With no word from grand jury, anxieties mount
over Ferguson shooting
FERGUSON, Mo. — Despite preparations for a weekend decision in the Ferguson shooting case, the grand jurors apparently need more time to deliberate, and the uncertainty just seemed to feed the anxiety and speculation Sunday in a city already on edge.
More than 3½ months have passed since police Officer Darren Wilson, who is white, killed unarmed black 18-year-old Michael Brown after a confrontation in the middle of a street in the St. Louis suburb. The shooting triggered riots and looting, and police responded with armored vehicles and tear gas.
Many in the area thought a grand jury decision on whether to charge Wilson with a crime would be announced Sunday, based partly on a stepped-up police presence in the preceding days, including the setting up of barricades around the building where the panel was meeting.
The grand jurors met Friday but apparently didn’t reach a decision, and they were widely expected to reconvene on Monday, though there was no official confirmation of that.
U.S. tells Iran it’s time to consider extending nuclear talks beyond deadline
VIENNA — The U.S. told Iran Sunday that it’s time to consider extending nuclear talks, in the first formal recognition by Washington that frenzied last-minute diplomacy may not be enough to seal a deal by a rapidly approaching deadline.
A senior U.S. official said that with the Monday evening cutoff date a little more than a day away, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry proposed to Iranian Foreign Minister Mohamad Java Zarf that the two sides start discussing post-deadline talks in their latest meeting since Kerry arrived three days ago to add his diplomatic weight to the talks.
At the same time, two Western diplomats said, negotiations were continuing with Iran on trying to bridge differences on reducing Tehran’s ability to make nuclear weapons to levels acceptable to Washington while giving the Islamic republic the relief it seeks from international sanctions over its atomic activities.
All three officials demanded anonymity because they weren’t authorized to discuss the diplomatic twists and turns of talks that have been under a blanket of confidentiality since the sides started negotiating a comprehensive nuclear deal eight months ago.
The U.S. official said a number of options were under discussion.
Russian, Italian, U.S. astronauts head for International Space Station
BAIKONUR, Kazakhstan — A Russian capsule carrying three astronauts from Russia, the United States and Italy has blasted off for the International Space Station.
The Soyuz capsule roared into the pre-dawn darkness just after 3 a.m. Monday from the Russian manned space facility in Baikonur, Kazakhstan.
Aboard the capsule are Russian Anton Shkaplerov, NASA’s Terry Virts and European Space Agency astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti of Italy.
The craft will dock with the space station about six hours after launch, where they will join three others already aboard. Those include Russian Elana Serova, and Cristoforetti’s arrival will make it the second time in the station’s 16-year history that two women have been aboard on long-term missions.
New Jersey is latest to consider having colleges define when ‘yes means yes’
TRENTON, N.J. — You think the attractive woman at the party who has been chatting you up all night is ready to take things to the next level. She seems to be throwing all the right signals.
But if things turn sexual, are you sure that will hold up under legal scrutiny? That’s a question at the center of a national debate surrounding “yes means yes” — more accurately called affirmative consent — the policy that requires conscious, voluntary agreement between partners to have sex.
A new proposal in New Jersey makes it the latest state moving to require college campuses to define when “yes means yes” in an effort to stem the tide of sexual assaults.
Whether the policy will reduce assaults remains unclear, but states and universities across the U.S. are under pressure to change how they handle rape allegations.
By wire sources
