The administration of U.S. President Donald Trump is considering a measure to block U.S. citizens and permanent residents from returning home if they are suspected of being infected with the new coronavirus, a senior U.S. official confirmed to Reuters.The official said a draft regulation, which has not been finalized and could change, would give the government authorization to block individuals who could “reasonably” be believed to have contracted COVID-19 or other diseases.Trump has instituted a series of sweeping immigration restrictions since the start of the coronavirus pandemic, suspending some legal immigration and allowing U.S. border authorities to rapidly deport migrants caught at the border without standard legal processes.Omar Jadwat, director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s immigrants’ rights project, said in a written statement that barring U.S. citizens from entering the country would be unconstitutional and “another grave error in a year that has already seen far too many.”Reuters reported in May that U.S. government officials were concerned that dual U.S.-Mexico citizens might flee to the United States if the coronavirus outbreak in Mexico worsened, putting more stress on U.S. hospitals.The draft regulation, which was first reported by The New York Times on Monday, would be issued by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), which has played a lead role in the pandemic response, the senior official told Reuters.A Trump pandemic task force was not expected to act on the proposal this week, although that timeline could change, the official said.The United States leads the world in both confirmed coronavirus cases and deaths, with more than 5 million cases recorded and over 162,000 deaths, according to a Reuters tally.The CDC did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
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A rare storm packing 100 mph winds and with power similar to an inland hurricane swept across the Midwest on Monday, blowing over trees, flipping vehicles, causing widespread property damage and leaving hundreds of thousands without power as it turned toward Chicago. The storm known as a derecho lasted several hours as it tore across eastern Nebraska, Iowa and parts of Wisconsin, had the wind speed of a major hurricane, and likely caused more widespread damage than a normal tornado, said Patrick Marsh, science support chief at the National Weather Service’s Storm Prediction Center in Norman, Oklahoma. It’s not quite a hurricane. It has no eye and its winds come across in a line. But the damage it is likely to spread over such a large area is more like an inland hurricane than a quick more powerful tornado, Marsh said. He compared it to a devastating super derecho of 2009, which was one of the strongest on record and traveled more than 1,000 miles in 24 hours, causing $500 million in damage and widespread power outages and killing a handful of people. “This is our version of a hurricane,” Northern Illinois University meteorology professor Victor Gensini said in an interview from his home about 15 minutes before the storm was about to hit. Minutes later he headed to his basement for safety as the storm took aim at Chicago, starting with its suburbs. Gensini said this derecho will go down as one of the strongest in recent history and be one of the nation’s worst weather events of 2020. “It ramped up pretty quick” around 7 a.m. Central time in Eastern Nebraska. “I don’t think anybody expected widespread winds approaching 100, 110 mph,” Marsh said. ‘Life-saving mode’Several people were injured and widespread property damage was reported in Marshall County in central Iowa after 100 mph winds swept through the area, said its homeland security coordinator Kim Elder. She said the winds blew over trees, ripped road signs out of the ground and tore roofs off of buildings. “We had quite a few people trapped in buildings and cars,” she said. She said the extent of injuries is unknown and that no fatalities have been reported. Elder said some people reported their cars flipping over from the wind, having power lines fall on them and being injured when hit by flying debris. Dozens of cars at one factory had their windshields blown out. Buildings have also caught on fire, she said. “We’re in life-saving mode right now,” Elder said. Marshalltown Mayor Joel Greer declared a civil emergency, telling residents to stay home and off the streets so that first responders can respond to calls. MidAmerican Energy said nearly 101,000 customers in the Des Moines area were without power after the storm moved through the area. Reports from spotters filed with the National Weather Service in Des Moines had winds in excess of 70 mph. Roof damage to homes and buildings were reported in several Iowa cities, including the roof of a hockey arena in Des Moines. Across the state, large trees fell on cars and houses. Some semi-trailers flipped over or were blown off highways. Farmers reported that some grain bins were destroyed and fields were flattened, but the extent of damage to Iowa’s agriculture industry wasn’t immediately clear. MidAmerican spokeswoman Tina Hoffman said downed trees are making it difficult in some locations for workers to get to the power lines. In some cases power line poles were snapped off. “It’s a lot of tree damage. Very high winds. It will be a significant effort to get through it all and get everybody back on,” she said. “It was a big front that went all the way through the state.” Cedar Rapids, Iowa, has “both significant and widespread damage throughout the city,” said public safety spokesman Greg Buelow. “We have damage to homes and businesses, including siding and roofs damaged,” he said. “Trees and power lines are down throughout the entire city.” Buelow said residents should stay home so crews can respond to “potentially life-threatening calls.” Tens of thousands of people in the metro area were without power. Dangers of derechoWhat makes a derecho worse than a tornado is how long it can hover one place and how large an area the high winds hit, Marsh said. He said winds of 80 mph or even 100 mph can stretch for “20, 30, 40 or God forbid 100 miles.” “Right now, it’s making a beeline for Chicago,” Marsh said Monday mid-afternoon. “Whether or not it will hold its intensity as it reaches Chicago remains to be seen.” But the environmental conditions between the storm and Chicago are the type that won’t likely diminish the storm, Marsh said. It will likely dissipate over central or eastern Indiana, he said. What happened is unstable super moist air has parked over the northern plains for days on end and it finally ramped up Monday morning into a derecho. “They are basically self-sustaining amoebas of thunderstorms,” Gensini said. “Once they get going like they did across Iowa, it’s really hard to stop these suckers.” Derechoes, with winds of at least 58 mph, occur about once a year in the Midwest. Rarer than tornadoes but with weaker winds, derechoes produce damage over a much wider area. The storms raced over parts of eastern Nebraska before 9 a.m. Monday, dropping heavy rains and high winds. Strong straight-line winds pushed south into areas that include Lincoln and Omaha, National Weather Service meteorologist Brian Barjenbruch said. “Once that rain-cooled air hit the ground, it surged over 100 miles, sending incredibly strong winds over the area,” Barjenbruch said.  Omaha Public Power District reported more than 55,500 customers without power in Omaha and surrounding communities.  The weather service’s Marsh said there’s a huge concern about power outages that will be widespread across several states and long lasting. Add high heat, people with medical conditions that require power and the pandemic, “it becomes dire pretty quickly.” 
 
