$20 million for police cameras
WASHINGTON — The Obama administration will provide $20 million in grants to local police departments to help buy body cameras for officers, the U.S. Justice Department said on Friday.
The grants represent the first portion to be approved by Congress of a $75 million, three-year body camera funding program requested in December by President Barack Obama.
Demand for the cameras, which clip onto officers’ uniforms to record interactions with citizens, has risen amid a series of deadly altercations between police and unarmed black men.
Port truckers end strike
LOS ANGELES — Southern California port truckers seeking recognition as employees rather than contractors ended a strike of freight-hauling companies on Friday after four days of picketing that drew attention to their cause but did little to disrupt cargo shipments in Los Angeles and Long Beach.
Several hundred drivers, backed by the Teamsters union, struck four trucking firms they accuse of defying federal and state labor enforcement decisions and a court ruling that the truckers were victims of wage theft through misclassification.
Military sexual assaults
WASHINGTON — Two-thirds of women in the military who reported they’d been sexually assaulted endure professional retaliation or other social ostracism, Pentagon’ leaders said Friday.
About 22 percent of female service members and 7 percent of male service members experienced some form of sexual harassment last year, ranging from crude jokes to assaults, the report said.
Katrina flooding
NEW ORLEANS — Judge Susan Braden of the U.S. Court of Federal Claims in Washington has ruled that federal authorities are liable for some of the catastrophic flooding that followed Hurricane Katrina and other storms — flooding blamed on a now-closed navigation channel.
Friday’s ruling came in a 2005 lawsuit that focuses on the now-closed Mississippi River Gulf Outlet — a navigation canal built by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and blamed by many for flooding in St. Bernard Parish and New Orleans’ Lower 9th Ward following Katrina.
U.S. renters hurting
WASHINGTON — More than one in four U.S. renters have to use at least half their family income to pay for housing and utilities.
That’s the finding of an analysis of Census data by Enterprise Community Partners, a nonprofit that helps finance affordable housing. The number of such households has jumped 26 percent to 11.25 million since 2007.
Since the end of 2010, rental prices have surged at nearly twice the pace of average hourly wages, according to data from the real estate firm Zillow and the Labor Department.
Goldman programmer
NEW YORK— A New York jury on Friday convicted Sergey Aleynikov, a former Goldman Sachs Group Inc. programmer, of stealing some of the bank's high-frequency trading code.
Mr. Aleynikov's lawyer said the defense would appeal.