Chicago Deputy Police Chief Shoots Himself, Latest in Long History of Suicides at the Department

The Chicago Police Department's new deputy chief of criminal networks was found dead on Tuesday from an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound, the latest in a history of suicides at the department.Dion Boyd, 57, was sworn into his new post on July 15 after 30-years on the force. Superintendent David Brown urged officers to keep an eye out for colleagues who could be in distress."Let's always remember to take care of ourselves and each other," Brown said at a press conference.The national suicide rate among police officers is about 18 per 100,000 as of 2017, however the rate in Chicago is 60 percent higher."One of the shocking statistics for me was that cops kill themselves at a higher rate than bad guys kill the police.  And when you put it in those numbers, you realize that there’s a real problem," Phil Cline, executive director of the Chicago Police Memorial Foundation, told WBBM radio.  “And it’s not something the just sprung up in the last year or so. It’s been a problem for a while."Boyd's body was found at the department's Homan Square facility, a secretive site that houses the anti-gang and bomb and arson squads. Various abuses allegedly occurred at the site, including reports of excessive force used in interrogations uncovered by The Guardian in 2016.Chicago police are currently attempting to clamp down on shootings that have plagued the city since Memorial Day weekend.While shootings typically rise in the city throughout the summer months, this year has seen a particularly sharp uptick. Chicago has recorded about 2,000 shooting victims so far this year, compared to roughly 1,400 over the same period in 2019.The seasonal rise seems to have been exacerbated by the impact of coronavirus lockdowns on inner city neighborhoods, as well as anti-police sentiment stemming from the George Floyd protests roiling the U.S.

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Spoiler alert? Kamala Harris outed as Biden's VP pick -- maybe

Joe Biden's vice presidential pick has been one of Washington's best kept secrets but a supposedly accidental news publication and Biden's own teasingly displayed notes are raising expectations that the winner is Kamala Harris. Speculation over the choice of VP is a parlor game played every four years in Washington, but this time the stakes are unusually high. Biden would be 78 on taking office -- the oldest US president ever -- and he has hinted that he might not seek a second term, making his deputy the prime candidate to take on the party's nomination.

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U.S. coronavirus deaths rise by nearly 1,300 for first time since May

California, Florida and Texas, the three most-populous states, reported one-day record spikes in deaths on Tuesday, together accounting for 584 of the 1,292 new deaths. Tuesday's surge in deaths comes on top of U.S. deaths rising on a weekly basis for three weeks in a row. A spike in infections in Arizona, California, Florida and Texas this month has overwhelmed hospitals.

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Chicago police chief dies in apparent suicide after promotion

A 30-year veteran of the Chicago police force is found dead two weeks after being promoted; Matt Finn reports from Chicago as the city marks another deadly night of violence.

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Was Belarus’ Arrest of Russian Wagner Soldiers Staged in a Ploy to Postpone Elections?

