The Burning Man event is seeking a renewal of its 10-year permit to use the federally owned Black Rock Desert site managed by the Bureau of Land Management; the BLM has responded with a bizarre, overreaching Environmental Impact Statement that ignores the lavishly documented record of Burning Man's excellent safety and stewardship record. Read the rest

Alfred Okwera Olango, who was black, was fatally shot by police in El Cajon, California on Tuesday. Police in the San Diego suburb city say the 38 year old Ugandan immigrant pointed a vape pen or e-cigarette device at them, before police shot the man to death.

Officers were responding to a call of a man behaving erratically, and walking in traffic. Olango's friends and supporters say court records show that he suffered from mental illness, and may have been experiencing a seizure before his death. An El Cajon police officer is believed to have shot Olango within as little as one or two minutes after arriving at the scene. Read the rest

“When ordering at Starbucks, people have changed their name to “Black Lives Matter” so that, when their order is up, the baristas have to yell out their new moniker,” reports Taryn Finley at Huffington Post Black Voices. Read the rest

Virginia authorities handcuffed a middle school student and charged him with larceny for "stealing" a milk carton from the school cafeteria earlier this year. The child has also been suspended from school. Read the rest

A second Baltimore police officer involved in the arrest and death of Freddie Gray was acquitted Monday. Gray, who was black, died in police custody one year ago, in Maryland. Read the rest

An assistant principal at a South Carolina high school is under investigation after police say the man restrained a 15-year-old student in a chokehold, and kept her in a chokehold until she passed out. The Kingstree, SC police department is reported to be seeking assault and battery charges against the man. Read the rest

Jurors in Baltimore, Maryland are now deliberating whether a police officer is guilty of manslaughter and assault in the death of Freddie Gray, a black man who died from a spinal cord injury that took place while he was in police custody last April. We know about Gray's death in part because someone took video of his arrest. His family says the police killed him, and it's hard to imagine they're wrong. Read the rest

Man, the first few paragraphs of this Washington Post story about a mentally ill man who died in a jail while waiting for medical care are so devastating. Read the rest

The senator from Nevada scoffed at the Bureau of Land Management's demand that Burning Man build it a $1m VIP compound with showers and flush toilets, saying that the festival's ethic of radical self-reliance should extend to its Fed minders. Read the rest

Reuters photog Jim Urquhart captured this surreal photograph of Eric Parker, who lives in central Idaho, aiming his gun from a bridge as pro-states' rights protesters assemble at the Bureau of Land Management base camp in Bunkerville, Nevada. The Atlantic has a good explainer on the case, which involves rancher Cliven Bundy not paying grazing fees to the BLM, and now essentially squatting his "ancestral land" with support from a lot of very angry white people with guns. This is militia culture in the United States. Read the rest