, earned her the pejorative nickname “Hanoi Jane.”

Fonda, who used a microphone Friday to address the demonstrators, said the group was trying to persuade lawmakers to support the Green New Deal, the environmental initiative proposed by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., that calls for a net-zero carbon U.S. economy by 2050.

The demonstrators also wanted to press Congress to put an end to fossil fuel exploration and to “phase out” fossil fuel infrastructure, said Fonda, who added that it was feasible to find fossil fuel industry workers comparable paying jobs in the renewable energy sector.

Fonda faces a fine of up to $250 and up to 90 days in jail if convicted of unlawful demonstration.

Her agent did not immediately respond to a request for comment Friday.

Jane Fonda Arrested During Climate Protest Outside U.S. Capitol

Jane Fonda was arrested outside the U.S. Capitol on Friday as part of a climate change protest, the latest act of civil disobedience by the Oscar-winning actress and Vietnam War objector, who said that she planned to reprise her role every Friday for the rest of the year.

But law enforcement officials said that a tip this week finally led them Wednesday night to the Arizona couple, murder suspects who had hunkered down in a remote outpost in the Tonto National Forest called Punkin Center.

It was there, the authorities said, that the Barksdales surrendered when law enforcement officers surrounded a modular home and several trailers in the unincorporated community, population 1,500. Their capture ended an exhaustive search for the fugitives, who had escaped in Utah on Aug. 26 after overpowering two private security guards who had been taking them back to Arizona from New York state, where they were arrested May 24.

“This is, obviously, a big relief off our shoulders,” David Gonzales, the U.S. marshal for Arizona, said during a news conference Thursday in Phoenix.

Gonzales said law enforcement officers had recently gotten tips that the couple had been in Snowflake, Arizona, a small town in Navajo County, where a Wells Fargo bank had been robbed Tuesday.

“Our hearts sunk,” he said. “It turned out it wasn’t them.”

Then, Gonzales said, the authorities received the tip that the Barksdales had an acquaintance in Punkin Center who was on probation for the sale of methamphetamines. Punkin Center is 114 miles from Snowflake.

As officers and a state police helicopter closed in on the couple’s hideout, the homeowner walked out of the residence, followed by Susan Barksdale, the authorities said. Next, Blane Barksdale came outside. He turned verbally abusive toward the arresting officers and made obscene gestures at them, the authorities said.

Officers used a stun gun and beanbag round from a shotgun to subdue him, the authorities said. Then, they said, he casually warned the arresting officers: “Be safe out there. It’s dangerous.”

The Arizona couple — she is 59 and he is 56 — were arrested May 24 in Henrietta, New York, a suburb of Rochester, on charges of first-degree murder, first-degree burglary, arson and other criminal offenses related to the killing of Frank Bligh, 72, of Tucson, in April.

Bligh’s body still has not been found, according to investigators, who said they nevertheless believed that he was a homicide victim and that he was last seen at the Cowpony Bar in Tucson on April 7.

Along with Blane Barksdale’s nephew, Brent Mallard, 31, the couple set fire to Bligh’s home, which was not occupied at the time, and caused an explosion, the authorities said. Mallard was charged with arson and second-degree burglary.

While the Barksdales were being extradited back to Arizona, the authorities said, they used the ruse that they had to go to the bathroom to overpower and kidnap two private security guards who had been transporting them through Utah.

When Capt. James Scott Jr. of the Tucson Police Department learned that the couple had escaped, he said Thursday, “You could imagine what came out of my mouth.” He said that knowing the U.S. marshals and several state, federal and local law enforcement agencies were on the trail made him sleep more easily at night.

“We just knew it was a matter of time that they would locate these individuals, and they did,” he said.

There had been a $25,000 reward for tips leading to the capture of Blane Barksdale, who was on the 15 Most Wanted list of the U.S. Marshals Service. The reward for Susan Barksdale’s capture was $10,000. The agency said Thursday that it was not immediately clear if the reward would be collected.

In addition to murder and arson charges, the Barksdales are expected to face kidnapping charges, according to the FBI. The U.S. Marshals Service said as many as four people could face charges for harboring the Barksdales, who appeared in federal court in Tucson on Thursday afternoon.

Asked if private security guards were transporting them, law enforcement officials smiled and said they were not.

Escapees Wanted on Murder Charges Are Captured in Arizona

What Blane and Susan Barksdale had been doing since Aug. 26 is still somewhat of a mystery.

