Grand jury: Dallas officer’s shooting of neighbor
was murder
DALLAS — A white former Dallas police officer was indicted on a murder charge Friday, nearly three months after she fatally shot an unarmed black neighbor whose apartment she said she entered by mistake, believing it to be her own.
Amber Guyger told fellow officers that she opened fire when Botham Jean appeared in the darkness.
Jean’s relatives joined the district attorney for the announcement of the charge. Jean, a 26-year-old native of the Caribbean island nation of St. Lucia, attended college in Arkansas and had been working in Dallas for accounting and consulting firm PwC.
“I truly believe that she inflicted tremendous evil on my son,” Jean’s mother, Allison said after the announcement. “He didn’t deserve it. He was seated in his own apartment.”
Guyger was arrested on a manslaughter charge three days after the Sept. 6 shooting, prompting criticism that the original charge was too lenient. But Johnson said at the time that the grand jury could upgrade the charge, which it did Friday.
Microsoft surpasses
Apple as most valuable public company
Microsoft’s big bet on cloud computing is paying off as the company has surpassed Apple as the world’s most valuable publicly traded company.
The software maker’s prospects looked bleak just a few years ago, as licenses for the company’s Windows system fell with a sharp drop in sales of personal computers.
But under CEO Satya Nadella, Microsoft has found stability by focusing on software and services over the internet, or the cloud, with long-term business contracts.
That 1990s personal-computing powerhouse is now having a renaissance moment, as it eclipses Facebook, Google, Amazon and the other tech darlings of the late decade.
Apple had been the world’s most prosperous firm since claiming the top spot from Exxon Mobil earlier this decade. Microsoft surpassed Apple briefly a few times this week, but didn’t close on top until Friday, with a market value of $851 billion to Apple’s $847 billion. Microsoft hadn’t been at the top since the height of the dot-com boom in 2000.
In GM country, workers aren’t abandoning
Trump – so far
LORDSTOWN, Ohio — Since General Motors announced its decision this week to shut down its hulking Lordstown plant — the anchor of this northeast Ohio town — workers on the line have had nothing but questions. Will they have jobs come spring? Should they put in for transfers and move their families to Texas or Tennessee? How much should they spend on Christmas?
One they haven’t yet answered: Who is to blame?
It was working-class voters like these who bucked the area’s history as a Democratic stronghold and backed Donald Trump in 2016, helping him win the White House with promises to put American workers first and bring back disappearing manufacturing jobs. Whether they stick with him after the GM news and other signs that the economy may be cooling could determine Trump’s political future.
For now, many people here are still behind the man who won them over with his sky-high promises. But they took those pledges seriously, and still expect him to fulfill them.
“Do I feel like there’s still time to put down Twitter and stop doing what he’s doing and focus on us? Yeah,” said Tommy Wolikow, who followed in his father’s footsteps to work at GM Lordstown before he was laid off on the same day as Trump’s inauguration.
Lawyers spar over
House subpoena for
ex-FBI director Comey
WASHINGTON — James Comey’s lawyer urged a judge Friday to block a subpoena requiring that the former FBI director submit to a private interview before a House panel, arguing that Republican lawmakers want to take shots in a “dark alley.”
But a lawyer for Congress said committees are free to conduct investigations as they please and that Comey, who is concerned that statements from a closed-door interview would be selectively leaked, had no right to refuse a subpoena and demand a public hearing.
“No federal district court judge in the history of the republic has granted the type of relief that Mr. Comey seeks,” said Thomas Hungar, general counsel for the House of Representatives.
U.S. District Judge Trevor McFadden, an appointee of President Donald Trump, did not immediately rule and scheduled additional arguments for Monday, the day initially scheduled for the interview. He questioned both sides but appeared skeptical at time of Comey’s arguments and wondered aloud why Comey couldn’t respond to leaks he didn’t like with disclosures of his own.
The Republican-led House Judiciary Committee sent Comey a subpoena seeking a private interview to discuss FBI actions in 2016. That was when the bureau declined to recommend charges against Democrat Hillary Clinton for her use of a private email server and opened an investigation into potential coordination between Russia and the Trump campaign.
From wire sources
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A man and his baby: A desperate bid to cross into US
TIJUANA, Mexico — The young Honduran man was worried and you could see it on his face: Clutching his 1-year-old son, he looked back apprehensively toward the barrier he just crossed. He was on U.S. soil and he knew that he didn’t have authorization to be there.
It was the middle of the night Thursday at the U.S.-Mexico border, next to the first of two U.S border fences separating Tijuana from San Diego, and an Associated Press photographer was there to capture the moment the man, holding his toddler close, decided to take a chance, looking for a different, better life than the one he had back in Honduras or in a bleak, overcrowded shelter in Tijuana. He knew he would likely be arrested, but it seemed worth the risk if he was able to apply for asylum in the U.S.
As Mexican officials try to move the more than 6,000 Central Americans packed into the open-air sports complex next to the border to a facility 10 miles (15 kilometers) from the nearest crossing, desperation has mounted among the migrants who arrived in Tijuana more than two weeks ago.
Several migrants swam around or climbed over the border barrier overnight and were quickly detained.
But the young man, his son bundled up against the night chill in a hooded jacket, leggings and boots, waited and when he saw an opportunity, he climbed over the border barrier as people on the Mexican side held his son, then handed the child through the bars. After a swift look back, he disappeared into the night, walking up a slope toward a second barrier wall on the U.S. side.
