PROTESTS AS INDIANAPOLIS POLICE KILL 3
» Police
INDI A N A POLI S faced protests Thursday after officers fatally shot two men and killed a pregnant pedestrian in three incidents just hours apart.
Police did not have body camera or dash camera footage of any of the shootings, but they said both men exchanged gunfire with officers. The pregnant woman was walking along an expressway ramp when an officer driving to work struck her with his vehicle.
Video of the events surrounding the first shooting was shown live on Facebook, including comments by a responding detective that the police chief called “unacceptable.”
Protesters converged on the first shooting scene Wednesday night, and dozens more gathered Thursday at the
City County Building in downtown Indianapolis. Many wore face masks aimed at reducing the spread of the coronavirus and at times shouted,
“No justice, no peace.”
The Marion County coroner’s office identified the man killed in the first shooting as Dreasjon Reed, 21, and the man killed later as McHale Rose, 19. Both men were black.
The pregnant woman was identified as Ashlynn Lisby, 23. Lisby was white. Her fetus also did not survive.
Supreme Court unanimously overturns “Bridgegate” convictions. ON» The
WASHING T
Supreme Court on Thursday unanimously overturned the convictions of two defendants in the “Bridgegate” scandal.
The case resulted from a decision in 2013 by associates of Chris Christie, then the governor of New Jersey, to close access lanes to the George Washington Bridge to punish a political opponent. The scandal helped doom Christie’s presidential ambitions.
Closing the lanes was wrong, the Supreme Court ruled, but not a federal crime.
The associates, Bridget Anne Kelly and Bill Baroni, were convicted of wire fraud and related federal charges for their roles in concocting a “traffic study” that caused extreme delays for motorists seeking to cross the bridge, the busiest in the world, from Fort Lee, New Jersey, to Manhattan.
Justice Elena Kagan, writing for the court, said “the evidence the jury heard no doubt shows wrongdoing — deception, corruption, abuse of power.”
“But the federal fraud statutes at issue do not criminalize all such conduct,” she wrote.
The controversy helped sink the presidential campaign of Christie in 2016.
In a statement on Thursday, Christie said he had been vindicated.
Coronavirus may lurk in semen, researchers report. Scientists across the world are trying to piece together a perplexing puzzle: how exactly the coronavirus affects the body, and how it spreads from person to person.
Now researchers in China have found that the coronavirus, or bits of it, may linger in semen. But the paper, published Thursday in JAMA Network Open, a peerreviewed open-access medical journal, does not prove that the virus can be transmitted sexually.
The doctors tested semen from 38 patients at Shangqiu Municipal Hospital in Henan province in central China. All the subjects, who ranged in age from 15 to 59, had previously tested positive for the coronavirus.
Researchers detected genetic material from the coronavirus in the semen of six patients, around 16%. Four patients with positive semen samples “were at the acute stage of infection,” doctors wrote.
Virus hospitalization is new barrier to military enlistment.
WASHINGT ON» The Defense Department has begun barring the enlistment of would-be military recruits who have been hospitalized for the coronavirus, unless they get a special medical waiver.
Under a Pentagon memo signed Wednesday, applicants who have tested positive for the virus but did not require hospitalization will be allowed to enlist, as long as all health and other requirements are met.
Those recruits who tested positive won’t be allowed to begin the enlistment process until 28 days after the diagnosis, and they’ll be required to submit all medical documentation. They’ll be cleared for military service 28 days after they’re finished with home isolation, and they won’t need a waiver.
It is unclear how many potential recruits could be affected by the new guidelines.
Arrests made in shooting death of black man.
» Authorities SAVANN A H , G A. arrested a white father and son Thursday and charged them with murder in the February shooting death of a black man they had pursued in a truck after spotting him running in their neighborhood.
The charges came more than two months after Ahmaud Arbery, 25, was killed on a residential street just outside the port city of Brunswick. National outrage over the case swelled this week after a cellphone video that appeared to show the shooting.
Gregory McMichael told police after the February shooting that he and his son chased after Arbery because they suspected him of being a burglar.
Arbery’s mother, Wanda Cooper Jones, has said she believes her son, a former football player, was just jogging in the Satilla Shores neighborhood before he was killed on a Sunday afternoon.