Chinese President Xi Jinping urged the world to “reject attempts to build blocks to keep others out” as an image of his country’s storied Great Wall hung behind him. Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte used photos and videos to illustrate what he was talking about. Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison shared his policy views — and his scenic view of Sydney Harbor.If the annual U.N. General Assembly meeting of national leaders is always a window on the world, this year the window is opening directly onto their desks, presidential palaces and homelands.Staying home because of the coronavirus pandemic, they are speaking by video, adding a new layer of imagemaking to the messages and personas they seek to project.”They have to be authentic, they have to be believable, and this is even more of a challenge virtually. But it need not be, if you’re able to think about how to use your background creatively,” said Steven D. Cohen, a Johns Hopkins University business communication professor who has coached politicians.”They can use what happens in the frame to complement those messages, to break through the glass of the computer and connect through stories, through visions,” he said.The General Assembly hall’s podium has provided decades of presidents, prime ministers and monarchs with a coveted portrait of statesmanship — and a setting conducive to it. While it’s no secret that many speeches are aimed largely at domestic audiences, sideline encounters and the prospect of live reactions from the international community can be “a factor for nudging people into what multilateral diplomacy is all about: finding common cause,” said Richard Ponzio, a former U.S. State Department and U.N. official and now a fellow at the Stimson Center, a foreign policy think tank.TV-style chyronsOthers enhanced their presentations with subtitles or even cable-news-style chyrons, like “HOW WE CAN BUILD A BETTER FUTURE FOR ALL” and “WE MUST LEAVE NO ONE BEHIND” to underscore key messages from eSwatini’s prime minister, Ambrose Mandvulo Dlamini.Duterte overlaid parts of his speech with relevant photos and videos of coronavirus test centers, storms and more, going well beyond the maps and pictures that leaders occasionally hold up at the assembly podium.Without the hall, some speakers opted for a more approachable posture. Pope Francis, for example, eschewed a podium to stand close to the camera in a bookcase-lined room, as though speaking to a visitor.Many leaders sat at desks, sometimes giving the world a glimpse of personal photos, stacks of books and other presumably carefully curated workaday items, including a coffee cup for Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador.Speaking from a desk connotes being “friendly, conversational, trying to connect with people,” said Jim Bennett, executive director of the Virtual Meetings and Events Association, an event planners’ clearinghouse. But desks — especially large ones — also can signal authority.Morrison chose an even more conversational setting: a sunny spot overlooking the city’s famous harbor and opera house, with boats passing in the background. Morrison, who has complained in the past about international institutions bossing countries around, called the virus a reminder of the importance of multinational cooperation, though he added that international institutions need to be “accountable to the sovereign states that form them.”Cheer from FijiFiji’s prime minister, Frank Bainimarama, had a crowd in the background of his speech for a special session on the U.N.’s 75th anniversary. After his remarks highlighting Fiji’s role in peacekeeping missions and ocean preservation efforts, he and the spectators gave the U.N. a birthday cheer.To be sure, many leaders spoke the traditional visual language of political speechmaking, flanked by flags with TV-friendly plain backdrops. Many others appeared in well-appointed offices and ceremonial rooms that could provide plenty of fodder for the decor-ranking  that took flight online this spring as the pandemic forced TV commentators and other public figures to work from home. Kausea Natano, the prime minister of the Pacific island nation of Tuvalu, gave the global audience a picture of its tropical shore.For heads of state, of course, a backdrop often speaks to more than individual taste.Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis spoke against a panorama of the Acropolis and the Parthenon. The prime minister of Mauritius, Pravind Jugnauth, seized on the chance to mark his country’s claim in a territorial dispute, appearing in front of a map that showed the British-controlled Chagos Islands as part of Mauritius while discussing the countries’ long-running disagreement over the archipelago.Venezuela’s President Nicolas Maduro speaks virtually during the 75th annual U.N. General Assembly, from Miraflores Palace in Caracas, Venezuela, Sept. 23, 2020.Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro spoke  before a large portrait of 19th-century South American independence leader Simón Bolivar and invoked him while lashing out at the United States, which doesn’t recognize Maduro as Venezuela’s president.U.S. President Donald Trump, for his part, used the White House diplomatic reception room to film an uncommonly brief address  focused on criticizing China.Palau’s president, for one, used his video to send a more up-close-and-personal message. in his final U.N. speech after serving as the Pacific island nation’s leader for 16 of the last 20 years.With some points of pride in the background — a U.N. environmental award and baseball and basketball trophies from teams on which he played — and a bright pink polo shirt instead of the dark suits he wore to the assembly rostrum over the years, Tommy E. Remengesau Jr. reflected on what the group has and hasn’t tackled since he first addressed it in the wake of the September 11 terror attacks in 2001.”My message then was one of unity,” he said, and “this call remains apt today.”
