The officer involved shootings of Philando Castile and Alton Sterling, what is it like to grieve when the world is watching? Curb fix devastates earthquake experts.
Minnesota in the aftermath of an officer involved shooting
Two fatal shootings of two black men. In two days.
Last night, news came in that Philando Castile was fatally shot in Minnesota by a police officer after a traffic stop.
A passenger in the car, Diamond Reynolds, began shooting video on her phone and broadcast it live on her Facebook page.
The incident follows a police shooting of another black man, Alton Sterling, on Tuesday, in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.
For more on both these stories, Take Two's A Martinez spoke with Mark Zdechlik, reporter with Minnesota Public Radio.
To hear the full conversation, click the blue player
Trauma on replay: Grieving when your loved one is national news
Two police shootings in two days have left two black men dead this week.
Thirty-seven-year-old Alton Sterling was shot by officers in Baton Rouge, Louisiana after an altercation Tuesday. Officers there were responding to a call they had received alleging Sterling had issued threats using a gun. At a press conference Wednesday, Sterling’s son openly wept as his wife addressed the media.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=urLybnPRLcI
Last night, a thousand miles north, another shooting involved 32-year-old Minnesota man Philando Castile.
Castile was shot during a traffic stop, and graphic video of his final moments was live-streamed on social media by his passenger, Diamond Reynolds, who said she was his girlfriend.
https://www.facebook.com/100007611243538/videos/1690073837922975/
Reynolds’ 4-year-old daughter was also in the car.
Castile was taken to a hospital in Minneapolis where he was pronounced dead.
Videos of incidents like these spread rapidly, and relatives of the victims find themselves surrounded by reporters and activists even as they are trying to process what's happened to their loved ones.
How does all that attention (and sometimes scrutiny) impact the families and friends of those killed?
Take Two put that question to L.A.-based marriage and family therapist Denise Williams.
(Questions and answers have been edited for clarity.)
As a therapist, helping people work through grief is something that — I'd imagine — comes up pretty often for you. When you think about the two shootings this week, what do you think their family and friends are going through right now?
I think when it comes to grief in this way, I think there's some denial. "Is this real? What really happened?" And I think there's a lot of anger that comes up because it's tied to what's perceived as an injustice. Between the denial and the anger and the rage, grieving may not even begin immediately. And you could hear that with the girlfriend when she kept saying "this can't be" and "this can't be happening."
When friends and family turn on the TV, they're reliving the deaths of their loved ones, sometimes on a loop 24/7. What is it like to be barraged by those images?
It can really create like a post-traumatic syndrome — it becomes very traumatic. It's not like when you lose a loved one who was terminally ill. You literally are watching your loved one be murdered, and you go through it over and over and over again. With post-traumatic syndrome, you have the nightmares, the reliving over and over, and you have this video that's helping you to relive this moment over and over and over again.
You can see how some of the survivors, they are turning to their families during grief. Both of the men shot this week were black. Is there something different about the way that black families in America handle trauma and loss?
Speaking directly to the trauma of loss when there's an injustice, especially when the injustice is time and time and time again, the grief becomes tied to the anger and the injustice of what's happening.
Often, what you will see is the mothers coming together to find a way to heal and to find some peace. They have to make sense of all of this, and a lot of times it comes through speaking out and creating either organizations or programs to help other women or families make sense of what's happening. And remember, this goes on for a long time, because it's not "OK, we're going to bury our loved one," but then you've got to go through this whole trial and the whole feeling of "we're not going to see justice," because nobody believes there's going to be any justice.
Press the blue play button above to hear the full interview.
The mass shooting that changed Australia's view of gun control
About 20 years ago, Australia witnessed one of the worst mass shootings in its history.
In a crowded lunch room at the tourist hot-spot, Port Arthur, a 28-year-old man pulled out a semi- automatic weapon and opened fire. By the time he was caught the next day, 35 people were dead and many others wounded. This single event shook the country to its core and led to drastic changes in gun legislation.
As part of Take Two's look at global firearms policies, Philip Alpers, director of GunPolicy.org at the Sydney School of Public Health, joined the show. He provided insight into how shooting crimes played out in Australia, before and after the Port Arthur tragedy.
Listen to the first installment of Take Two's look at gun policies around the world
Interview Highlights
What was gun crime like in Australia before Port Arthur?
