A “searing” Justice Department civil rights report into the police and court system in Ferguson, Missouri found that the city “had engaged in so many constitutional violations that they could be corrected only by abandoning its entire approach to policing, retraining its employees and establishing new oversight,” according to the New York Times.
Here are some of the most shocking elements, via CNN.
(image: AP/The Guardian – Report details shocking set of racist emails sent by law enforcement)
Jamelle Bouie writes at Slate on Ferguson’s True Criminals:
In Ferguson, if you are black, you live in the shadow of lawlessness and plunder, directed by city officials and enforced by the police. You work, and you pay taxes, and those taxes go to fund a system that stops you, arrests you, and steals from you.
The Huffington Post reported that Attorney General Eric Holder said it was “time for Ferguson’s leaders to take immediate, wholesale and structural corrective action” to address the problems in the report. Whether the city continues to operate its own police department could now be in doubt.
Separately, the DOJ also said that it would not prosecute Darren Wilson, the former Ferguson police officer, for his role in the death of an unarmed black man, 18-year-old Michael Brown, which sparked protests in the city and elsewhere in the country.
“Michael Brown’s death, though tragic, did not involve prosecutable conduct by Officer Wilson,” Holder said. “These findings may not be consistent with some people’s expectations.”…
“Members of the community may not have been responding to a single isolated confrontation but also to a pervasive, coercive and deep lack of trust,” he said. “Some of those protesters were right.”
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* POLITICS * After a day of swirling fallout from stories about control of her communications while Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton said she wants the public to see her email. Late on Wednesday, she tweeted:
Earlier, the House committee investigating the Benghazi attacks issued subpoenas for Mrs Clinton’s emails related to Libya. The Washington Post says her use of private email “reflects poor judgment about a public trust.”
The Senate failed in an effort to override President Obama’s veto of the bill authorizing the Keystone XL pipeline.
It appeared difficult to get a steer on how the Supreme Court might be leaning after hearing oral arguments in King v Burwell, which could curtail Obamacare. There was, though, maybe one clue…
A transcript of the arguments is here, via Vox.com.
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* WORLD * One of the most heavily-anticipated trials of recent years got off to a stunning start, as the Boston Globe reports:
After thousands of pages of legal briefs and nearly two years of hearings, a lawyer for Dzhokhar Tsarnaev stood in federal court Wednesday, the first day of the long-awaited Marathon bombing trial, and made a startling simple declaration: “It was him.”
In New York, a Pakistani man arrested in Britain in 2009 and extradited to the US was convicted of a terror plot targeting the subway system.
The US Ambassador to South Korea, Mark Lippert, was injured in an apparent knife attack in Seoul on Thursday morning. The ambassador was injured in the face and wrist by a man yelling political slogans. He was taken to hospital and his wounds are not life-threatening. His assailant, who is reportedly known to police, was arrested.
Iran’s foreign minister told NBC News that he believed a nuclear deal may be “very close.”
(YouTube/NBCNews)
China’s National People’s Congress got under way on Thursday, amid a lowering of the country’s economic growth forecast. CNBC finds that the gathering is attracting an increasing number of the country’s wealthiest individuals. Meanwhile, Bloomberg reports that more than 76,000 Chinese millionaires “emigrated or acquired citizenship of another country” in the tens years to 2013.
Another strong storm is headed for the US northeast in the next 24 hours, bringing frigid conditions from New Mexico to Massachusetts.
(CBS Evening News)
* BUSINESS * In something of a surprise in pharma M&A late on Wednesday, AbbVie agreed to buy Pharmacyclics for $21billion, seemingly under the nose of Johnson & Johnson. AbbVie will give more details in a conference call at 9am ET on Thursday.
Craft marketplace Etsy filed for an IPO, and will be listed on the Nasdaq under the symbol ETSY. Says Bloomberg:
Etsy, founded a decade ago as a niche website where artists could sell their creations, offers everything from crochet chickens to Soviet-era souvenir pens, making revenue through commissions and listing fees charged to sellers. Revenue last year surged 56 percent to $196 million, the filing shows. Still, the company’s losses widened, to $15.2 million for the 12 months through Dec. 31 from $796,000 a year earlier.
Meanwhile, hip eyewear outlet Warby Parker could be the latest start-up to join the $1billion club, Bloomberg reports.
Unemployment fell in every US state and Washington DC last year, a Labor Department report showed – the first time that has happened since 1984.
There’s a campaign to put a woman on the twenty dollar bill. Vauhini Vara at the New Yorker writes:
It wouldn’t require a vote in Congress or Presidential approval to get a woman on the twenty-dollar bill. The Secretary of the Treasury is responsible for the designs that appear on paper notes, including the portraits. Nor do the people depicted on bills have to meet particularly stringent standards; according to U.S. law, they just have to be dead. Even so, the appearance of U.S. banknotes was hardly modified during the twentieth century; according to historians, this was partly to keep the bills recognizable and partly due to the American public’s resistance to change.
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* MEDIA * Gawker has a fascinating insider’s account of a year “Ripping off the Web with the Daily Mail Online.”
This interactive feature in the Los Angeles Times on inmates at San Quentin State Prison who composed their own obituaries as part of a creative writing assignment is a moving look at roads not taken.
Salman Rushdie is to join NYU’s Journalism Institute in September as the school’s Distinguished Writer in Residence.
Meanwhile, another distinguished writer is offering to teach you all about Superheroes.
(Youtube/EdX)
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* CULTURE * Bruce Willis is to make his Broadway debut this fall in an adaptation of Stephen King’s novel Misery. The adaptation by William Goldman – who also adapted the movie version in 1990 – had its world premiere at the Bucks County Playhouse in 2012.
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* SPORTS * There are reports that Major League Soccer and its players’ union had agreed in principle to a five-year labor agreement, heading off a possible strike ahead of the weekend’s opening to its landmark 20th season.
Fifa President Sepp Blatter “will not be playing ball” with proposals for a televised debate between candidates vying to unseat him. Candidate Luis Figo has backed the idea and FA chairman Greg Dyke has offered to host such a debate at Wembley, but Blatter – the overwhelming favorite to win a fifth term in May – has the final say.
Champion flat jockey Richard Hughes announced he would retire at the end of the 2015 season. Hughes, 42, who will take up a career as a trainer, has been champion jockey in each of the last three seasons. He joins 19-time champion jump jockey Tony McCoy, who also announced his retirement this year.
Des Bieler at the Washington Post writes about Winnipeg Jets’ goalie Ondrej Pavelec and his really rather awesome mask by artist David Gunnarsson.
(image: DaveArt.com/TheHockeyNews)
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