MOSCOW—The videos were certainly not what Russians have come to expect from their country’s secret warriors abroad: powerful men in unmarked uniforms imposing Russian influence on Syria, Ukraine, and Africa. These men were caught on camera by Belarusian security officers totally unprepared. Some were naked except for underwear, with documents, propaganda leaflets, and condoms strewn around their hotel rooms. Others wore vaguely marked uniforms. All 33 of them were military-age Russians hunkered down just outside Minsk a few days before Belarus’ presidential elections.Belarusian state news agencies reported the soldiers served as Russian security contractors with Wagner, a Russian private military group close to the government. They were in the country for “destabilization” purposes before the elections, Belarusian officials said. Moscow denied any military involvement in Belarus, and some believe the mercenaries were simply using the country as a staging post on their way to or from their latest assignment. By arresting the Wagner soldiers, Belarus’ embattled president Alexander Lukashenko is likely to be making many enemies in Russia. The Belarusian Security Council accused the arrested Wagner soldiers of preparing “a terrorist attack,” the Russian Interfax news agency reported Thursday. The arrest and subsequent broadcast of the footage, which was aired by a Belarusian state channel, Agency of Television News, was all the more confusing as Belarus and Russia have been allies in an arrangement called the Union State for decades. Some of the men were shown in their underwear with hands twisted behind their backs. They had tattoos on their arms, and one uniform patch read: “Our business is death and the business is good.” The state media report said there were more than 200 such soldiers plotting to upset the presidential elections next month. The Russian private security contractor, Wagner, has reportedly been sending combatants to eastern Ukraine, Syria, and African countries, including Libya, on deadly secret missions that give the Kremlin plausible deniability. When the Belarusian state media published the names of the 33 arrested soldiers, 17 of them matched up to a Ukrainian list of “war criminals” who fought on the Russian-backed side in the Ukraine war. Belarusian weekly newspaper Nasha Niva reported that one of the mercenaries, Andrey Bakunovich, was a commander of Wagner’s group of snipers. The Belarus-1 channel quoted a source in the Belarusian intelligence agency, still called the KGB, as saying that several of the arrested private soldiers were Russian citizens who tried to avoid punishment by demonstrating their paperwork confirming they were serving in various Russian military forces. A well-known Russian nationalist novelist, Zakhar Prilepin, who fought in Ukraine, also said he recognized several of the arrested soldiers. “Hundreds of these people work in the private military forces and take part in various conflicts,” Prilepin told a nationalist website, Russian Spring. The soldiers were merely using Belarus for transit on the way to foreign missions, he said. “It is going to be weird if now the Union State will start some political hysterics because of this story.”But later on Wednesday, Russia’s Federal Security Service, Russia’s successor to the KGB, seemed to accuse Prilepin of talking too much. “I am surprised that some of our idiots confirmed that the arrested men are soldiers of our private military forces,” a retired FSB general-major, Alexander Mikhailov, told reporters.The private forces known as Wagner are financed by Russian President Vladimir Putin’s close friend Yevgeny Prigozhin, who owns catering companies and is known as “Putin’s chef.” “Whenever Putin needs to solve an issue abroad, his personal chef and close ally Prigozhin sends his soldiers,” Sergey Parkhomenko, a political commentator, told The Daily Beast. “Prigozhin’s corporation feeds the Kremlin and fights its wars.”   Longtime Belarus watchers, familiar with the almost three-decades-long rule of Lukashenko, suggested the arrests were a well-staged “performance” by Lukashenko, to perhaps win support from domestic opponents to Russia before the election on Aug. 9. For nearly 30 years, Lukashenko claimed up to 80 percent of public support, but his popularity has recently faded, along with his loyalty to the Kremlin, to Moscow’s frustration.The macho leader, who is known for mocking women—and, recently, those who succumb to coronavirus—as weaklings, is now challenged by three liberal, pro-Western women in the election. For weeks, thousands of people have been protesting in Belarus, demanding to end Lukashenko’s dictatorship; his approval rating has melted down to 24 percent, according to some polls. Lukashenko may be losing favor in the Kremlin, but in Putin’s eyes, there is no doubt he is a better prospect than any of the liberal pro-Western female candidates.Lukashenko’s longtime rival, ex-presidential candidate Andrei Sannikov, is convinced that Lukashenko and Putin had both been aware of the plans to arrest the Wagner mercenaries ahead of time. “Putin gives Lukashenko the license to stay in power and helps him with this Wagner scandal, to pretend the threat is too serious to continue the election race,” Sannikov told The Daily Beast. “Putin is making a mistake, Lukashenko is a nutcase.”At the meeting with the head of Belarusian KGB, Lukashenko commented on the arrests of Russian soldiers: “I’m looking at the reaction of the Russians. They are already making excuses, saying that we brought them here ourselves. Clearly, they try to, somehow, to justify their dirty intentions.”Whether he was in on the plan to bring the soldiers to Belarus or not, Lukashenko is certainly trying to capitalize on the apparent Russian meddling. He could even try to postpone the election or cancel it altogether. “You and I should be worried about destabilization of the situation in our country most of all,” he said after the arrests. “The issue of the presidential election is secondary.”Read more at The Daily Beast.Get our top stories in your inbox every day. Sign up now!Daily Beast Membership: Beast Inside goes deeper on the stories that matter to you. Learn more.

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Buddy, the first dog to test positive for COVID-19 in the US, has died

Buddy first showed symptoms in mid-April, right before his 7th birthday. He was struggling to breathe, lost weight and became increasingly lethargic.