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Demonstrators took the streets for another night Friday in Louisville, Kentucky, to protest the killing of Breonna Taylor, a Black emergency medical worker who was killed by white police officers last March as they carried out a drug raid.About 15 protesters were arrested Friday, police said, for breaking the 9 p.m. curfew.Earlier Friday, Taylor’s family and their lawyer, Benjamin Crump, called on Kentucky Attorney General David Cameron to release body camera footage, police files and the transcripts of the grand jury proceedings that did not bring homicide charges against the officers who killed Taylor.Crump said the grand jury’s decision is an example of systemic racism that persists in America. “It underscores what we’ve been saying all along,” he said.Taylor’s mother, Tamika Palmer, said, “The police and law were not made to protect us Black and brown women.” Palmer said the grand jury’s decision confirms the fact that she has “no faith in the legal system.”Palmer said she “knew” Cameron “would never do his job” and added, “The system as a whole has failed Breonna.”Cameron is Kentucky’s first Black attorney general.U.S. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who represents Kentucky, defended the investigation in a speech Thursday on the Senate floor, saying Cameron “conducted exactly the kind of thorough, impartial investigation that justice demands.” He called protests in Louisville in which two police officers were shot “more evidence of the lawlessness, riots, and violence that has plagued American cities too often this year.”Crump posted on Twitter he is hopeful a federal investigation into Taylor’s killing would produce charges against the officers. “We hope the FBI investigation finally gets justice for Bre and her family.”Taylor was killed when police on a drug raid entered her apartment on a “no-knock” warrant, authorized to allow police to enter a dwelling without warning to keep evidence from being destroyed. No drugs were found in Taylor’s apartment.However, Cameron said Wednesday that a neighbor of Taylor’s heard police announce their presence before entering Taylor’s apartment and that their entry was not deemed a “no-knock” raid.Cameron said the officers “were justified in their use of force” after Taylor’s boyfriend, Kenneth Walker, who says he heard no announcement by the police, opened fire at them first when they entered the apartment, thinking they were intruders.Attention is being focused on Taylor’s shooting and other cases following the death earlier this year of George Floyd, a Black man, who died while in police custody in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Floyd’s death sparked protests around the world about social injustice.
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The U.S. Justice Department asked a federal judge in San Francisco on Friday to allow the government to bar Apple Inc. and Alphabet Inc.’s Google from offering WeChat for download in U.S. app stores pending an appeal.The filing asked U.S. Magistrate Judge Laurel Beeler to put on hold her preliminary injunction issued Saturday. That injunction blocked the U.S. Commerce Department order that was set to take effect late September 20 and that would also bar other U.S. transactions with Tencent Holding’s WeChat, potentially making the app unusable in the United States.Beeler responded late Friday by setting a hearing for October 15 on the motion but said she could potentially hold it on “a tighter time period.”The Justice Department filing said Beeler’s order was in error and “permits the continued, unfettered use of WeChat, a mobile application that the Executive Branch has determined constitutes a threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States.”Tencent had put forward a “mitigation proposal” that sought to create a new U.S. version of the app, deploy specific security measures to protect the new apps source code, partner with a U.S. cloud provider for user data storage, and manage the new app through a U.S.-based entity, the filing said.However, its proposal still allowed Tencent to retain ownership of WeChat and did not address U.S. concerns over the company, it added.Tencent declined to comment.Lawyers for U.S. WeChat Users Alliance, the group behind the legal challenge to the WeChat ban, questioned the urgency of the government’s request, noting the time it took for the government to seek a stay.”The government’s decision to sit tight for five days shows that there is no emergency,” they wrote.In support of its argument, the Justice Department made public portions of a September 17 Commerce Department memo outlining the WeChat transactions to be banned.”The WeChat mobile application collects and transmits sensitive personal information on U.S. persons, which is accessible to Tencent and stored in data centers in China and Canada,” the memo said. Beeler said WeChat users who filed a lawsuit “have shown serious questions going to the merits of the First Amendment claim.”The