JUNE
June 7
The Washington Post website reported that Omar Villagomez, a 21-year-old Hispanic man driving a vehicle, was shot and killed by police in a parking lot in Turlock, California.
June 12
The Washington Post website reported that on June 12, a gunman opened fire inside a crowded nightclub in Orlando, killing 50 people and injuring 53 others in a rampage that was the deadliest mass shooting in the U.S. history.
June 14
The Washington Post website reported that the CIA released 50 previously classified documents, exposing details of the agency's treatment of terrorism suspects after the September 11, 2001, attacks. Among the newly released files was a detailed internal investigation of the interrogation and death of Gul Rahman, a militant suspected of ties to al-Qaeda. He was locked at a CIA prison in Afghanistan known as the Salt Pit and was regarded as a defiant adversary who was unlikely to "break" unless being subjected to increasingly severe measures. He was "shackled in a sitting position on bare concrete while nude from the waist down," repeatedly doused with cold water and was "showing early signs of hypothermia." Patrollers noticed him shaking one morning. Two hours later, he was found "lying motionless on his right sid... a small amount of blood coming from his nose and mouth." An autopsy concluded that Rahman had died of exposure to severe cold. According to the documents, at Salt Pit, prisoners were routinely kept in diapers and then stripped of them when they failed to cooperate. The CIA acknowledged the mistaken arrest in 2004 of Khalid al-Masri, a German citizen. He was transferred by the CIA to the Salt Pit, where interrogators "quickly concluded he was not a terrorist and had no al-Qaeda connections." However, the two Agency officers primarily involved in al-Masri's rendition justified his continued detention, despite the diminishing rationale, by insisting they knew he was "bad."
June 15
The Christian Science Monitor website reported that according to the National Center on Elder Abuse, five million older adults were abused each year and 90 percent were abused by their family members, and half were the person's children. Abuse can be verbal, financial, physical, or sexual.
June 16
The Washington Post website reported that Nicholas Damon, a 30-year-old Hispanic man driving a vehicle, was shot by police in Westminster, Colorado.
June 22
The FOX News website reported that the American Civil Liberties Union sued former Air Force psychologists James E. Mitchell and John "Bruce" Jessen for helping design CIA interrogation techniques in October 2015 on behalf of three former CIA prisoners. The lawsuit contended the psychologists condoned waterboarding, loud music, confinement, slapping and other harsh tactics. Lawyers for the pair filed documents in federal court, denying that they committed torture or war crimes. But Mitchell and Jessen declined to respond to many of the allegations, saying much of the information was classified. They asked a judge to throw out the lawsuit and award them court costs.
On the same day, the Washington Post website reported that Isaiah Core, a 20-year-old black man driving a vehicle, was shot by police in Birmingham, Alabama.
On the same day, the Washington Post website reported that Deravis Caine Rogers, an unarmed 22-year-old black man, was shot by police in Atlanta, Georgia.
June 25
The Washington Post website reported that Rodrigo Guardiola, an unarmed 36-year-old Hispanic man, was shot by the police in Gainesville, Georgia.
June 27
A survey by the Pew Research Center found profound differences between black and white adults in their views on racial discrimination, barriers to black progress and the prospects for change. Eighty-eight percent of blacks said the country needed to continue making changes for blacks to have equal rights with whites, but 43 percent were skeptical that such changes will ever occur. Fifty-three percent of whites said the country needed make changes for blacks to achieve equal rights with whites, and only 11 percent expressed doubt that these changes would come. Blacks were more likely than whites to say black people were treated less fairly in the workplace (a difference of 42 percentage points), when applying for a loan or mortgage (41 points), in dealing with the police (34 points), in the courts (32 points), in stores or restaurants (28 points), and when voting in elections (23 points). Blacks were also more likely than whites to say racial discrimination (70% vs. 36%), lower quality schools (75% vs. 53%) and lack of jobs (66% vs. 45%) were major reasons that blacks may have a harder time getting ahead than whites. A majority of blacks (71%) said that they had experienced discrimination or been treated unfairly because of their race or ethnicity. Only 5 percent of whites said their race or ethnicity made it harder for them to succeed in life.
