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George Floyd’s body arrived at a Houston church Tuesday for a private funeral, to be followed by burial, capping six days of mourning for the black man whose death inspired a global reckoning over police brutality and racial injustice. Floyd, 46, was to be laid to rest next to his mother in the suburb of Pearland. He cried out for her as a white Minneapolis police officer pressed a knee on his neck May 25. Cellphone video of the encounter ignited protests and scattered violence in cities across the U.S. and around the world. While the service was private, at least 50 people gathered outside the Fountain of Praise church to pay their respects. “There’s a real big change going on and everybody, especially black, right now should be a part of that,” said Kersey Biagase, who traveled more than three hours from Port Barre, Louisiana, with his girlfriend, Brandi Pickney. The couple wore matching T-shirts she designed, printed with Floyd’s name and “I Can’t Breathe,” the words he uttered...

LONDON — A statue of a slave trader has reignited the culture wars in the U.K. Thousands took to the streets in Britain at the weekend to join anti-racism demonstrations after George Floyd died in Minneapolis during a forceful police arrest. Almost four years after the referendum on EU membership created a new fault-line in British politics, the response to a small number of violent and destructive incidents amid largely peaceful protests exposed deep cultural divides that extend well beyond Brexit. One moment in particular — the toppling of a statue of 17th century slave trader Edward Colston in Bristol — quickly became the centerpiece of the debate. The memorial was dragged off its plinth with ropes and tossed into the harbor. To many it was criminal damage — "thuggish behavior," as Home Secretary Priti Patel wrote in the Telegraph —  that undermines a legitimate quest to end racism. Some questioned why, despite the ongoing pandemic, protesters broke social distancing...

Authorities in Antwerp removed a statue of the former Belgian king and colonial ruler Leopold II on Tuesday after it was set on fire in protest at his oppressive rule of Congo. The removal of the statue came after thousands of Belgians took to the streets at the weekend in support of the Black Lives Matter protests that have swept across Europe from the U.S. following George Floyd's death while in police custody in Minneapolis. Leopold II's rule from 1865 to 1909 involved a reign of terror in the Congo, which he ran as his personal property before it became a Belgian colony. In recent days, his statues in Brussels, Ostend, Ghent and other cities have been defaced, set on fire, covered in paint and daubed with the words “I can’t breathe,” the last words of George Floyd. The Antwerp statue, located in the city's Ekeren district, was painted red before being lit on fire, causing serious damage. Ekeren's local Mayor Koen Palinckx, from the right-wing New Flemish Allian...

NEW YORK — An NYPD officer seen on video shoving a young woman to the ground during a Brooklyn police brutality protest now faces criminal charges. The officer, Vincent D’Andraia, is charged with criminal mischief, harassment and menacing, said Brooklyn District Attorney Eric Gonzalez. Video shows the officer forcefully shove the young woman during a May 29 protest over the killing of George Floyd. She struck the pavement and went to the emergency room. “I fully support the long-held American tradition of non-violent protest. As District Attorney I cannot tolerate the use of excessive force against anyone exercising this Constitutionally guaranteed right. This is especially true of those who are sworn to protect us and uphold the law,” Gonzalez said. ‘I am deeply troubled by this unnecessary assault. We will now seek to hold this defendant accountable.” The cop is one of two officers who have been suspended without pay from the NYPD for their actions at protests. The other suspend...

The lobbying firm Squire Patton Boggs has fired former Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott, one of Washington’s most prominent lobbyists. The firm gave no reason for the Mississippi Republican’s sudden departure and declined to answer questions about it. Mark Ruehlmann, Squire Patton Boggs’ chairman and global chief executive, said only that the firm had “decided that it is the right time to make a change in the leadership” of its public policy practice. “We wish to thank retired Senator Trent Lott for his years of service to the firm and our clients,” he said in a statement on Monday night. “As a global law firm, we are obliged to constantly evaluate and tailor our professional offerings to not only respond, but also anticipate the issues and concerns of an evolving marketplace and the clients we serve.” Asked whether it would be accurate to describe his departure as a firing, a Squire Patton Boggs spokesman reiterated that the “firm’s leadership decided to part ways with Senator Lo...