Justice Department filing said, “The First Amendment does not bar regulation of WeChat simply because it has achieved the popularity and dependency sought by (China), precisely so it can surveil users, promote its propaganda, and otherwise place U.S. national security at risk.”WeChat has had an average of 19 million daily active users in the United States, analytics firms Apptopia said in early August. It is popular among Chinese students, Americans living in China and some Americans who have personal or business relationships in China.Beeler wrote “certainly the government’s over-arching national-security interest is significant. But on this record — while the government has established that China’s activities raise significant national security concerns — it has put in scant little evidence that its effective ban of WeChat for all U.S. users addresses those concerns.”WeChat is an all-in-one mobile app that combines services similar to Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram and Venmo. The app is an essential part of daily life for many in China and boasts more than 1 billion users.TikTok on Wednesday sought a similar preliminary injunction from a U.S. judge in Washington. A judge on Friday said he would hold a hearing Sunday morning about whether to halt the U.S. app store ban on new TikTok downloads set to take effect Sunday night.  
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The attorney for Breonna Taylor, a Black emergency medical worker who was killed by white police officers last March in Kentucky as they carried out a botched drug raid, said Friday that a grand jury’s decision not to bring homicide charges against the officers was an example of systemic racism that persists in America.“There seems to be two justice systems in America, one for Black America and one for white America,” said Benjamin Crump at a news conference in Louisville. “It underscores what we’ve been saying all along.”Taylor’s mother, Tamika Palmer, also denounced the grand jury’s decision, saying in a statement the decision underscored “why I have no faith in the legal system. The police and law were not made to protect us Black and brown women.”Palmer said she “knew” Kentucky Attorney General David Cameron “would never do his job” and added, “The system as a whole has failed Breonna.”Taylor’s family and Crump repeated a call for Cameron to release a transcript of the grand jury proceedings.A billboard sponsored by O, The Oprah Magazine, is on display with a photo of Breonna Taylor, in Louisville, Kentucky, Aug. 7, 2020.McConnell defends probeU.S. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky defended the investigation in a speech Thursday on the Senate floor, saying Cameron “conducted exactly the kind of thorough, impartial investigation that justice demands.” He called protests in Louisville in which two police officers were shot “more evidence of the lawlessness, riots and violence that has plagued American cities too often this year.”Crump tweeted earlier Friday that he was hopeful a federal investigation into Taylor’s killing would produce charges against the officers. “We hope the FBI investigation finally gets justice for Bre and her family,” he said in reference to Breonna.The news conference was held hours after protests erupted for a second night Thursday in Louisville in response to the grand jury’s decision. Some protesters smashed windows, and police said at least 24 people were arrested.More than a hundred protesters took refuge in the First Unitarian Church after the start of a nighttime curfew.Earlier Thursday, there were some tense moments when a group of armed white people confronted the protesters, but no shots were fired.Breonna Taylor family attorney Ben Crump speaks during a news conference, Sept. 25, 2020, in Louisville, Kentucky.’No easy answer’Louisville Mayor Greg Fischer said at a news conference Thursday, “What do we do with this pain?”  The mayor added that there is “no easy answer to that question.”Taylor was killed when police entered her apartment on a “no-knock” drug raid, authorized to allow police to burst into a dwelling without warning to keep evidence from being destroyed. No drugs were found in Taylor’s apartment.However, Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron said Wednesday that a neighbor of Taylor’s heard police announce their presence before entering Taylor’s apartment and that their entry was not deemed a “no-knock” raid.Cameron said the officers “were justified in their use of force” after Taylor’s boyfriend, Kenneth Walker, who said he heard no announcement by the police, opened fire at them first when they entered the apartment, thinking they were intruders.Attention is being focused on Taylor’s shooting and other cases following the death earlier this year of George Floyd, a Black man, after a white police officer in Minneapolis pressed his knee into Floyd’s neck. Floyd’s death sparked protests around the world about social injustice.
 
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