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Antonio Banderas says he’s tested positive for COVID-19 and is celebrating his 60th birthday in quarantine.  The Spanish actor announced his positive test Monday in a post on Instagram. Banderas said he would spend his time in isolation reading, writing and “making plans to begin to give meaning to my 60th year to which I arrive full of enthusiasm.” “I would like to add that I am relatively well, just a little more tired than usual and hoping to recover as soon as possible following medical instructions that I hope will allow me to overcome the infection that I and so many people in the world are suffering from,” Banderas wrote. A spokesperson for Banderas didn’t immediately respond to messages Monday. Earlier this year, Banderas was nominated for the Academy Award for best actor for his performance in Pedro Almodóvar’s Pain & Glory.  
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Children want to see characters who look like them, said Hudda Ibrahim.Last year, her niece Fatima asked why books don’t have characters like her.”I said, ‘I’ll do it. I’ll fix it,'” Ibrahim said.In April her children’s book came out under the title, “What Color is My Hijab?”The cover of the book “What Color is My hijab” by Hudda Ibrahim.Ibrahim’s book features Muslim women in various professions — pilot, businesswoman, politician — doing their work while wearing a hijab, a traditional head scarf.Because of COVID-19, Ibrahim didn’t hold a typical book launch. She may do so next year and hold Facebook events in the meantime.The book had support before it was published, and Ibrahim crowdfunded it through Kickstarter. A Spanish version of the story is in the works now, she said.Ibrahim is excited about her first children’s book with colorful art by California-based illustrator Meenal Patel. She talked about it with the St. Cloud Times at Lake George in late June.”I’m so excited to have this opportunity to produce such a work so that kids who look like me and kids who don’t look like me will read this book and learn something from it,” she said.”This book helps both those kids who want to see themselves represented in the literature and those who are wondering why these kids dress different or look different.”Ibrahim sees herself as a bridge builder and cultural broker.She does that work as president and founder of Filsan Talent Partners, which helps companies diversify their workforces. And she does that work in classrooms at St. Cloud Technical and Community College, where she teaches diversity and social justice.”What Color is My Hijab?” is significant because it features the hijab and because it features diversity among Muslim women, said Megan Kalk, who works with Ibrahim at Filsan Talent. The women in the book are different races. They wear different types of clothing. They have different abilities.Kalk likes that the book shows Muslim women with various skills, including athletics and professional skills. Her 9-year-old daughter wears a hijab.”She’s got all these opportunities open to her,” Kalk said. “It’s empowering for girls to see women in a lot of different careers.”Ibrahim told Kalk about the book idea before she wrote it. The next day, it was finshed, Kalk said.”She works all the time with about a million ideas on the table at once,” Kalk said.Ibrahim’s book about the Somali refugee experience, “From Somalia to Snow,” was published in 2017.Ibrahim didn’t attend kindergarten as many of her young readers do, she said. Her family was fleeing civil war when she was kindergarten age.Ibrahim grew up in Africa and her younger sister Lula Ibrahim grew up in the U.S.”At some point in childhood you start to realize that none of those characters relate to you, other than being a kid,” said Lula Ibrahim. “If I would have come across a book like this (as a child), it would have made me happy.”Lula and Hudda’s nieces love “What Color is My Hijab?” and want Hudda to write more books, Lula said.Ibrahim has suggested that Fatima, the now 8-year-old who inspired the book, become her illustrator, because she’s an artist.”Little kids are encouraging this which shows how much this is needed,” Lula said. “I would like to encourage more authors of color and of different faiths and different kinds of people to know that there are children waiting to see things like this.”Ibrahim wrote the book for girls like Fatima. And she wrote it for other children who don’t wear a hijab, so they can better understand the kids who do.Her students at the technical and community college ask her why she wears a hijab. Others have asked her if she wears it because her husband or father insist, Ibrabim said. But it’s her decision. She wears a hijab to show modesty and to show pride in her heritage, culture and values, she said.”We — I’m talking about the refugees and immigrants who are coming to this country — we are educating ourselves every single day about our new country and culture and its values,” Ibrahim said. She hopes her book will educate kids and parents about their Muslim neighbors.”This book is really telling the story of diversity and inclusion and inspiring young girls to be proud of who they are.” 
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There were no fires this time in Watts. There was no looting, no shooting and no National Guard troops patrolling.  
 
