Linda Tirado is a photographer and the author of Hand to Mouth: The Truth About Being Poor in a Wealthy World.

And as of Saturday afternoon, she's blind in one eye.

Tirado had been covering the protests and riots in Minneapolis:

Early pics: pic.twitter.com/XLq6lHspBd

— Linda Tirado (@KillerMartinis) May 29, 2020

But around 2:30am on Saturday, May 30, Tirado posted that she had been hospitalized. According to Twitter, the doctors believe she was hit in the eye with a tracer or a rubber bullet, which either exploded, or just hit her in the exact nerve spot to cause damage. While the blindness is likely permanent, Tirado did offer the cold comfort that it was not her photography eye.

Click the links to read the tweets if you want more detail. You can also support her Patreon.

Up side, I do not have the plague, they tested me for covid and that wouldn’t have happened otherwise.

Fucked world where I’m like “well they might have exploded my eyeball but at least it got me basic medical care!”

— Linda Tirado (@KillerMartinis) May 30, 2020

Let this be your occasional tragic reminder that the "less than lethal" tactics used by riot police are indeed quite dangerous, and potentially deadly; when I was in college, a girl at my school was killed by a pepper spray canister to the face after the Red Sox beat the Yankees in the ALCS. The idea that pepper spray and rubber bullets and tracer shells might be "less lethal" just makes police use them more egregiously, which leads to more and more of these horrible scenarios. Read the rest

CBS News reports that Kellie Chauvin, wife of the police officer who killed George Floyd by kneeling on his neck for nearly 9 consecutive minutes, has filed for divorce.

Sekula Law Offices, the law firm representing Mrs. Chauvin, posted this on Facebook:

This evening, I spoke with Kellie Chauvin and her family. She is devastated by Mr. Floyd’s death and her utmost sympathy lies with his family, with his loved ones and with everyone who is grieving this tragedy. She has filed for dissolution of her marriage to Derek Chauvin.

While Ms. Chauvin has no children from her current marriage, she respectfully requests that her children, her elder parents, and her extended family be given safety and privacy during this difficult time.

According to International Business News, Mrs. Chauvin was born in Thailand in 1974, and spent the first several years of her life in a refugee camp before her family moved to Wisconsin. She entered in an arranged marriage in 1991, and had 2 children before leaving that first husband after a decade for alleged abuse. In 2018, she became the first woman of Hmong descent to be crowned Mrs. Minnesota. She met the man who killed George Floyd when he came in on a work shift while she was working at Hennepin County Medical Center — by which he already had an established record of violent conduct that went unpenalized — and married him in 2010.

The Chauvins also own property in Orange County, Florida — where the officer who killed George Floyd cast his voting ballots in 2016 and 2018, despite presumably being a Minnesota permanent resident in order to serve as a police officer (although only 8 percent of Minneapolis police actually live in Minneapolis). Read the rest

Protests over the police killing of George Floyd continue in Minneapolis tonight, in defiance of a curfew imposed by the mayor. Protesters have now overtaken the westbound interstate 35 freeway in Minneapolis. Read the rest

Buzzfeed News reporters obtained the explanation offered by United States Department of Homeland Security's CBP to congressional staffers who asked why it decided to fly a Predator Drone over Minneapolis during the protests over the killing of George Floyd. Read the rest

Donald Trump on Friday afternoon claimed to be completely ignorant of the racist history of the phrase 'when the looting starts, the shooting starts,' which he tweeted, and the White House retweeted, and which was also posted on the Presidential Facebook account. Read the rest

“If we fail the test case here, history will not judge us kindly.”

Leaked internal Facebook posts reveal that Facebook employees are horrified that Mark Zuckerberg and C-suite executives refuse to remove impeached president Donald Trump’s threats of violence. Read the rest

The Mayor of Minneapolis, Jacob Frey, has declared a curfew for the city following protests over impunity in the killing of George Floyd.

An 8 p.m. curfew imposed by the mayor late Friday will extend through the weekend.

Mayor Frey has issued Emergency Regulation No. 2020-2-1 which imposes a curfew throughout the City of Minneapolis beginning at 8 p.m. tonight (Fri., May 29) and extends through the weekend.See the posted regulation for details at: https://t.co/iebgleKnyx pic.twitter.com/7l61oURPtc

— Minneapolis Clerk (@mplsclerk) May 29, 2020

Minneapolis mayor announces a curfew beginning 8 p.m. tonight until 6 a.m. tomorrow and another 8 p.m. Saturday through 6 a.m. Sunday. People are banned from public streets + public places in Minneapolis with some exceptions (police, fire, National Guard, the homeless) pic.twitter.com/yuTD0QmCqm

— Mark Berman (@markberman) May 29, 2020

PREVIOUSLY ON BOING BOING:

• Cop who killed George Floyd arrested

• Minneapolis ablaze after prosecutor suggests no crime was committed by cops who killed George Floyd

• The cop who killed George Floyd has a long record of police brutality Read the rest

Fires rage in Minneapolis after the killing of George Floyd, an unarmed black man, by local cop Derek Chauvin.

Though four officers were immediately fired, local prosecutor Mike Freeman said that there is 'other evidence that does not support a criminal charge' even as police refused to release unredacted footage of the incident. Video of Chauvin kneeling on Floyd's neck as he gasped for breath was taken by a bystander; Chauvin's long history of violent conduct soon surfaced.