The rollout of the executive action came during the American Veterans national convention in Louisville, Kentucky, where Trump was joined onstage by Betsy DeVos, the education secretary, and the deputy secretary of the Department of Veterans Affairs, James Byrne.

“I am proud to announce that I am taking executive action to ensure that our wounded warriors are not saddled with mountains of student debt,” Trump said. “They have made a sacrifice that’s so great. And they’re such incredible people. And they never complain. They never complain. That’s hundreds of millions of dollars in student debt held by our severely wounded warriors. It’s gone forever.”

The savings projected by the Trump administration represents a small fraction of about $1.6 trillion in overall student loan debt in the United States, which has become a point of emphasis among many of the Democrats running for president.

While 50,000 permanently disabled veterans in the country are eligible for relief under a decades-old debt forgiveness program, only half of them have qualified because of cumbersome requirements, according to the White House.

The executive action signed by Trump directs the Education Department and the Department of Veterans Affairs to simplify the process to speed up applications. The president said disabled veterans would not have to pay federal income tax on the forgiven debt, and he called on all 50 states to provide the same relief.

“So that’s really big stuff,” Trump said.

Some of the administration’s critics, however, have said that DeVos has hindered the process.

In a letter sent to DeVos in May, the attorneys general for 51 states and territories said that the Education Department was not doing enough to help ease the burden of college debt for disabled veterans and that the Education Department was too hung up on the tax implications of forgiving student loan debt.

“As a nation, we have a moral obligation to assist those who have put their lives on the line to defend us,” the group wrote.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/21/us/trump-veterans-student-loans.html" id="bd7f52f0-8adf-3d2b-ad40-3a0782092f58">The New York Times</a>.

Trump Orders Student Loan Forgiveness for Disabled Veterans

President Donald Trump signed a measure Wednesday that seeks to remove the bureaucratic barriers for permanently disabled veterans to qualify for student loan forgiveness, which he said would save 25,000 wounded warriors an average of $30,000.

The photo of the smiling Kappa Alpha members was the subject of a bias complaint filed with the university in March, according to Rod Guajardo, a spokesman for the university, which is commonly referred to as Ole Miss. He said he did not have a copy of the complaint and was unsure if it was a public record.

Guajardo said in an email on Thursday that the photo was referred to campus police and the FBI, which declined to investigate the matter further because it did not pose a specific threat. The university said it took no disciplinary action because, while offensive, what the students did was not a violation of the school’s code of conduct.

But the Ole Miss chapter of Kappa Alpha, which the three students are members of, said in a statement on Thursday that it took swift action after it learned of the photo on Tuesday.

“The photo is inappropriate, insensitive, and unacceptable,” the fraternity chapter said. “It does not represent our chapter.”

William C. Lamar, the U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Mississippi, turned the photo over to the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, according to the Mississippi Center for Investigative Reporting, which first obtained and reported on the image. The center is part of the Local Reporting Network of ProPublica, a nonprofit news organization.

Lamar did not respond to requests for comment Thursday, and a Justice Department spokeswoman declined to comment.

Emmett, who was 14 when he was killed in 1955, would have turned 78 on Thursday. The sign, which has been replaced multiple times after being vandalized, marks the spot along the Tallahatchie River where Emmett’s body was found after he was tortured and lynched. He had been accused of whistling at a white woman behind the counter of the grocery store where he went to buy candy. Last year, the cold case was quietly reopened by the Justice Department after the woman recanted parts of her story.

“To me, that’s sacred ground,” Deborah Watts, Emmett’s cousin and the co-founder of the Emmett Till Legacy Foundation, said in an interview Thursday. “Emmett’s body was dumped here. He was brutally murdered. He was lynched. What sense of pride does that represent for you?”

The photo was posted to a private Instagram account in March and has since been deleted, according to the Mississippi Center for Investigative Reporting. The center identified two of the students in the photo as Ben Leclere and John Lowe in a report published Thursday.

Leclere was holding a shotgun on the left side of the photo, and Lowe was crouching down and did not appear to be holding anything, the report said. It did not identify the third student who was on the right and holding a rifle.

It was unclear if the bullet holes were made by the students or if they were remnants of previous vandalism.

Efforts to reach Leclere and Lowe on Thursday were unsuccessful. Phone messages left at their parents’ numbers were not immediately returned.

The Ole Miss chapter of Kappa Alpha, a national fraternity whose “spiritual founder” was Robert E. Lee, the Confederate Civil War general, did not elaborate on the length or the nature of the suspensions. Neither did the national fraternity.

“We support the chapter and the actions they are taking,” the national Kappa Alpha order said through a spokesman.

