The U.S. at a glance ... NEWS^7
Fort Worth
Shot at home: A white police
officer was charged with mur-
der this week after he fatally
shot a black woman, Atatiana
Jefferson, inside her bed-
room while she played video
games with her 8-year-old nephew. Aaron
Dean, 34, and another officer responded
to an early-morning nonemergency call
about a door ajar at Jefferson’s home. A
bodycam shows Dean pushing through
a gate to enter the backyard, shining a
light through a window at Jefferson, 28,
and yelling “Put your hands up! Show
me your hands!” He then fires one shot
through the glass. The officers never
announced their identities. Jefferson’s
nephew said his aunt thought a stranger
was outside when she grabbed a handgun
from her purse and pointed it toward the
window—all legal in Texas. “Nobody
looked at that video and said there was
any doubt that this officer acted inappro-
priately,” police chief Ed Kraus said.Westerville, Ohio
Onstage: Democratic presidential
contenders went after emerging
front-runner Elizabeth Warren at
a debate this week, hammering
the Massachusetts senator over
the costs of Medicare for All and
her ambitious liberal platform.
Warren insisted middle-class
families would pay less over-
all for health care under the plan, but
refused to say whether their taxes would
go up. The author of the plan, Sen. Bernie
Sanders, conceded it would require a tax
hike. “At least Bernie’s being honest here,”
said Sen. Amy Klobuchar, calling Warren’s
plan a “pipe dream.” South Bend, Ind.,
Mayor Pete Buttigieg said that Warren’s
health-care solution required “kicking
150 million Americans off their insurance.”
He and Klobuchar went after Warren
aggressively, hoping to position themselves
as moderate alternatives to her as formerVice President Joe Biden
fell behind Warren
in some national and
early-state polls. Biden,
for his part, took the
opportunity to coun-
ter President Trump’s
repeated attacks on his
son, Hunter, proclaim-
ing “My son did noth-
ing wrong. I did nothing wrong.”
All 12 candidates onstage supported the
Trump impeachment inquiry, and they
took turns excoriating Trump’s handling
of the crisis in Syria. Buttigieg, a veteran
of Afghanistan, said Trump’s abandon-
ment of Kurdish allies has U.S. forces feel-
ing “ashamed,” while Biden said Trump
“knows not a damn thing about foreign
policy.” Sanders, 78, appeared vigorous
after suffering a heart attack two weeks
earlier, and said his health wouldn’t slow
his campaign. This week, Sanders received
the endorsements of Rep.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
(D-N.Y.) and two of her fire-
brand allies, Rep. Ilhan Omar
(D-Minn.) and Rashida Tlaib
(D-Mich.).Los Angeles
Through the look-
ing glass: Accused by
Republicans of ben-
efitting from his
father’s former
role as vice presi-
dent, Hunter
Biden this week
announced he
was quitting
the board of a
Chinese com-
pany and pledged to stop working with
foreign entities if his father is elected
president. Biden, 49, called President
Trump’s claim that then–Vice President
Joe Biden pressured Ukraine on behalf of
a company he worked for a “ridiculous
conspiracy idea.” Though the younger
Biden conceded that his work in Ukraine
could be seen as an error in judgment, he
insisted it was “absolutely not” an “ethi-
cal lapse.” He likened the efforts
to attack him by the president—
whose own attempts to pressure
Ukraine into investigating the
Bidens are at the center of the
impeachment inquiry—to
an Alice in Wonderland trip
down the rabbit hole. Last
week at a rally in Minneapolis,
Trump’s son Eric invoked
Hunter while leading a crowd in
a chant of “Lock him up!”El Paso, Texas
No emergency: Diverting $6.1 billion
in defense funding to pay for a border
wall is “unlawful,” a federal judge
ruled last week. U.S. District Court
Judge David Briones appeared poised
to halt at least $3.6 billion planned
for hundreds of miles of 30-foot
steel fencing, saying that President
Trump can’t declare an emergency in
order to supersede the will of Congress.
Trump’s immigration agenda also took
blows in New York, California, and
Washington, where judges blocked a
“public charge” rule that would prevent
migrants from obtaining green cards if
they use government benefits or appear
likely to do so; the New York judge
called it “unlawful, arbitrary, and capri-
cious.” On border funding, the Supreme
Court ruled in July that California plain-
tiffs lacked standing to challenge the wall
in a similar case, but Briones said El Paso
has a right to oppose an emergency dec-
laration that implies the region is “crime-
ridden and dangerous.”Doral, Fla.
Massacre meme: A conference at Pres-
i dent Trump’s Doral resort last week
featured a video that depicted him slaugh-
tering journalists and political rivals in an
action movie-style massacre. Organizers
said the video—which shows Trump’s
head superimposed on the body of a man
shooting up the “Church of Fake News”
in a mashup of a scene from Kingsman:
The Secret Service—was “unsanctioned.”
The targets in the video include Barack
Obama, John McCain, and Bernie
Sanders, as well as other figures covered
with logos of media organizations such as
NBC, NPR, and The Washington Post.
The clip ends with Trump triumphantly
standing on the church altar after “kill-
ing” CNN. Donald Trump Jr. and for-
mer White House Press Secretary Sarah
Huckabee Sanders spoke at the confer-
ence but claimed not to have seen the
video, which was created by a prolific but
Scr unidentified maker of pro-Trump memes.
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Hunter BidenWarren: Top target in debateJefferson‘Church of Fake News’