"Prior to 1996, we had pretty average gun crime, pretty average gun homicide for a developed nation. But it was those exceptional shootings that really got Australia going, and that was, in a period of 10 years, we had something like 13 mass shootings in which 104 people were shot. By the time Port Arthur came along, the big massacre in Tasmania, we were already thoroughly fed up with the idea that anybody who wanted to could easily get one of these weapons of war basically, which were generally referred to as assault weapons, and that these were so easily available to men who clearly shouldn't have them."
What was it about that particular event that changed political and public will?
"I think what happened was the horror of knowing that a young man without any qualifications to get such a firearm had so easily got a hold of what is referred to, what the gun dealers used to sell here as assault weapons, they advertised them as assault weapons. And so, these had spread into the community, this young man got one very easily. He walked into a public place, and in a period of 90 seconds, he shot 29 shots, and killed 20 people. And that was just over the top for Australians."
What became the guiding principals on gun legislation since Port Arthur?
"John Howard was the prime minister, and in the 12 days after Port Arthur, he managed to get an agreement between all of the state premiers and leaders to institute three pillars of gun control. The first was uniform licensing, and licensing of each gun owner, that is the person was licensed. Now, suddenly they had to prove a genuine reason for owning each fire arm. They had to tell the police why they were using it. Self defense was specifically outlawed. Self defense would automatically disqualify you from having a firearm license. So everybody of course stopped using that as their reason. And the next reason would be sports shooting. OK, that's fine, you can say you're into sports shooting, but you had to prove it... Possibly even more important was registration, because by registering each firearm, each licensed gun owner was made personally responsible for each firearm in their collection. And that immediately dropped the rate of gun theft more than half, and has stayed there for 20 years."
Has gun control had any negative effects in Australia?
"We don't see reducing firearms as something that has a negative effect. But of course in the United States, I understand this, I was working on firearm injury prevention in the United States at Columbine, we thought that could be a turning point. Then came Virginia Tech, we thought that was surely going to be the tipping point, and then you get Sandy Hook, and Orlando, and you realize there is going to be no tipping point. That it's going to have to get a lot worse before it gets better."
To listen to the full interview, click on the blue audio player above.
The Ride: The day smog first visited LA (and never left)
Smog. Here in Los Angeles, we all know it exists. In fact we live with it. And most of us know its primary source is cars and trucks.
But the story of how it got here and what was causing it is as thick and convoluted as smog itself.
It was July 8, 1943, “when Los Angeles got its first slap in the face of a smog onslaught that took really many people by surprise,” said Chip Jacobs, a former investigative reporter and co-author of “Smogtown: The Lung-Burning History of Pollution in Los Angeles” — a book that sheds light on one of L.A.’s murkiest mysteries.
“People were having car accidents,” he added. “Mothers were wondering why their kids’ eyes were watering. Police officers were spinning loopy. It became a circus-like atmosphere in this really hot metropolitan juggernaut known as Los Angeles, and the politicians were speechless.”
Because no one knew what it was.
Long before smog was smog, the mysterious haze that descended upon Los Angeles that day had many names. The L.A. Times referred to it as the daylight dim out. So-called heavy fumes were to blame.
“It rolled in like this dirty gray washcloth fog,” according to Jacobs. “And I mean, you could almost like taste it and it smelled kind of like gasoline and chlorine. Just imagine what’s otherwise a bright, humid day. All of the sudden this thing rolls in and your lungs are contracting. You can’t see anything.”
But where did it come from? Before smog was connected to cars, there were multiple suspects.
“First they thought it was the Japanese,” Jacobs said. “People thought it was a chemical warfare attack.”
And for good reason. The U.S. was in its second year of heavy fighting against the Japanese during World War II. Just a few months before smog rolled into the burgeoning LA metropolis, the Japanese had, in fact, bombed Santa Barbara.
But it wasn’t the Japanese.
“Then they thought it was the gas company butadiene plant on Aliso Street,” Jacobs said. “Well, guess what happened? They shut it out and smog got worse.”
Nope. Not butadiene.
Maybe it was sulfur.
“Other cities have had terrible air pollution, and it was always sulfur,” Jacobs said. “Sulfur is largely the product of coal-fired power plants, of which we had very few in LA. But the powers that be and fancy named scientists, PhDs, that rolled in assumed every municipal air pollution problem was the same.”
So what was the culprit in this addled, lung-congesting mystery that had L.A.’s then mayor Fletcher Bowron vowing to snuff it out in six months?