Ole Miss defended its handling of the episode.

“This image and the actions portrayed in the photo of this off-campus incident are offensive and hurtful,” Guajardo said Thursday. “While the image is offensive, it did not present a violation of university code of conduct. It occurred off campus and was not part of a university-affiliated event. We stand ready to assist the fraternity with educational opportunities for those members and the chapter.”

“The University of Mississippi will continue to build programs that engage our students in deliberate, honest and candid conversations while making clear that we unequivocally reject attitudes that do not respect the dignity of each individual in our community,” Guajardo added.

Ole Miss has previously grappled with controversial symbols of the state’s past. In 2003, the Oxford, Mississippi, school retired its longtime sports mascot, Colonel Reb, a white-goateed, cane-toting Southern plantation owner that many had criticized as racist and anachronistic.

Emmett’s family said Thursday that their resolve was even stronger after the episode.

“This is still an open murder case,” Watts said. “Damaging that sign is not going to deter me or other members of our family that are continuing to pursue justice.”

Watts said she would leave it to law enforcement and prosecutors to determine whether a hate crime was committed by the three students in the photo.

“It’s like an assault on our humanity,” she said. “If somebody shot up Robert E. Lee’s statue, what would they feel about it?”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/25/us/emmett-till-ole-miss-students-fraternity.html" id="62a67419-f53d-3ac5-a1b8-088f3a93670f">The New York Times</a>.

Three students at the University of Mississippi were suspended by their fraternity on Wednesday after an Instagram photo surfaced of them brandishing guns in front of a bullet-riddled memorial sign for Emmett Till, whose brutal murder in 1955 served as a catalyst for the civil rights movement.

'Unacceptable': Mississippi Fraternity Suspends 3 Over Photo

Leclere was holding a shotgun on the left side of the photo, and Lowe was holding an AR-15 semi-automatic rifle on the right, the report said. The report did not identify the third student, who was crouching down and did not appear to be holding anything.

The officer, Charlie Rispoli, a 14-year veteran of the Police Department in Gretna, referred to Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., in a post Thursday as “this vile idiot.”

The post continued, saying she “needs a round — and I don’t mean the kind she used to serve,” a reference to her past work as a bartender, according to a screenshot of his comment obtained by nola.com, which covers New Orleans.

He was responding to a post by the satirical website tatersgonnatate.com with the headline “Ocasio-Cortez on the Budget: ‘We Pay Soldiers Too Much.’”

Wayne Rau, a city councilman and the mayor pro tem of Gretna, a city of about 18,000 people across the Mississippi River from New Orleans, condemned Rispoli’s post in an interview Sunday.

“I’m pretty appalled by it,” Rau said. “I don’t think this is a representation of the Police Department of the city of Gretna.”

Asked whether Rispoli’s Facebook post was a threat, he said, “I’m not sure how to take that post.” He said it should be up to the city’s police chief, Arthur Lawson, to decide on any disciplinary or criminal action.

In addition to Rau, there are four other members on the Gretna City Council. Three were not immediately available for comment Sunday. The fourth, Jackie Berthelot, directed questions to the Police Department.

Efforts Sunday to reach Rispoli, who appeared to have deactivated his Facebook account, were unsuccessful. Corbin Trent, a spokesman for Ocasio-Cortez, declined to comment. Lawson, who is an elected official, did not immediately respond to a request for comment Sunday.

The chief told nola.com that he was disturbed by the post.

“I will tell you this: This will not go unchecked,” he said. “I’m not going to take this lightly and this will be dealt with on our end. It’s not something we want someone that’s affiliated with our department to make these types of statements. That’s not going to happen.”

The chief told the website on Friday that the post appeared to violate the department’s social media policy but he did not think it rose to the level of being a threat.

Ocasio-Cortez is part of a quartet of first-year Democrats in the House who have received death threats and were told by President Donald Trump to “go back where you came from” in a racially charged post on Twitter.

Belinda Constant, the mayor of Gretna, said Sunday that she had been out of the state and was not immediately prepared to comment. “I will be looking into the situation,” Constant, a Democrat, said.

Eva Malecki, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Capitol Police, declined to say whether the agency was investigating.

“The mission of the United States Capitol Police is to protect and serve Congress,” she said. “However, we do not discuss how we carry out our protective responsibilities.”

The four congresswomen were also the subject of a recent Facebook post by the Republican County Chairmen’s Association of Illinois, which depicted them in a mock movie poster that referred to them as the “jihad squad.”