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Protester arrested while opposing removal of Confederate statue in Georgia

A protester was arrested and charged with obstruction for refusing to leave as a Confederate statue was removed a public square in the city of McDonagh, Georgia.The monument was taken down overnight on Wednesday by workers who used a crane to winch it from its pedestal in McDonagh Square.

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Israel says it arrested Hamas militant who fled strip by sea

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Trump attended a fundraiser in Texas without a mask on the day the US hit 150,000 coronavirus deaths

Trump was expected to attend the fundraiser with GOP Rep. Louie Gohmert, but the congressman tested positive for the coronavirus.

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Ellen DeGeneres Apologizes to Staff Members as WarnerMedia Investigates Show

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A key federal appeals court will reexamine case on Michael Flynn's guilty plea

The full panel of judges' decision to review Flynn's case could result in a reversal of a three-judge panel's decision to dismiss the case last month.

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Iran says fires missiles from underground in Gulf war games

Iran's Revolutionary Guards said they launched ballistic missiles from "the depths of the Earth" on Wednesday during the last day of military exercises near sensitive Gulf waters. The launches came a day after the Guards struck a mock-up of a US aircraft carrier with volleys of missiles near the Strait of Hormuz, a vital shipping lane for a fifth of world oil output. The Iranian manoeuvres were staged amid heightened tensions between Iran and its decades-old arch enemy the United States.

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Portland has become the focal point of Black Lives Matter protests in America, but it has a tortured history when it comes to race

For years in Oregon's early history, white locals barred Black people from living in its borders. It's now one of the least diverse states in America.

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Nine of the top 10 U.S. coronavirus hot spots are in Florida and Texas

While President Trump touted improvements in the coronavirus pandemic in the Sun Belt, the CDC warned that nine of the nation’s top 10 growing hot spots are in Florida and Texas, according to an internal government document obtained by Yahoo News.

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CNN host says Trump loyalist owes broadcaster an apology over video played at Barr hearing

CNN host Jake Tapper has demanded that Republican congressman Jim Jordan apologise for playing an edited video that misleadingly showed reporters describe the George Floyd protests as “peaceful”.On Tuesday, attorney general William Barr took part in his first congressional hearing since he took the role, and faced questions on topics including his response to the protests and the subsequent deployment of federal law enforcement agents to cities such as Portland, Oregon.

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New research suggests COVID-19 can spread via aerosol transmission -- and might affect tall people more

A new survey has found more evidence to suggest that people can become infected with COVID-19 through aerosol transmission, which could be prevented by wearing a mask. Carried out by data scientists in the UK, Norway, and the US, the study is one of the first to investigate which personal and work-related factors can lead to COVID-19 transmission. After surveying 2,000 people in the UK and US, the researchers found that the data from both countries suggests that aerosol transmission of the virus -- via microdroplets which are so small that they remain suspended in the air for several hours -- is very likely.

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Google's Sundar Pichai was immediately pounced on in the first question of the antitrust hearing, asking the CEO why Google steals content

In his opening set of questions to Google CEO Sundar Pichai, David Cicilline revealed what the year-long investigation had found.

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Trump says coronavirus stimulus checks, direct payments may be more than $1,200

The amount the president put on the table is even higher than that proposed by Republicans and Democrats.

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FBI says errors discovered in more than two-dozen wiretap applications were mostly minor

The agency said its review of 29 applications to obtain wiretaps on U.S. citizens had only minor, mostly typographical errors.

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Chinese scientist arrested after seeking medical care

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The US Postal Service will reportedly reduce post office hours to save money

A USPS spokesperson didn't elaborate on how USPS locations would ensure service to customers after reducing hours.

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Father, son with COVID-19 forced to quarantine in Hawaii

Hawaii's public health director said a rarely used special health order was used to force them into isolation.

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As Biden VP pick nears, Susan Rice slams Trump for being soft on Russia's Putin

Former U.S. national security adviser Susan Rice, who is on Joe Biden's short list to be his running mate, criticized President Donald Trump on Wednesday for failing to question Russian leader Vladimir Putin about reports Moscow paid bounties for the killing of U.S. troops. "He is absolutely a failure as our commander in chief," Rice told the ABC network in an interview. "He has got some very bizarre, very inexplicable reason for always giving Putin the benefit of the doubt."

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