President Donald Trump on Tuesday suggested without evidence that the 75-year-old man whose head was cracked open by Buffalo law enforcement last week was an “ANTIFA provocateur” — alleging that the septuagenarian protester was attempting to “set up” the police officers who assaulted him. “Buffalo protester shoved by Police could be an ANTIFA provocateur. 75 year old Martin Gugino was pushed away after appearing to scan police communications in order to black out the equipment. @OANN,” Trump wrote on Twitter, citing the conservative cable channel One America News Network. Trump added: “I watched, he fell harder than was pushed. Was aiming scanner. Could be a set up?” The president’s conspiratorial social media post comes after a video of the encounter last Thursday between Martin Gugino and Buffalo, New York, police, shot by local NPR affiliate WBFO, went viral online amid nationwide protests in the wake of the killing of George Floyd, a 46-year-old black man, by Minneapolis poli...

Trump ally and frequent cable news commentator Dan Bongino is expected to testify Wednesday in a high-profile House Judiciary Committee hearing on police brutality, according to a communication reviewed by POLITICO. The combative Fox News personality was included on an informal list of witnesses sent to staff of committee Democrats last night. He was listed as one of the Republicans’ witnesses. A spokesperson for committee Republicans declined to comment, and Bongino did not immediately respond to multiple requests for comment. The hearing will focus on police brutality, in the wake of the killing of an unarmed African American man, George Floyd, by a white police officer in Minneapolis. The officer, Derek Chauvin, was seen in a video pressing his knee on Floyd’s neck for nearly nine minutes as Floyd begged for his life. Chauvin is facing multiple charges, including second degree murder. Two autopsy reports have called the death a homicide, and video of the killing set off massive, ...

NEW YORK — A senior official in the de Blasio administration has left the mayor's office over his handling of recent protests across the city — the first departure of a high-ranking aide since the start of the demonstrations demanding police reform. Senior adviser Alison Hirsh was so troubled by de Blasio’s near-unconditional defense of the NYPD amid incidents of violence against protesters, she decided to step down from the job she was hired for last fall, three sources familiar with her departure confirmed to POLITICO. Hirsh will begin this week as a senior adviser to Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza, focused on the complicated task of reopening public schools after the coronavirus forced a system-wide closure in March. “I could not be prouder to join the amazing team at the Department of Education, particularly at this moment in history,” Hirsh, who will maintain her $230,000-a-year salary, said in a prepared statement. “As a working mother I feel this personally. Nothi...

France will ban police from using chokeholds to carry out arrests and take a harder line on racism in police ranks, Interior Minister Christophe Castaner said. Castaner's decision follows outrage in France over alleged police brutality and racial discrimination in law enforcement. Thousands gathered last week in Paris to protest the 2016 death of a black man in police custody and the handling of the case by the judicial system. The case has been likened to the death of George Floyd, an unarmed American black man, who died of asphyxiation in Minneapolis after a police officer pressed his knee on his neck for almost nine minutes. "The method of chokehold or strangulation will be abandoned, and will no longer be taught in police schools," Castaner told journalists on Monday. "Nobody's life should be at risk during an arrest." "The method was dangerous," Castaner added . On Tuesday, Castaner told French TV channel BFM TV that 30 investigations h...

Joe Biden says he, like many white people, was wrong about racism in America. “I thought we had made enormous progress when we finally elected an African American president,” he told voters in a livestreamed “Young Americans Town Hall” last week. “I thought you could defeat hate, you could kill hate. But the point is, you can’t.” Days earlier Biden said he thinks others are experiencing a similar awakening to their own willful naiveté. “Ordinary folks who don’t think of themselves as having a prejudiced bone in their body, don’t think of themselves as racists," Biden said , "have kind of had the mask pulled off.” The killing of George Floyd by a white police officer — and the viral video of the agonizing 8 minutes and 46 seconds with the officer’s knee on Floyd’s neck — has prompted a reckoning with racism for not only Biden, but for a wide swath of white America, according to polls conducted since Floyd’s death and anecdotal evidence from around the country. Every stat...