Protesters filled the streets around the country in late May and June following the Minneapolis police killing of George Floyd, demanding an end to police brutality. There was violence and looting in some places, including Los Angeles, but not in LA’s Watts neighborhood, forever linked to an uprising that broke out in the segregated community 55 years ago and became known as the Watts riots.  
 
Demonstrators made a point not to go into Watts or other poor neighborhoods this time.  
 
Watts has never fully recovered from fires that leveled hundreds of buildings or the violence that killed 34 people — two-thirds of whom were shot by police or National Guard troops. Those who lived through those frightening days and those who grew up in its aftermath are keenly aware of that past and the lessons it taught.  
 
“People have learned from the history to say we’re not going to burn our community,” said state Assemblyman Mike Gipson, who was born in Watts a year after the turmoil. “We realize our community is not going to be built again.”  
 
Watts has changed from an exclusively Black neighborhood in the 1960s to one that’s majority Latino. It remains poor, with high unemployment.  
 
The uprising started Aug. 11, 1965, in a nearby neighborhood after the drunken driving arrest of a young Black man by a white California Highway Patrol officer. The violence reflected pent-up anger over an abusive police force, a problem that has ebbed but not entirely faded, according to those who live here.  
 
Improvements over the years include a more diverse Los Angeles Police Department that better reflects the city’s population. One of Watts’ major public housing developments, Jordan Downs, is being rebuilt with a nearby retail shopping complex.  
 
A government commission that studied the cause of the rebellion called for better police-community relations and more low-income housing, along with better schools, more job training, more efficient public transportation and better health care. While some gains have been made, those who live here say the area has a long way to go to overcome decades of neglect.  
 
