Look back: National news brief April 22-28

April 24

Amazon’s new service delivers packages to your car

• Amazon unveiled a new delivery service free for Amazon Prime members. In addition to in-house delivery, users can now sign up to have packages delivered to their cars — even when the users are not present.
• Through the Amazon Keychain app, employees can unlock consumers’ cars and place the packages in the trunk. Employees have access to the whole car, so if the trunk is full they will place packages in the lower half of the backseat.
• Users would receive real-time notifications on every step of the delivery process, even if the car is locked. They can block access to the Cloud Keychain at any point in the process. Employees must lock the car before receiving instructions to move on to their next destination.
• The service is now available in 37 U.S. cities. It is compatible with 2015 and newer Chevrolets, Buicks, GMCs, Cadillacs and Volvos.
• For more information, see Amazon’s web page dedicated to this new service.
• Check out a demonstration of the delivery process in ABC News’ video.

April 26

Museum and memorial opens in remembrance of the nation’s history of slavery

• The Legacy Museum and the National Memorial for Peace and Justice opened in Montgomery, Alabama — a site dedicated to confronting the nation’s history of slavery.
• One of the most impactful sections is the lynching memorial in the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, which contains 800 steel panels suspended in air engraved with the names of the victims.
• To increase its impact, the Memorial allows local governments to take full-size replicas of the monument panels to remember the victims and expand into other parts of the country.
• In this YouTube video, take a look at Oprah Winfrey’s visit to the Memorial in a segment from “60 Minutes.”
• Read more about the two sites and what they mean in this Vox article.

Bill Cosby found guilty of sexual assault charges

• In Montgomery County, Pennsylvania Bill Cosby was found guilty of three counts of sexual assault. Cosby will face 10 years in prison for each count, making it a 30-year sentence for the Hollywood veteran.
• Contrary of having only one witness in 2017’s spring trial — which found Cosby innocent — the jury allowed five of Cosby’s 50 accusers to testify. 
• Many news outlets, including the New York Times, Vox and NBC News, published articles on whether the #MeToo movement changed Cosby’s fate — a movement which caused a worldwide uproar across all industries.
• Psychologist and associate professor at Yale University Joan Cook wrote a woman-empowerment essay stating, “Cosby retrial becomes a perfect platform to see how far we have come.” Her essay was published in The Hill before the trial verdict.
• Some are skeptical of #MeToo’s effects within the legal world. “You don’t tear down the walls of patriarchy with a tweetstorm or a couple of marches,” said author and historian Danielle McGuire, who writes about racial and sexual violence. “The #MeToo movement will have to go on longer, and do more education and training.”
• Dominic Willmott, a research fellow in forensic psychology at the University of Huddersfield in England found in his study that debunking sexual assault myths before a trial, such as there are not as many false rape reports as we think, does not change the jury’s perception of the defendant’s innocence. “These beliefs are so deep-rooted that people can’t push them aside,” said Willmott. “They are so deeply embedded in what we believe, we almost can’t shake them off.”
• Read more from the two skeptics in this article from the Huffington Post, “Don’t Count On ‘Me Too’ To Sway The Bill Cosby Jury” that looks at the impact of #MeToo on sexual assault trials critically.
• Watch a recap and description of the Cosby trial in this Associated Press video.