Donald Trump’s calls to ban Syrian and Muslim refugees from entering the country has been a centerpiece of his campaign. This week, he will be formally named the Republican nominee at the RNC in Cleveland.
Blocks from where Trump’s coronation ceremony is taking place is a small Cleveland neighborhood where hundreds of refugee families have recently been resettled from conflict zones across the Middle East. For them, Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric poses a very real threat. VICE News visits this neighborhood to see what it’s like watching the RNC through their eyes.
Cornel West is heading to Philadelphia next, where he will serve on the Democratic Platform Drafting Committee, but he has announced he won’t be backing the party’s presumptive nominee. West talks about why he is backing the Green Party’s Jill Stein over Hillary Clinton.
Residents of Boca Raton are outraged by a new polling place in their town. Cenk Uygur and Ana Kasparian, hosts of The Young Turks, break it down. Tell us what you think in the comment section below.
“When told his Islamic Center of Boca Raton would no longer be allowed to be a polling place, President Bassem Alhalabi says he was saddened. “We were very happy to serve the community.”
He says he was especially stunned because of where he votes himself.
“Personally me and my wife and all the kids, we vote at a church. And we made friends there,” Alhalabi says
Alhalabi says Palm Beach County Supervisor of Elections Susan Bucher called him personally because of the role the Islamic Center already plays in the community.
The mosque also functions as a hurricane shelter, feeds the homeless and even works with the juvenile justice department.”
An NYPD officer recorded his captain asking him why he’s not arresting more “bad guys.” Cenk Uygur and Ana Kasparian, hosts of The Young Turks, break it down. Tell us what you think in the comment section below.
“When NYPD officer Michael Birch was summoned into a performance evaluation meeting with his commanding officer and a lieutenant one day in August 2012, he was expecting to hear more of what he’d heard in the past about the way he did his job: that he wasn’t generating enough “activity.” As an officer in the transit bureau, he says, that meant being told to issue more summonses for fare evasion, and arresting more people for stealing fellow straphangers’ cell phones.
Instead, “the conversation just turned completely weird to me,” he said in an interview this week. “Because he’s basically telling me it’s OK to racially profile.”
Birch provided Gawker with what he claims is a recording he secretly made of that meeting, on which a man who seems to be his commanding officer can be heard repeatedly questioning him about his recent summonses, placing particular emphasis on the fact that he has only stopped two black men out of 54 total people. “Two male blacks,” the man says at one point. “So you’re telling me you only saw two male blacks jump the turnstile?”
Always Question Authority 