NEWS OF THE DAY
From Across the Nation
_1 No charges: A grand jury declined to bring charges against Dallas police officers who used a bomb-carrying robot to kill a sniper who had just gunned down five officers during a downtown rally, prosecutors announced Wednesday. Investigators presented their findings to a grand jury more than a year after the July 7, 2016, attack by Micah Johnson, a 25-year-old Army reservist who investigators said was upset by recent shootings of black men by police. The use of the robot to detonate explosives was a first for a U.S. police department.
_2 Clinton’s regret: Hillary Clinton says she should not have let a senior campaign adviser keep his job after a female staffer accused him of sexual harassment in 2007. “The most important work of my life has been to support and empower women,” Clinton wrote on Facebook Tuesday night. “So I very much understand the question I’m being asked as to why I let an employee on my 2008 campaign keep his job despite his inappropriate workplace behavior. The short answer is this: If I had it to do again, I wouldn’t.” Clinton said her campaign manager recommended that faith-based adviser Burns Strider be terminated, but Clinton said she instead demoted him, docked his pay, required counseling, separated him from the victim, and warned him that he’d be fired if he did it again.
_3 No retrial: Government prosecutors decided Wednesday not to retry New Jersey Sen. Bob Menendez on corruption charges, after a judge threw out some of the counts last week. The first trial of Menendez and Florida eye doctor Salomon Melgen ended in a hung jury last November. Menendez was charged with trading his political influence for gifts and campaign donations from Melgen. Last week the judge threw out the bribery counts related to Melgen’s campaign donations.
_4 Multiple marriages: A Massachusetts man has been charged with accepting money to marry six women to help them evade immigration laws. Federal prosecutors allege 57-year-old Peter Hicks, of Worcester, married the women from sub-Saharan African nations who between 2003 and 2013 and filed for immigration benefits for four of them. Some of the women were in the U.S. illegally. Authorities also allege that on at least one occasion, he was still married to one woman at the time of his marriage to another. Hicks faces a maximum of five years in prison if convicted.
_5 Meningitis outbreak case: A pharmacist at a Massachusetts facility responsible for the 2012 fungal meningitis outbreak that killed 76 people and sickened hundreds of others has been sentenced to eight years in prison. Glenn Chin apologized to the victims before he was sentenced in Boston’s federal courthouse on Wednesday. Chin was cleared in October of second-degree murder charges, but convicted of racketeering and mail fraud. Chin ran the now-closed New England Compounding Center’s clean rooms, where the drugs were made.