Stranger Than Fiction

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TOP NEWS

• Minneapolis police clashed with protesters angered over the death of George Floyd. A video showed Mr. Floyd telling officers he couldn’t breath while one of the cops held him face down on the ground with his knee on the back of Mr. Floyd’s neck for around five minutes. Several hundred protesters gathered at the location of the encounter.

• Facebook shut down efforts to make the site less divisive. An internal effort to understand how the platform shaped user behavior and how the company might address potential harms but Zuckerberg and other senior executives largely shelved the research, according to internal documents and people familiar with the effort.

• EU proposes a $824 billion COVID-19 recovery plan. The plan aims to quickly provide a massive fiscal injection for the hardest hit countries in the European Union, without increasing the already-soaring debt levels of southern countries such as Italy, Spain and Greece.

• Millions of children in the U.S. don’t have access to food. An emergency program created two months ago by Congress has only reached a fraction of the 30 million children it was intended to help. An outdated system has made it difficult to get food into their hands, with only 15% of eligible children receiving benefits.

WHAT I’M READING + WATCHING + LISTENING TO

• “I survived coronavirus with a greater awareness of my own privilege—and a profound struggle to reconcile that with what was happening to my community.”

• 35 ways to jump start your emergency savings

• How the coronavirus rippled through eight young lives

• The 90,000 fans who screamed in an empty stadium

THE COMMENT

"When sirens managed to pierce through whatever show I was ingesting on Netflix or Amazon Prime, I wondered if the ambulance’s new passenger looked like me, and whether they, too, had good insurance that facilitated video appointments with their doctor. My partner’s suggestion to cook a $30 lamb for Easter dinner was hard to swallow when the line at the nearby community kitchen snaked down the street and around the corner. When I learned that my cousin back home in Mississippi was still working her job as a grocery clerk, I started to compose a text suggesting that she consider other options, then stopped myself. Who was I to speak of options when I was working cozily from my bedroom? I had the luxury of worrying about my 401(k) rather than next month’s rent, and was even saving more cash since I wasn’t spending on commuting and happy-hour cocktails.” - J.J. McCorvey

THE STRANGEST

• Local TV stations air Amazon PR piece on worker safety as if it were a real news story

THE AV ROOM