The deployment, when combined with preexisting deployments related to the COVID-19 pandemic and other natural disasters, constituted the largest military operation other than war in U.S. activated over 96,000 National Guard, State Guard, 82nd Airborne, and 3rd Infantry Regiment service members. had imposed curfews by early June 2020, while more than 30 states and Washington, D.C. Some police responded to protests with instances of notable violence, including against reporters. While the majority of protests were peaceful, demonstrations in some cities escalated into riots, looting, and street skirmishes with police and counter-protesters. Polls in the summer of 2020 estimated that between 15 million and 26 million people had participated at some point in the demonstrations in the United States, making the protests the largest in U.S. Protests quickly spread nationwide and to over 2,000 cities and towns in over 60 countries in support of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement. Protests first emerged at the East 38th and Chicago Avenue street intersection in Minneapolis, the location of Floyd's arrest and murder, and other locations in the Minneapolis–Saint Paul metropolitan area of Minnesota. The George Floyd protest movement began hours after his murder as bystander video and word of mouth began to spread. In June 2021 Chauvin was sentenced to 22.5 years in prison with possibility of supervised release after 15 years for second-degree murder. In April 2021, Chauvin was found guilty of second-degree unintentional murder, third-degree murder, and second-degree manslaughter. Chauvin and the other three officers involved were later arrested. The civil unrest and protests began as part of international reactions to the murder of George Floyd, a 46-year-old African American man who was murdered during an arrest after Derek Chauvin, a Minneapolis Police Department officer, knelt on Floyd's neck for 9 minutes and 29 seconds as three other officers looked on and prevented passers-by from intervening. The George Floyd protests were a series of police brutality protests that began in Minneapolis in the United States on May 26, 2020. $1–2 billion in insured damages in the United States (May 26–June 8, 2020).$550 million in Minneapolis–Saint Paul (May 26–June 6, 2020).Continued nationwide protests over racial and economic inequality, centering on broad social issues including police brutality.Federal forces began to be deployed in June 2020.Referendum on city charter amendment revision originally announced for November 2020, but would later be postponed.Plans to disband the Minneapolis Police Department announced provision for a city charter amendment passed by the Minneapolis City Council.Budget cuts and reforms for several police departments approved in several cities.Protests, demonstrations, civil disobedience, civil resistance, online activism, strike action, riots Murder of George Floyd while being arrested by Minneapolis Police.“The only thing that could cause a social explosion in this country,” a Cuban friend told me in 2019, “is a lack of food and medicine.” Today, the grocery and pharmacy shelves are bare, the COVID-19 pandemic is resurgent, inflation is eating away at workers’ real incomes, and periodic electricity blackouts are aggravating everyone’s misery. The social explosion my friend foresaw broke out on Sunday, July 11, beginning in a poor suburb of Havana, then spreading via social media to a dozen cities across the island, drawing thousands of people into the streets-marching, shouting anti-government slogans, and, in some places, battling police and looting. Not since the 1994 riot on the Havana waterfront, at the depth of the depression caused by the collapse of the Soviet Union, has Cuba experienced such serious social unrest.Ī number of factors-economic, social, and political-converged this year to ignite these unprecedented demonstrations in a country whose communist regime has managed to keep a tight lid on opposition for more than half a century.įirst and foremost, the Cuban economy is a shamble and the government is broke. Over the past two years, Cuba has lost every major source of foreign exchange earnings. Venezuelan exports of cheap oil for Cuba have been cut by half, causing fuel shortages. The Trump administration convinced Latin American countries to kick out Cuban doctors working on medical services contracts.
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