Photograph by Evy Mages
The District of Columbia will pay $1.6 million to settle two cases that stemmed from DC police’s arrest of hundreds of demonstrators during Donald Trump’s 2017 inauguration. The protesters, some of whom were gathered under the umbrella group Disrupt J20, planned to disrupt the inauguration and adjacent events, such as the “DeploraBall.” Some protesters damaged property and six cops were injured. But the civil cases, brought by ACLU of the District of Columbia and DC attorney Jeffrey Light, had argued that DC cops “engaged in or supervised constitutional violations including mass arrests of demonstrators without probable cause, unlawful conditions of confinement for detainees, and/or use of excessive force,” the ACLU says. The police unlawfully “kettled” protesters, the lawsuits stated the same controversial crowd-control tactic they used on Swann Street, Northwest, last summer.
Image by Noi Pattanan via iStock.
Monday night’s full moon is 2021’s first “supermoon,” a term that migrated from astrology to astronomy and is an excellent way to describe the points, twice each year, when the moon is full
and at perigree, meaning it’s closest to Earth and terrifyingly large.
While scientists have pushed back against claims that supermoons occasion natural disasters ”The effects on Earth from a supermoon are minor,” NASA scientist James Garvin said in 2011 those of us who’ve lived through 2020 and the early days of 2021 know that it’s impossible to be too cautious. One 2020 supermoon took place on May 7, just as Americans leapt from panic-buying toilet paper to panic-buying Pelotons. The moon turned red during a supermoon in January 2019 that coincided with a lunar eclipse and a Cardi B/Tomi Lahren Twitter fight.
Photograph by Evy Mages
The US Capitol Police say they apprehended Marc Beauchamp of Henrico, Virginia, Sunday night. The police force says it caught Beauchamp inside the perimeter contained by fencing around the US Capitol.
One curious note: The cops say Beauchamp parked
on the grass by the Lincoln Memorial, an act they helpfully note is illegal. This also means Beauchamp would have had to travel about two miles, presumably on foot, before he reached the site where his alleged adventure ended. (The Capitol Police tell
Washingtonian no incident report is available.)
If the police can prove their case against Beauchamp, it could mean that Washington has yet another fence that some people view not as national security infrastructure but as some sort of challenge. Jumpers have breached the White House fence countless times (one person did it four times) and thrown a lot of weird stuff over it. The Capitol fence, of course, dates back to the beginning of 2021, when fans of then