an entire political party, and a whole media infrastructure continue to accept, embrace, and protect him and his pathologies.

The Trump administration in mid-2019 issued an emergency declaration to push through an $8 billion-plus arms deal with the Saudi kingdom and the United Arab Emirates without congressional approval.

The Democrat-led House voted, mostly along party lines, to block the weapons sale. Trump vetoed the resolutions last July, and the GOP-held Senate failed in an attempt to override the veto.

Much of the opposition stemmed from the 2018 slaying in a Saudi Consulate in Turkey of Washington Post columnist and U.S. resident Jamal Khashoggi, as well as Saudi Arabia’s military endeavors in Yemen. News outlets reported in late 2018 that the CIA found that Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman himself had ordered the assassination of Khashoggi, citing people familiar with the matter. The crown prince has denied ordering the killing.

More importantly, U.S. intelligence knew of a plan to lure Khashoggi back to arrest him, so the president and the de facto ambassador to Saudi Arabia must have also known. If they knew and did not share the information with Khashoggi, they are liable. [snip]

Last October, Jared Kushner paid an unannounced visit to Riyadh, where it’s reported that he stayed up until the wee hours talking “strategy” with the crown prince, apparently his new BFF. He allegedly gave MbS an “enemies list” culled from the classified president’s daily brief, which MbS seems to have used the following month to purge disloyal relatives from government and take their money. Also last October, Kushner’s company received a $57 million loan from Fortress Investment Group, which was recently purchased by SoftFund, a Saudi investment concern, to bail out its troubled property at One Journal Square in Jersey City. (A larger and more widely-reported loan, to bail out the troubled property at 666 Fifth Avenue, came the following summer, via Qatar.)

An epidemiologist called Brummert Tuesday, April 21 with the news: They had traced her exposure back to the keypad at the pharmacy.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has always warned that "it may be possible" to become infected with coronavirus by touching contaminated surfaces or objects.

It just "does not spread easily" in that manner...

An epidemiologist called Brummert Tuesday, April 21 with the news: They had traced her exposure back to the keypad at the pharmacy.

McLean said he and other jurors did the best they could with the evidence presented and were unaware of information turned up in the AP review of the case -- in part because his co-defendants were not allowed to take the stand. Both have since said Burrell was not even on the scene. One of them, Ike Tyson, admits to being the shooter.

“Now there are statements from Ike Tyson saying he did the shooting. We didn’t have that then,” McLean said. [snip]

The AP examined thousands of pages of court documents and archival video that showed police investigators offered cash to potential witnesses in exchange for information. In addition, they relied on the testimony of jail house snitches who received reduced sentences in exchange, and later recanted their testimony.

At the end of the interview, McLean asked an AP reporter to deliver a message to Burrell: “Tell him that I’m sorry,” he said. “I tried to do my best. I kind of think in retrospect I failed.”

After reviewing police records, court transcripts, and interrogation tapes, in addition to interviewing dozens of people connected to the case, the AP found that the case against Burrell was extremely thin. It relied substantially on the testimony of one of Burrell’s teen rivals, who gave conflicting accounts of the shooter’s identity, which, per the report, was “largely obscured behind a wall 120 feet away.” There were no eyewitnesses, and a stunning lack of physical evidence — no gun, fingerprints, or DNA — and Burrell, who was 16 at the time of the 2002 shooting, claims a convenience-store surveillance tape that would have cleared him of all wrongdoing never surfaced.

Additionally, Burrell’s co-defendants have confessed to their involvement in Edwards’s death, and they all say Burrell wasn’t there. Burrell had an alibi that day, but the police reportedly didn’t follow up on it. One of Burrell’s co-defendants, Ike Tyson, insists that he was the one who pulled the trigger; he says he fired off the rounds with the intention of scaring a member of a rival gang, and that it wasn’t until later that evening he learned of Edwards’s death. “I already shot an innocent girl,” Tyson told the AP. “Now an innocent guy — at the time he was a kid — is locked up for something he didn’t do. So it’s like I’m carrying two burdens.”