A campus police officer in Ohio was indicted for murder in the shooting death of an unarmed motorist on July 19. University of Cincinnati Officer Ray Tensing was charged in connection with the death of Samuel Dubose, with the incident captured on the officer’s body camera.

Richard Perez-Pena writes at the New York Times:

The death of Mr. Dubose, who was black, at the hands of Officer Tensing, who is white, joined a string of recent cases — in places including Staten Island; Cleveland; Baltimore; North Charleston, S.C.; and Ferguson, Mo., among others — that have raised hard questions about law enforcement’s use of force and the role of race in policing. Video cameras have recorded many of these episodes and other, nonlethal encounters — like the arrest of Sandra Bland, who died three days later in a Texas jail cell — offering disturbing evidence of the confrontations that often contradicts the accounts of those involved.

Release of the footage had been the subject of a lawsuit brought by the Associated Press and other media organizations earlier this week.

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* WORLD * Speculation intensified late on Wednesday that airplane wreckage which washed up on the island of Reunion in the Indian Ocean might be part of the missing Malaysian airliner MH370. CNN reported that a Boeing source said the debris “appears to be part of a Boeing 777.”

Russia vetoed a UN resolution at the Security Council introduced by Malaysia which would have established a commission to assign responsibility for the shooting down of MH17.

Reclusive Taliban leader Mullah Omar was apparently killed in 2013 in Pakistan, Afghan sources were reported as confirming. Joshua Keating writes at Slate “If Mullah Omar really is dead, what does that mean for the Taliban?”

The Pakistan-based negotiations with the Afghan government have reportedly split the movement’s leaders, and a prominent Taliban website has denounced the negotiating team as midlevel sellouts. Omar’s presumed support for the talks may have been the biggest thing they had going for them.

As online outrage continued, Minnesota Dentist  Walter Palmer apparently “regrets” killing Cecil the lion on a Zimbabwe hunting trip. His dental practice remained closed on Wednesday. In a compelling piece in The Independent, filmmaker Louis Theroux writes on how Palmer is “now discovering what it’s like to be hunted.”

What struck me reading the coverage was how similar he was in certain respects to many of the Americans I met in South Africa. They too were bowhunters from the mid-West, a place where there is a robust hunting culture, directly mainly at the large populations of deer. And like Palmer, some were involved in a years-long effort to bag as many big-ticket trophies as possible, a bit like trainspotters ticking locomotives off a list, only with more death.

And late night talkshow host Jimmy Kimmel found it hard to contain his emotion in last night’s monologue.

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* POLITICS * With yet another poll of GOP primary candidates showing – you guessed it – Donald Trump with a clear lead, the field grew by one, when former Virginia Gov decided to go ahead and file papers to become the 17th candidate.

Meanwhile, Alex Isenstadt at Politico looks at Rand Paul’s “downward spiral” and what went wrong with the former top-tier candidate’s campaign.

Those close to Paul say there’s a simple reason for his lack of success: He’s simply not willing to do the stroking and courting that powerful donors expect. He’s downright allergic, they say, to the idea of forging relationships with the goal of pumping people for dough. And while he’s had no shortage of opportunities to mix and mingle with some of the Republican Party’s wealthiest figures, Paul has expressed frustration that donors want so much face time.

On the subject of polls, meanwhile, a CNN poll showed Sen Bernie Sanders beating the top Republican candidates head-to-head.

And the Sanders campaign had apparently signed up 100,000 people for more than 3,000 kick-off “house parties” across the country on Wednesday night – the biggest organizing event so far of the 2016 cycle.

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* BUSINESS * Facebook reported strong 2Q earnings, saying that the number of its monthly active users jumped 13% year-over-year to 1.49billion. Mobile ads now make up more than three-quarters of the company’s total ad revenues.

The Federal Reserve appeared to inch closer to a possible interest rate rise in September. Reuters reports that the “central bank said after its regular policy meeting on Wednesday that the economy and job market continue to strengthen”.

http://twitter.com/trutherbitbot/status/626500893412753408

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* MEDIA * There’s a nice piece by Paul Farhi at the Washington Post on cursing on air at NPR. Clever headline too…

News organizations frequently wrestle with how to keep up with, or to resist, the coarsening of everyday speech. Most maintain written guidelines spelling out what’s acceptable, down to the number of dashes, asterisks or bleeps that must accompany the occasional f-bomb, s-bomb or n-word that becomes part of a news story.

And a piece by Merrill Perlman at the Columbia Journalism Review ponders just how relevant it is anymore to yell “Stop The Presses!” 

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* SPORTS *  

RIP Peter O’Sullevan.