Black residents, people born here and those who work to make life better in Watts spoke to The Associated Press about the challenges they faced and those that remain.
 
Donny Joubert remembers the chaos of 1965 through the eyes of a 5-year-old.  
 
Smoke filled the air and adults wept in front of a black-and-white TV tuned to images of their community burning and widespread looting.  
 
When he saw National Guard troops walking outside, Joubert thought his plastic toy soldiers had come to life.  
 
“What really shocked me was I look up and I see the same guys I was holding were walking through the development with guns on their shoulders,” Joubert said.  
 
Like some young men in the area, Joubert joined a gang and ended up in jail.  
 
But at 20, and with a young daughter, he got a second chance. Through a program founded by U.S. Rep. Maxine Waters of California he eventually got a job at the Los Angeles Housing Authority, where he’s now a grounds supervisor.  
 
He’s also vice president of the Watts Gang Task Force, which meets weekly with police. If there are reports of an abusive officer — someone roughing people up or prone to stopping cars without cause — they tell the captain. The officer may get transferred, though Joubert is concerned that just moves the problem to another neighborhood.  
 
He wants to see more done to prosecute police for brutality and fatal shootings. Only two officers in Los Angeles County have been prosecuted for on-duty killings in the past 20 years, a period in which close to 900 people, mostly Black and Latino, have been killed by law enforcement.  
 
“It’s been a crooked system when it came to us. They always had a system to keep us locked up, to keep a knee in our neck,” Joubert said. “Every dirty cop that took a Black life, that took a Latino life without cause, we want them in prison because that’s what they did to us.”  Residents of Watts are still living with collateral damage from 1965, said the Rev. Marcus Murchinson, who preaches at the Tree of Life Missionary Baptist Church and also runs a charter high school, drug rehab clinics and offers health care.  
 
Many of the businesses that burned were never rebuilt. A corridor of Black-owned restaurants, clothing stores and bars never rebounded.  
 
The area has long been termed a “food desert” because of a lack of fresh fruits and vegetables and a plethora of fast food restaurants and convenience and liquor stores stocked with booze, junk food and cigarettes. It took 20 years for a supermarket to be built after the uprising.  
 
“It was almost an act of punishment when they burned down the grocery store,” Murchinson said of the time it took to get a new one.  
 
Murchinson, 36, who didn’t grow up in Watts, said the community has survived uprisings in 1965 and 1992 following the acquittal of the officers who beat Rodney King. But surviving is not enough.  
 
“The spirit of the people of Watts has not changed. They are still resilient. They are still vibrant,” he said. “They have the root of survival. That is a good and bad thing. When you have the testimony of surviving, you sometimes think that is success and think surviving equates to thriving, and it doesn’t.”  
 
He said residents still suffer from years of systemic racism in policing, banking and housing. Multiple generations of the same families continue to live in public housing projects and only a small percentage get off government assistance and achieve the dream of owning a home.  
 
“What project is going on there?” he asked. “The project seems to be to warehouse people and make them comfortable, not competent.”  Lavarn Young, 81, who moved to Watts from Texas in 1946, said she’s seen a lot of good change since the uprising.  
 
Freeways built nearby make it easier to get around, there’s a light rail stop in the heart of Watts and shopping centers eventually replaced businesses that burned down in 1965.  
 
But she said gangs have made the neighborhood more dangerous than it was a half-century ago, even if crime is not as bad as during the crack cocaine epidemic of the 1980s and early ’90s.  
 
Young, who was horse race bookie and later worked in special education in schools, lives in her parents’ house, which is lined with family photos.  
 
One of her sons lives in the house behind her. He gets by on disability pay after a bullet lodged in his brain when he was shot in the eye. He survived two other shootings, as well.  
 
Young has 15 grandchildren and lots of nephews and nieces who are in and out of the house. She doesn’t ask if they are in gangs.  
 
“You don’t have to be in a gang, but you’re associated with it,” she said. “If you’re in a Blood hood, you’re a Blood. If you’re in a Crip hood, you’re a Crip. It depends where you were born.”  
 