Joe Biden declared he opposed a growing movement on the left to defund police departments. President Donald Trump and Republicans are determined to make him own it anyway. Trump lit into Biden on Twitter, painting him as the leader of the “radical left” and responsible for a movement that celebrates anarchy, coddles “antifa” and demonizes law enforcement. But the swiftness and clarity of Biden's dismissal, which came as CBS, ABC’s “The View” and other media outlets were peppering Democratic politicians with questions about defunding the police, suggests Biden's team wanted to head off an issue it saw as politically poisonous. And at least for now, they've succeeded. Biden emerged from the attacks on Monday without suffering any significant backlash from activists who've embraced the "defund" movement. It was the latest attempt by Trump to tie Biden to the most far-left positions in the Democratic Party. The aim is to hurt the presumptive nominee among in...

President Donald Trump, increasingly nervous about the direction of his campaign as he struggles in general election polls, is considering bringing back more loyal aides from his successful campaign in 2016, according to five Republicans who speak to the president. He wants lobbyist David Urban , a former senior adviser who was pivotal in helping him win Pennsylvania, to play a more prominent role. He is considering re-hiring Susie Wiles, who managed his Florida campaign but was unceremoniously fired last year, to help him win the nation’s largest swing state for a second time. The campaign just hired senior advisers Jason Miller to focus on overall strategy and coordinate between the campaign and White House and Boris Epshteyn to be strategic adviser for coalitions. And officials have mentioned bringing back lobbyist Bryan Lanza, who was former deputy communications director, too. Trump is increasingly concerned that his reelection prospects could be slipping away and wants to b...

As protests unfolded over the latest police killing of a middle-aged black man, an African American bishop asked Mike Pence a simple question: How can you personally reunite a racially splintered nation? Pence, a devout Christian of the born-again stripe, calmly replied that he would orient the country toward God and away from “voices of division” demanding transformational change — or, in his words, talking “too much” about systemic racism. “The faith community, I believe, has before and can again pay an enormously important role in healing the divide in our country,” Pence said to the clergy and congregants seated around him. What doesn’t help, he volunteered, is “this talk of institutional bias, or racism, within law enforcement.” “It’s a challenging time to be in law enforcement, but I would tell you that Donald Trump and I know and believe that the men and women of law enforcement — our white officers, our African American officers, our Hispanic, Latino and Asian officers — the...

Some West Virginians voting in Tuesday’s primary will be allowed to tap on their phones or laptops instead of heading to the polls. Some in Delaware will get to do the same next month. And the trend may spread into November, as the coronavirus pandemic inspires a search for voting methods that don’t expose people to the deadly disease. But moving elections to the internet poses huge risks that the United States is unprepared to handle — endangering voters’ privacy, the secrecy of the ballot and even the trustworthiness of the results. The problems: The internet is riddled with security flaws that hackers can exploit. So are voters’ computers, smartphones and tablets. And the U.S. has never developed a centralized digital identity system like the one in Estonia, a tiny, digitally savvy nation that has held its elections online since 2005. “Securing the return of voted ballots via the internet while ensuring ballot integrity and maintaining voter privacy is difficult, if not impos...

At 3:15 p.m. on April 29, 1992, a jury delivered not-guilty verdicts for four Los Angeles police officers charged with using excessive force in the arrest of Rodney King a year earlier. It was a warm afternoon in Los Angeles, and news of the verdicts inflamed many residents, who had assumed that the video of the assault—showing King being beaten into submission—would ensure convictions. By sundown, angry residents had taken over the intersection of Florence and Normandie Avenues and were pulling drivers from their cars, while demonstrators downtown pelted police headquarters with rocks and set a shack on fire. I covered the riots for the Los Angeles Times , and I watched the shack burn. The riots escalated quickly. The Los Angeles Police Department was paralyzed and leaderless—Chief Daryl F. Gates left police headquarters in the opening hours of the unrest to attend an anti-reform fundraiser and was out of touch as the violence took hold. That created a vacuum at the LAPD, which face...