Gizmodo: “On Tuesday [June 2, 2020], Washington, DC, resident Ed Felten tweeted an image of a black bulb resembling a Christmas ornament, lying in a patch of spring grass. “Very relieved that the unexploded flash-bang grenade that my daughter found and innocently picked up this morning didn’t explode in her face,” Felten, former White House deputy chief technology officer, captioned the image. “Beyond angry that it was left on the streets of our capital city.” Alongside the tweet were various reports of the previous night’s police assaults on civilians with stun (aka “flash-bang”) grenades, rubber bullets and chemical gas. Kicking off the evening, police memorably fired tear gas at peaceful protesters so that the president could take a photo holding a Bible upside-down outside St. John’s Episcopal Church. A flash-bang grenade, detonated at short range, could most certainly cause serious harm: A ProPublica investigation has found that, in at least 50 cases, flash-bangs have burned, maimed, or killed Americans, including slicing off fingers and hands. “When these modified hand grenades explode on the human body, they can cause severe injury or death,” ProPublica wrote in 2015. “The flash powder burns hotter than lava.” In one 2014 case, a mother told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution that a flash-bang grenade police threw into her toddler’s crib “blew open his face and his chest.” As militarized police and actual military forces meet protesters on streets across the nation, what should you do when you find leftover weapons of mass destruction and canisters of harmful chemical gas? Gizmodo asked experts for advice…”

See also Jezebel – The Occupation of Washington, D.C.: “…Yet the military exists to guard power, and its use is an all-encompassing play that ensures that birthright, once given, is kept. And Trump has done his best to transform Washington into a version of Tom Cotton’s [R- Senator – AK]  fantasy; he’s ordered military planes to hover over the city, in the type of “show-of-force” mission more typically used to warn of incoming troops—an operation reportedly called “Operation Themis” after the Greek figure Themis, a Titaness of “divine law and order.” (That this name is shared with an Italian program designed to secure the country’s borders and eliminate “terrorist threats” is appropriate.) Trump has suggested taking over the direction of the city’s police force, a move quickly countered as unprecedented and decidedly illegal by D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser. Even the city’s curfew is a warning to residents to expect and plan for violence. “It’s after 7, they can do whatever they want to you,” one protester told the Washington Post. “There are no rules.”..