Fences now separate homes on the streets where children once played on one another’s lawns, and bars cover many windows.  
 
“Now, you hardly know your neighbors,” she said.FILE – Demonstrators push against a police car in the Los Angeles neighborhood of Watts, Aug. 12, 1965.Former gang member Eric Frierson, 37, lives in Imperial Courts, one of the housing projects he refers to as “tribal institutions” because of the rivalries that divide residents despite sharing “the same struggle.”  
 
Frierson laments losing focus on becoming a good athlete and falling prey to the “distractions.”  
 
“You come outside and see the sidewalk stained with blood. It doesn’t go anywhere. Every time you go by it, you see it,” he said.  
 
His father was in prison, and Frierson served time for robbery, a felony conviction that prevents him from getting work.  
 
“I went behind that wall. I continued the trend,” Frierson said.  
 
He said he’s not optimistic the current activism will lead to big improvements. But he’s planning to set up some type of club that will provide sorely lacking activities for kids.  
 
Frierson still sees a lot of good within the walls of the housing projects.  
 
“There’s a lot more love in those bricks than they give us credit for,” he said.   
 
Hank Henderson, 62, and his family arrived in Watts from Indianapolis the year before the uprising and has seen the bad and good of the neighborhood. He remembers the fires, shattered windows, burned-out cars and soldiers in the streets.  
 
He saw the businesses that never returned: banks, doctor’s offices, a gas station, pharmacies, a dental office, barbershops, a grocery store and cleaners.  
 
The neighborhood was rough, but Henderson stayed out of trouble — his father wouldn’t tolerate it and he played sports. He was a local Golden Gloves champ and trains young boxers today.  
 
The Black Lives Matter movement and Floyd’s death have brought attention to abuses Black people have witnessed and suffered for years, though Henderson said that situation has improved since LAPD started listening to their complaints.  
 
“The police car says, ‘To protect and to serve’ but ‘seek and destroy’ is what they were doing,” Henderson said. “People are listening now. They’re realizing what’s been going on all these years.”  
 
Henderson moved out of Watts about two years after a son, Rayshawn Boyce, was gunned down in 2009. The suspected killer was caught but never charged because witnesses feared for their safety.  
 
“Here, they got this code. You don’t say nothing,” Henderson said. “They had witnesses at first but then they backed off. They would have had to move, and where were they going to go?”  
 
Henderson left the Nickerson Gardens housing project after nearly 50 years, moving to the suburbs about 30 miles (50 kilometers) inland.  
 
“I didn’t want to get out of here for years. I just wasn’t ready. A lot of people moved out, but they weren’t ready for the real world,” he said.  
 
The divisions in Watts — the gangs, the different housing projects — trickle down to children, who grow up aware of the feuds.  
 
“Our park is surrounded by three different areas,” Benjamin Jackson Jr. said. “Certain kids from our community of Watts can’t get together. We don’t even have a neutral meeting place.”  
 
Jackson grew up in Jordan Downs public housing, a weather-beaten collection of two-story apartment buildings originally built to house steelworkers after World War II. The complex is undergoing a major makeover that will include much-needed retail.  
 
He still lives in the project.  
 
“It’s easy to get in one, harder to get out because we’re born in it,” Jackson said. “The only time seeing anything different from the projects was me being incarcerated.”  
 
Jackson got in trouble at age 10 and was in an out of lockups much of his life. He was a member of the Grape Street Crips, but now, at 44, he’s older, wiser and “no longer a gangbanger.”  
 
He said police used to pick up him and others ostensibly for questioning. On the way to the station, they’d say they had to respond to another call and would drop him in rival turf, all alone.  
 
They no longer do that, but he said he’s still harassed despite being a carpenter who hasn’t been on parole or probation in 10 years.  
 
“They put me up against a wall. ‘Let’s jack him up and see if he got any warrants,'” Jackson said. “They’ll say the music was too loud when I don’t have music playing or spot me with people in the car and will just pull me over.”  
 
He said the main goal is to get out of the projects, to give his children a better life with a house and a yard. The oldest of his seven kids, a 24-year-old daughter, has realized that dream and lives in central California.  
 