Minnesota's Attorney General said he nonetheless "anticipated" charges against the officers who killed Floyd. Another potential avenue for justice: the FBI is investigating whether Floyd's rights were violated, though its request for "more video" was excoriated by commentator Don Lemon.

Police abandoned a precinct during clashes Thursday night, and it became the first to be destroyed during unrest in modern U.S. history.

Among those detained was a black CNN reporter and his crew, live on air.

On social media, President Trump branded those protesting "THUGS" and suggested they should be shot; Twitter hid his tweet per its policy against glorifying violence, another first.

UPDATE: Chauvin was arrested Friday.

Photo: Hungryogrephotos (Public Domain)

CORRECTION: CNN's reporter was detained Friday morning, not Thursday night. Read the rest

A 46-year old black man named George Floyd was killed by police in Minneapolis on Monday, May 25, 2020. A police officer named Derek Chauvin kneeled on Floyd's neck, after vaguely accusing him of forgery and/or public intoxication. He pressed his knee down so hard — and kept it there — that it cut off the air to Floyd's lungs, suffocating him. Three police officers stood around and watched as Floyd used his last breaths to cry for help; several bystanders filmed the scene, and tried to get the cops to stop, but to no avail.

Those 4 police officers were fired shortly after the video was released (by their official account, Floyd had been "resisting arrest," something which is a physically impossible to do while also dying under restraint). That sounds like good news on the surface — but thanks to Police Union rules, bad cops who get fired for misconduct usually just get re-hired in a nearby precinct. Their past behavior — even repeated, established patterns of violent misconduct — are left off their permanent record, or otherwise ignored.

And that's exactly how the police officer who killed George Floyd was in the position to do so in the first place. As Insider reports, Derek Chauvin had a long and ugly history of police brutality, long before he killed George Floyd:

[Chauvin] was involved in violent incidents before, including three police shootings. And he has been the subject of 10 complaints filed to the city's Civilian Review Authority and the Office of Police Conduct.

Update: Shona from Gig Workers Rising clarifies: "Gig Workers Rising isn't organizing the national day of action. Drivers in each of the 6 cities taking action are coordinating the day of action together. Drivers in LA with Rideshare Drivers United Los Angeles called a strike and asked other cities to take action on the same day. Gig Workers Rising supports and educates drivers who are organizing across the state. We are not organizing drivers."

On May 8, Uber drivers are organizing a nationwide shutdown of Uber, with drivers turning off their apps in protest over low pay: so far, seven cities' drivers are signed up: Philadelphia, Chicago, San Francisco, San Diego, Minneapolis, LA and DC. Uber and Lyft have both slashed pay for drivers and raised prices as they try to assuage the capital markets. Read the rest

"Dü You Remember?" is a new five-part podcast telling the story of Hüsker Dü, the Minneapolis punk band that paved the way for Nirvana, The Pixies, Foo Fighters, and really the entire realm of alternative rock. The podcast features interviews with Bob Mould, Greg Norton, and, yes, Grant Hart, who died last month, and other punk peers like Henry Rollins and Babes in Toyland's Lori Barbero. The podcast is pegged on the Numero Group label's release of Savage Young Dü, a lavish box set documenting the band's early years.

"We were huge music fans. We were students. We took everything in. We made it our own unique voice, and I think it changed the world for a select group of people. It certainly did not change the entire world of pop music, but I think for people who were affected by it, there was nothing before and after. It was that band."--Bob Mould

Listen to the rest of the series: "Dü You Remember? A podcast about Hüsker Dü" Read the rest

The average donation to first-time socialist candidate for Minneapolis City Council Ginger Jentzen is $25, and she accepts no corporate money. She's running on a platform of citizen oversight of the police, rent controls, and a $15 minimum wage. She's outraised any other candidate in Minneapolis history. Read the rest

Club Jäger was a popular Minneapolis night spot until Citypages revealed that its owner, Julius Jaeger De Roma, donated $500 to the senatorial campaign of David Duke, a former KKK Grand Wizard and ardent Donald Trump supporter. Read the rest

In memory of the late Mary Tyler Moore, I present to you Minneapolis punk pioneers Hüsker Dü's killer 1985 cover of "Love Is All Around," Sonny Curtis's theme song to The Mary Tyler Moore Show. The Hüskers' rendition was the flipside to their "Makes No Sense At All" single.

Read the rest

Less than a week after an officer from a nearby force shot and killed Philando Castile during a traffic stop, leaving him to die in front of his child and girlfriend (and the world on livestream) the Minneapolis Police Department has perjured itself in issuing a copyright takedown notice to Youtube in order to suppress a controversial recruiting video that depicted the jobs of MPD officers as being a firearms-heavy shoot-em-up. Read the rest

Arts group Works Progress Studio have opened Water Bar, which bills itself as the first-ever bar devoted to nothing but public sources of water. Read the rest

Organizers of a demonstration in protest of the police shooting of Jamar Clark by Minneapolis police have been hit with a lawsuit by the Mall of America, which is seeking a court order requiring them to tweet and text a message announcing the cancellation of their protest. Read the rest