Defense will try to renegotiate plea deal in general’s sex-assault case; trial delayed
FORT BRAGG, N.C. — The trial of an Army general accused of sexual assault moved into uncharted legal territory Tuesday when the judge dismissed the jury to allow the defense time to hammer out a new plea deal with the military.
While the highly unusual decision gives Brig. Gen. Jeffrey A. Sinclair a second chance to negotiate the dismissal of the most serious charges, he appears certain to face an inglorious end to a nearly 30-year career spanning service in three wars. His lawyers said it could take weeks to finalize an agreement.
Experts in military law said Judge Col. James Pohl is seeking a just and innovative solution for a courtroom situation that doesn’t fit prior case law.
“No one has ever seen anything like this before, but it seems like the right thing to do,” said retired Maj. Gen. Walt Huffman, a Texas Tech University law professor who previously served as the Army’s top lawyer. “This case was already unusual in so many respects.”
Judge Pohl reviewed newly disclosed emails Monday and said he found the appearance of “unlawful command influence” in Fort Bragg officials’ rejection of a plea bargain with the general in January. He declined to dismiss the charges outright, but allowed Sinclair’s lawyers to negotiate with Army officials not previously involved with the case.
Pistorius trial: Friend says runner shot gun without warning out of sunroof, also at eatery
PRETORIA, South Africa — Oscar Pistorius fired guns in public in the months before he killed his girlfriend — once out of a car sunroof on a road and once in a crowded restaurant, a onetime friend said at the athlete’s murder trial Tuesday, drawing an aggressive effort from the chief defense lawyer to pick holes in his testimony.
The account by Darren Fresco portrayed Pistorius as a reckless hothead infatuated with firearms and seemingly drifting down a precarious path before he fatally shot Reeva Steenkamp through a closed toilet door at his home before dawn on Feb. 14, 2013.
Fresco’s description of how Pistorius once berated a police officer fit the prosecution’s attempts to cast the double-amputee athlete as prone to flashes of anger and blinded by an inflated sense of entitlement at a time when his public image was that of a clean-cut poster boy for overcoming adversity.
“I said to him, are you (expletive) mad?” Fresco testified after, he said, Pistorius fired his gun out of the sunroof of the car later on the same day that he had the dispute with the police officer. “He just laughed.”
Europe seeks to prevent US, other countries from using cheese names
WASHINGTON — Would Parmesan by any other name be as tasty atop your pasta? A ripening trade battle might put that to the test.
As part of trade talks, the European Union wants to ban the use of European names like Parmesan, feta and Gorgonzola on cheese made in the United States.
The argument is that the American-made cheeses are shadows of the original European varieties and cut into sales and identity of the European cheeses. The Europeans say Parmesan should only come from Parma, Italy, not those familiar green cylinders that American companies sell. Feta should only be from Greece, even though feta isn’t a place. The EU argues it “is so closely connected to Greece as to be identified as an inherently Greek product.”
So, a little “hard-grated cheese” for your pasta? It doesn’t have quite the same ring as Parmesan.
U.S. dairy producers, cheesemakers and food companies are all fighting the idea, which they say would hurt the $4 billion domestic cheese industry and endlessly confuse consumers.
By wire sources