“She ain’t never coming back,” Jackson said.  
    
On a small building that backs up to freight train tracks on Compton Avenue, an image of Martin Luther King Jr. is painted on a wall across the word, “DREAM.”  
 
Inside the Shack by the Track, Lorinda Lacy tries to make those letters come to life for Watts residents.  
 
In addition to assembling party supplies for a living and serving snacks — hamburgers, cookies, candy — she spends a lot of her time and energy helping others.  
 
Lacy, known as Auntie Moee, is one of many in Watts, including nonprofits and charities, who provide for those in need.  
 
Lacy does all her work on a shoestring budget, providing blankets and pillows to the homeless, feeding children who miss out on school lunches during the summer and providing hundreds of free meals each holiday to anyone who’s hungry. She gets contributions, buys food when it’s cheap and gets handouts from churches and food pantries.  
 
“I don’t have anything to give back but my love,” she said. “I’m not rich. I’m poor.”  
 
Lacy said her brother, the rapper Kevin “Flipside” White, was her inspiration and mentor for giving back to the community. White was part of the group OFTB, or Operation from the Bottom, that recorded with Death Row Records and worked on several tracks with the late Tupac Shakur.  
 
White died in a drive-by shooting in 2013.  
 
Lacy, 45, moved out of Watts 20 years ago because she didn’t want her daughters to grow up with the trauma she experienced.  
 
She said she she eventually became “immune” to the violence after stepping over bodies on the way to school and finding out who had been killed the night before or who had their house shot up. As a child, she slept on the floor because of frequent drive-by shootings.  
 
“If it wasn’t every night, it was every other night,” she said.  
 
Even though she moved out, she hasn’t given up on her old neighborhood, where her mother still lives in the house where Lacy grew up.  
 
She’s trying to provide a safe place where people can hang out while she works. Music plays in the background and kids play games outside.  
 
“All I’m doing is taking my stand and doing my part,” she said.  
 
Gipson attributes his success partly to hardworking parents — a father who was a truck driver and a mother who was a domestic worker — who did not spare him from discipline. They taught him to respect others, and neighbors also looked out for him and told his parents when he was out of line.  
 
There was immense pressure to join a gang, and he wanted to be part of one. But Gipson said the leader wouldn’t let him join, partly because he was afraid of Gipson’s mother.  
 
Gipson’s turning point came in middle school when he overcame a speech impediment and low self-esteem and was elected class president.  
 
“It was difficult growing up, but not impossible growing up in Watts,” he said.  
 
Inspired by a cousin who worked as a U.S. marshal, Gipson eventually became a police officer in the city of Maywood and then left for a series of jobs working for politicians and unions. He was elected to City Council in Carson in 2005 and state Assembly in 2014 to represent an area that includes Watts.  
 
He said the legacy of the Watts riots is something he keeps in mind as he tries to make life better for residents.  
 
“I would say, even though I didn’t know them in 1965, those people didn’t lose their lives in order for someone to grow up in Watts and not create and make a better place for the next generation,” he said. “What you have seen, my God, even in 2020 where people feel disenfranchised, marginalized, feel like they’ve been pushed aside and left for dead, been invisible, their voices have not been elevated to the point where change is effective.”  
 
Asked why so much is still needed in Watts, Gipson said change is slow. He cited the millions poured into rebuilding Jordan Downs. A new hospital that serves the area opened five years ago to replace the county-run Martin Luther King Jr. hospital that was closed after patient deaths and shoddy care.  
 
Floyd’s death inspired Gipson to introduce legislation to ban the use of a controversial neck hold that police officers use to restrain suspects. Floyd was handcuffed on the ground and gasping for air as an officer pressed a knee in his neck for nearly eight minutes.  
 
Gipson also wants to see bias training for police, more people of color hired on the force and an affirmative action ban in the state repealed.  
 
“We’re not the same California we were 55 years ago or the city of Los Angeles 55 years ago. We’re moving forward, we’re bringing people together,” Gipson said. “Voices are saying, ‘We’ve been mistreated.’ Change is in the air.”
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