NEWS OF THE DAY
Oil spill: Federal authorities on Saturday responded to an oil spill off the coast of Louisiana. The Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement said Friday that oil spewed out of an underwater pipe in the Gulf of Mexico about 40 miles southeast of the town of Venice. The offshore oil and gas operator, LLOG Exploration Offshore, said as much as 9,350 barrels of oil were released before the spill was halted. There were no immediate reports of injuries or of impact to the shoreline. BSEE officials say they were working with the U.S. Coast Guard to respond to the spill.
Police protests: Police arrested five people in Ferguson, Mo., following the latest round of protests over a white former St. Louis police officer’s acquittal last month in a black suspect’s shooting death. Officers told about 50 protesters gathered Friday outside the Ferguson police station to leave several times before making the arrests. Protests have taken place in the St. Louis area since a judge acquitted Jason Stockley. He was charged with firstdegree murder in the 2011 shooting death of Anthony Lamar Smith. Ferguson also was home to protests after an officer fatally shot Michael Brown in the St. Louis suburb in 2014.
Trump tweets: Lawyers for President Trump urged a judge to dismiss a lawsuit challenging Trump’s ability to block his critics from following him on Twitter. The lawyers filed papers late Friday to try to end a federal lawsuit in New York City that makes First Amendment claims. They argue Trump’s Twitter feed, which has 33 million followers, is not state action. The lawsuit was filed in July by the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University and seven people rejected by Trump after criticizing the president.
Inmate donations: Inmates serving time in Texas prisons have found a way to help those impacted by Hurricane Harvey. The inmates donated more than $53,000 from their commissary funds to the American Red Cross. Texas Department of Criminal Justice spokesman Jason Clark said more than 6,600 inmates donated money between Aug. 31 and Sept. 30. Harvey made landfall in Texas as a Category 4 hurricane on Aug. 25. The commissary funds are usually used by inmates to buy food and supplies while they’re incarcerated.
JFK Jr. documents: Brown University in Providence, R.I., has gone to court to try to block the sale of the college application submitted by John F. Kennedy Jr. to the school, which the university says was stolen. The lawsuit filed Friday asks the court to bar the website MomentsInTime.com from selling the documents related to Kennedy, including his application and letters from his mother, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. Website operator Gary Zimet referred questions Saturday to his attorney, who didn’t immediately respond. Zimet told the Providence Journal that a person hired to clean out a home in East Hampton, N.Y., found the material, and Zimet obtained them through an intermediary. Kennedy graduated from Brown in 1983. He died in a plane crash in 1999.