Smog. It’s what happens when bad emissions mix with good sunshine to create air pollution. But it wasn’t connected with cars until nine years after smog invaded L.A., in 1952, when Cal Tech professor Arie Haagen-Smit “opened up his lab window in a basement office… and brought in air, went throughout the scientific process, distilled it into acids and said, ‘Aha. Now I know what’s going on and you’re not going to like what’s going on people.’”
It was cars, in all their mass-produced, big-bodied glory. The very cars that were defining L.A. and its do-anything lifestyle were spewing noxious fumes and making a mess of L.A.’s iconic air.
Haagen-Smit was ridiculed and vilified. But eventually he was vindicated, as officials and the general public slowly began to accept the car-smog connection, and even more slowly realized something needed to be done. Haagen-Smit’s name now graces the emissions laboratory for the California Air Resources Board in El Monte.
Thanks to advancements in car technology and California emissions regulations, it’s rare we hear weather forecasts that include any reference to smog.
In 2015, there were 81 days that exceeded the federal ozone standard in the L.A. area, according to Sam Atwood, media relations manager for the South Coast Air Quality Management District, which controls air pollution for urban portions of L.A., Riverside and San Bernardino counties and all of OC.
In 1978, the L.A. area exceeded the federal ozone standard 234 days, or roughly two out of every three days in the year.
But there’s still a lot of work to do. By 2031, the goal is virtually zero days of smog. Zero.
“In some ways, I wish we could have a 1943 every year just to remind us,” Jacobs said. “When you can see it and smell it and watch your dog struggle or watch your lawn turn brown … that was a call to action, and people’s indifference does tend to follow a bell curve where it shoots up in a crisis and then dips, dips, dips. We still have the worst air quality in the country.”
State of Affairs: Clinton leads Trump in CA, ballot measures, and gun control
On this week's State of Affairs, California voters' views on the presidential race, a long November ballot that could get longer, and the gun control debate continues.
Joining Take Two to discuss:
- Thad Kousser, Professor and Department Chair, Department of Political Science, UC San Diego
- Jack Pitney, Roy P. Crocker Professor of American Politics, Claremont McKenna College
Zika isn't affecting blood donations in SoCal. But supplies are still low.
The threat of Zika affecting blood banks is a concern is southern states like Texas and Florida, with some supplies dipping because of people who cannot donate; earlier this year, the FDA issued an advisory that people should refrain from donating for four weeks if they come back from a country with a Zika outbreak or have sex with someone who did.
The good news in Southern California is that the threat of Zika entering the blood stream is having little effect on supplies.
"We've seen some reduction," says Dr. Ross Herron with the Red Cross. "Of our ability to track it, it looks like it's led to about 1/10 of one percent in reduction [of blood supplies]."
The bad news is that Red Cross says there are other reasons that the blood supply in the region is in need of more donations.
"It's summer and the July 4th holiday – people take a lot of vacations around July 4th," he says. "Students are not in colleges and they're not in high schools. That's a significant portion of who donates blood – about 25 percent of our blood comes from high school and college drives."
Dr. Herron is confident that Zika is not an immediate threat to the area, however.
"Before the end of the summer, we may see Zika locally transmitted," he says, "but I don't think it will affect a major percentage of donors."
"If we have local transmission of Zika, then we're going to have to have new measures to be able to protect the safety of the blood supply."
With 'Memories' Snapchat goes full social network
Are you on Snapchat? If so, you are definitely not alone.
The developers claim 100 million people use it across the globe, but in case you're not one of them, Snapchat is the app where you send a video or photo on your phone and it disappears 10 seconds after your friends open it, forever.
Well, maybe not forever anymore.
Yesterday, the company announced that it's changing things up with a new feature called Memories, which lets users save and use old snaps from their phones photo album.
Kurt Wagner is a Senior editor with Recode and he joins the show to talk about why the feature's arrival means that Snapchat has some big future plans.
UFC and allegations of doping
The Ultimate Fighting Championship, or UFC, hits a milestone this Saturday
UFC 200 features some of the most popular names in mixed martial arts, but the main event, a rematch with Daniel Cormier and former light heavyweight champ Jon Jones has suffered a TKO.
Jones is out of UFC 200 because of a potential doping violation, throwing the event - and potentially his future into jeopardy
We'll talk about it with
, columnist for USA Today