A 38-year-old animal rights activist and vegan-lifestyle advocate posted to her website accusations that YouTube had failed to properly compensate her for ad revenue generated by videos she uploaded to the site, then drove to the company’s headquarters, took out a pistol, shot three people, shouted, “Come at me,” and fatally shot herself.[1][2] A survivor of a mass shooting at a high school in Florida tweeted that the YouTube shooting was “proof” that children aren’t the only Americans who need to worry about being shot to death in their day-to-day lives, and US president Donald Trump proposed additional tariffs on Chinese-made flamethrowers.[3][4] Trump tweeted that the US “Department of ‘Justice’” was “an embarrassment” because it was “slow walking” the turnover of documents related to investigations of his political opponents, a 33-year-old white man and Trump campaign associate from the Netherlands was sentenced to 30 days in prison for lying to special prosecutors investigating state-sponsored interference in the US presidential election, and a 43-year-old black woman from Texas was sentenced to five years in prison because she unknowingly violated the conditions of her supervised release by voting in that election.[5][6][7] A police officer in Asheville, North Carolina, stopped a black man for jaywalking, forced him to the ground, repeatedly punched him in the face while he shouted, “I can’t breathe,” tased him multiple times, and called him a “bro” and a “tough boy”; a deputy sheriff in Sacramento, California, ran over a 61-year-old woman who was attending a demonstration for Stephon Clark, a 22-year-old unarmed black man who was holding his cell phone in his grandmother’s back yard when two officers approached him and shot him eight times, which they told investigators they did because he lunged at them; and an autopsy of Clark’s body revealed that the majority of shots were fired into his back.[8][9][10] In Baton Rouge, Louisiana, prosecutors announced that they would not charge a white police officer who was filmed shouting, “I’ll shoot your fucking ass” at a 37-year-old black man named Alton Sterling, whom he then shot six times and called a “stupid ass motherfucker,” which the officer later told investigators he said because he was “mad” at Sterling for “making” him kill him.[11][12] A 68-year-old white man in Kentucky assaulted his wife with a flashlight and then pointed a rifle at responding officers, opened fire, and was apprehended alive; and footage was released of a police officer in Houston shouting, “I’ll shoot your ass” at an unarmed black man named Danny Ray Thomas and then moments later firing a fatal shot into Thomas’s chest.[13][14] Police in Augusta, Georgia, apprehended alive a 22-year-old white man who fired multiple shots at the driver and the passenger of a nearby vehicle; police in Chicago apprehended alive a 21-year-old man in a train station who was carrying a loaded pistol, wearing body armor, and holding a duffel bag filled with SWAT equipment; and police in Elgin, Illinois, released more than 30 hours of footage of the traffic stop of a 34-year-old black woman named Decynthia Clements, which showed the officers agree that if force was necessary to apprehend her they would use rubber bullets and Tasers, and then order Clements from the car and shoot her with live ammunition, killing her. “She had a couple knives in her hands,” said one of the at least seven officers at the scene. “I don’t know what else we were going to do.”[15][16][17]
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