Five years since George Floyd and Zelenskyy criticizes the ‘silence of America’: Weekend Rundown

For 9 minutes and 29 seconds on May 25, 2020, Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin pressed his knee and the weight of his body against George Floyd’s neck, killing him as people watched.

The murder prompted vows to deal with America’s deep-seated racial injustices. Five years later, many lawmakers, companies and institutions have rowed back on those commitments, and in a previously nondescript area of Minneapolis, hardly anyone can agree on whether things have changed for the better.

“That’s a challenging question,” said Andrea Jenkins, the City Council member for Ward 8, where the tragedy occurred. “There have been a number of changes, and yet it feels like things are very much the same.”

Samar Moseley, who drives a city bus in Minneapolis, said the “whole city is still suffering from PTSD after George Floyd.” Relations with the police are “easing up some, but there’s still tension,” he added.

Charles Adams, a North Minneapolis police inspector who has been in law enforcement in the area for 40 years, said the incident “put us back to the 1960s.”

Adams said that he was “surprised” by the number of Black recruits who have joined the force since then but that “the good news is that they say they want to be a part of the change.”

Zelenskyy attacks ‘silence’ from U.S. as Russia launches massive wave of strikes

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy criticized the United States and the international community for remaining silent after Russia unleashed what Ukrainian officials described as the largest aerial assault on the country since the war began.

Russian forces launched a massive overnight barrage Saturday night as 367 drones and missiles targeted more than 30 cities and villages across Ukraine, including the capital, Kyiv.

“The silence of America, the silence of others in the world only encourages Putin,” Zelenskyy wrote on Telegram. “Every such terrorist Russian strike is reason enough for new sanctions against Russia.”

The attack came shortly after a prisoner exchange in which each side released hundreds of detainees. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said Moscow would give Ukraine a draft document outlining its conditions for a “sustainable, long-term, comprehensive” peace agreement once the prisoner exchange had finished.

Meet the Press

Former Surgeon General Vivek Murthy accused Congress of failing “in its responsibility to protect our kids” from the harms of social media, calling for legislation to force social media apps to include warning labels about their harms to children.

Murthy told moderator Kristen Welker on NBC News’ “Meet the Press” that the current approach to social media is “the equivalent of putting our kids in cars with no seat belts, with no air bags, and having them drive on roads with no speed limits and no traffic lights. And that is just morally unacceptable.”

Former Rep. Patrick Kennedy, D-R.I., who is now a mental health advocate, told Welker he believes the United States “is falling down on its own responsibility as stewards to our children’s future” because of lack of action on the issue.

Politics in brief

• Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., said there is enough opposition in the Senate to hold up President Donald Trump’s “big, beautiful” bill.
• Former President Joe Biden attended his grandson’s high school graduation, making his first public appearance since he announced he had been diagnosed with prostate cancer.
• A Texas bill to require posting the Ten Commandments in public schools headed closer to Gov. Greg Abbott’s desk.
• The Trump administration’s decision to dismiss lawsuits and drop accountability agreements with several police departments could undo momentum to curb excessive use of force, proponents of federal oversight say.
• Texas is poised to become the second state to enact an across-the-board ban on social media for minors before its state legislative session ends in a little over a week.

Letters shed light on Eleanor Roosevelt’s long-rumored romance with reporter

A new biography sheds light on Eleanor Roosevelt’s 30-year relationship with trailblazing journalist Lorena Hickok after decades of speculation.

In her research for “Hick,” author Sarah Miller read about 3,500 of the letters the two women exchanged, sometimes twice daily, from 1932 until Roosevelt died in 1962.

“They loved each other. They were physically affectionate with each other. It was a romance, for sure. Whether that included sexual intimacy is probably something we can’t know,” Miller said.

While there appears to be consensus among historians that Hickok was romantically interested only in women, some past accounts have portrayed her correspondence with Roosevelt as a deeply intimate friendship, rather than a romance.

Notable quote

The fire that destroyed Louisiana’s Nottoway Plantation prompted a reckoning with the past and reignited the debate over how places born from slavery should be viewed — and how they should function today.

In case you missed it

• A 28-year-old man was arrested at John F. Kennedy Airport in New York on Sunday following an alleged attempt to firebomb a branch office of the U.S. Embassy in Tel Aviv, the Justice Department said.
• Thousands of people have been slaughtered and 12 million have been forced from their homes as Africa’s largest war tears Sudan apart.
• Consumers are hunting for cheaper vacations — and road trips are one way people are keeping travel plans despite economic gloom.
• The path to freedom began behind a toilet. The escape by 10 inmates from a New Orleans jail exposed the city’s prison’s security failures.
• A man was arrested Friday and accused of kidnapping an Italian tourist and torturing him for weeks in a Manhattan home in a bid to steal the alleged victim’s Bitcoin.
• Lando Norris won Formula 1’s iconic Monaco Grand Prix, completing a flawless weekend and making up lost ground in the championship race.