“Political Jihad is their game,” said the post, which was published Friday and later deleted. “If you don’t agree with their socialist ideology you’re racist.”

It showed Reps. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota and Ayanna S. Pressley of Massachusetts brandishing guns.

On Sunday night, the state’s Republican Party chairman, Tim Schneider, issued a statement disavowing the post, which he said did not reflect the party’s values.

“Bigoted rhetoric greatly distracts from legitimate and important policy debates and further divides our nation,” Schneider said, adding, “I urge everyone who opposes them to keep the rhetoric focused on policy and ideology.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/21/us/charlie-rispoli-gretna-police.html" id="4b3d9b20-1120-3781-a2f8-1d2bf50ccf32">The New York Times</a>.

Louisiana Police Officer on Facebook Says Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez 'Needs a Round'

A Facebook post by a Louisiana police officer suggesting that Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez “needs a round” drew criticism Sunday from officials in the city where he works.

Racially and religiously charged comments Zhu had made on Twitter came to the attention of pageant organizers, who ruled that they violated the competition’s rules of “good character.”

After a flurry of text messages and emails between Zhu, 20, and organizers, she was told the competition would no longer recognize her and she was to stop mentioning or using images of herself as the pageant’s winner.

Zhu, a conservative activist who is a University of Michigan senior and the social media director for the national group Chinese Americans for Trump, shared on social media an email she had received Thursday from the pageant’s state director, Laurie DeJack.

“It has been brought to the attention of Miss World America ‘MWA’ that your social media accounts contain offensive, insensitive and inappropriate content,” DeJack wrote.

The first tweet that drew the scrutiny of the pageant came in response to criticism of police officers about the Black Lives Matter movement.

“Did you know the majority of black deaths are caused by other blacks?” Zhu wrote on Twitter in October 2017. “Fix problems within your own community first before blaming others.”

In February 2018, in a tweet she has since deleted, Zhu criticized a World Hijab Day awareness event at the University of Central Florida, where she had been a student before transferring.

“There’s a ‘try a hijab on’ booth at my college campus,” Zhu wrote at the time. “So you’re telling me that it’s now just a fashion accessory and not a religious thing? Or are you just trying to get women used to being oppressed under Islam.”

Zhu said in an interview Saturday that her tweets had been taken out of context and that she was punished for her conservative views. She said that not wanting to wear a hijab did not make her an Islamophobe.

This was the first pageant entered by Zhu, who is now disqualified from advancing to the Miss World America pageant in October in Las Vegas.

“They just immediately assumed that I was a racist,” said Zhu, vice president of the College Republicans at the University of Michigan. “They should have let me explain myself.”

DeJack declined to comment Saturday and referred questions to the Miss World America organization, an international competition that dates to 1951.

The organization’s national director, Michael Galanes, and its chief operating officer, Robert Gandara, did not respond to messages seeking comment. There was no immediate word on who would replace Zhu.

Zhu is not the first beauty pageant contestant to be embroiled in controversy.

In 2009, Carrie Prejean Boller, who was the first runner-up nationally in the Miss USA pageant, faced a backlash when she was asked whether she supported same-sex marriage and answered that marriage should be between a man and a woman.

“There was a huge outcry about this,” said professor Hilary Levey Friedman, an author, sociologist and beauty pageant expert.

Boller, who also drew attention for seminude photos, was fired as Miss California USA by pageant organizers, including Donald Trump, because, they said, she did not fulfill her contractual obligations to make required public appearances.

Erika Harold, who was Miss America in 2003 and ran unsuccessfully for Congress and for Illinois attorney general as a Republican, caused a stir for promoting an abstinence education program.

Levey Friedman pointed out that pageant winners with liberal views, such as Kate Shindle, the 1998 Miss America who pushed for AIDS education and distributing condoms in schools, have also caused controversy.

Vanessa Williams, the actress and singer, surrendered her crown as the first black Miss America in 1984 after revelations that Penthouse magazine was about to publish nude photos she had posed for when she was a photographer’s assistant. In 2015, the chief executive of Miss America apologized to Williams for the way the controversy had been handled.

Blain Roberts, a history professor at Fresno State University in California who has written about pageants, said competitions such as Miss America have strict rules that contestants must never have been married and must adhere to a code of conduct.

“You had to sign a pledge as a contestant guaranteeing that you had not engaged in any acts of moral turpitude,” Roberts said.

The tiara went to Kathy Zhu, but one day after she had been crowned Miss Michigan by the Miss World America organization, the beauty queen was stripped of her title.

Neil Vigdor

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