Chicago loses population
Chicago was alone among the nation’s 20 largest cities in losing population last year — and it lost nearly double the number of residents as the year before, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.
It’s the city’s third consecutive year of population loss for Chicago. The city’s population fell by 8,638 residents from 2015 through 2016, to 2,704,958. The year before, it declined by 4,934.
The population of the greater Chicago area — defined by the Census Bureau as the city and suburbs extending into Wisconsin and Indiana — is also declining.
‘Stand your ground’ laws
TALLAHASSEE,Fla. — Lucy McBath is afraid many more people will die if Florida Gov. Rick Scott signs a bill making it harder to prosecute when people claim they commit violence in selfdefense.
She already lost her son, an unarmed black teenager, when a white man angry over loud music and claiming self-defense fired 10 times at an SUV filled with teenagers.
The measure before Mr. Scott would effectively require a trial-before-a-trial whenever someone invokes self-defense, making prosecutors prove the suspect doesn’t deserve immunity.
Mr. Scott hasn’t revealed his intentions, but he’s a National Rifle Association supporter, and this is an NRA priority.
“If it passes in Florida, then they take that same legislation and they push it on the legislative floors across the country,” said Ms. McBath, whose 17-year-old son Jordan Davis was killed by Michael Dunn outside a Jacksonville convenience store in 2012.
Scouts keep abuse secret
For decades, secrets of alleged sexual abuse have been collecting dust in the Boy Scouts of America’s headquarters in Irving, Texas, and in state and regional offices across the nation. And the Scouts are fighting hard to keep them locked away.
Former Scouts in Georgia and other states, many of them now middle-age, say the national organization’s refusal to make public the files helped facilitate sexual abuse inflicted by their scoutmasters.
The accusers’ claim of a conspiracy of silence is the crux of a lawsuit filed last week against a former Athens, Ga., scoutmaster who allegedly molested a dozen or more Scouts and other boys in the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s. It’s the latest in a series of such lawsuits filed against former Georgia scoutmasters.
“Instead of making information publicly available or reporting it to the appropriate authorities, defendants kept silent while actively soliciting new Scouts when they knew without doubt that many Scout leaders had been credibly accused of pedophilic/ephebophilic tendencies,” says the lawsuit against Athens businessman Ernest Boland, who died in 2013.
In 2012, a Portland judge ordered the release of files collected nationwide from 1965 to 1985 that detailed the expulsion of 1,247 Scout volunteers. But the Scouts have successfully fought against releasing files from before or after that period, and — in some cases — even those compiled in the time outlined by the judge.
The Scouts organization argues that confidentiality must be maintained to protect the victims. The alleged cases of molestation, it says, also happened more than 40 years ago in some cases and that comprehensive policies and procedures that are “barriers to abuse” have since been put in place.