Hate crimes case in Arbery murder goes to jury
A federal prosecutor in the hate crimes trial in Brunswick, Georgia, for the men who murdered Ahmaud Arbery told the jury in closing arguments on Monday that the three white defendants had unquestionably targeted Arbery because of his race. The closing argument by Christopher J. Perras, a lawyer with the U.S. Justice Department’s civil rights division, came after 3 1/2 days of testimony in which the three defendants — Gregory McMichael, 66, his son Travis McMichael, 36, and their neighbor William Bryan, 52 — were shown to hold deep expressions of what Perras called “racial hatred.”
IRS will allow taxpayers to forgo facial recognition amid blowback
The IRS said Monday it would allow taxpayers to opt out of using facial recognition technology to gain access to their online accounts and would shift to an entirely different identity verification system as the agency tries to alleviate backlash over its use of biometric data. The decision came after the IRS said it would “transition away” from using a third-party service to help authenticate people creating online accounts by using facial recognition. The IRS adopted the technology to enhance the security of taxpayer information and avoid data leaks. But activist groups and lawmakers said the use of video “selfies” to verify accounts was an invasion of privacy.
A key to returning to normal is paid sick leave, Democrats say
The omicron variant wave hammered the American workforce, sending more people home sick than at any other point in the COVID-19 pandemic. Yet, unlike in 2020, there is no federally required paid sick leave for workers — and none at all for the one-fifth of workers who don’t receive it from their employers. Now, as omicron recedes and many restrictions are being lifted, and as more of the country begins to treat COVID-19 as an unavoidable part of life, some Democratic lawmakers and others are trying to revive paid leave for COVID-19-related reasons.
Boris Johnson moves to lift coronavirus restrictions in England
After almost two years of restrictions, Prime Minister Boris Johnson of Britain said Monday that it was time to live with the coronavirus, announcing an end to England’s remaining legal curbs and most free testing, and making his country an outlier in its handling of the pandemic. Although careful not to declare the country’s health crisis officially over, Johnson sought to put the country firmly on the path to normalcy, albeit just a day after an announcement that Queen Elizabeth II had tested positive for the virus. Some critics say that news underscores the risks of moving too quickly to scrap restrictions.
With sensors on streets, France takes aim at vehicle noise
When France introduced speed cameras 20 years ago, it drastically reduced the number of car accidents and helped save tens of thousands of lives. Now the government is taking aim at another scourge: the earsplitting noise that has been a fact of life for residents of French cities. New sensors, or “sound radars,” were placed in seven cities last week as an experiment. The sensors can detect and take pictures of vehicles making excessive noise, a problem that officials say has gotten worse in recent years. The hope is to eventually set a noise-pollution limit and fine those motorists exceeding it.
Colombia’s highest court decriminalizes abortion
Having an abortion is no longer a crime under Colombian law, the country’s top court on constitutional matters ruled Monday, in a decision that paves the way for the procedure to become widely available across this historically conservative, Catholic country. The ruling by Colombia’s Constitutional Court follows years of organizing by women across Latin America for greater protections and more rights, including access to abortion, and significant shifts in the legal landscape of some of the region’s most populous countries. Mexico’s Supreme Court decriminalized abortion in a similar decision in September and Argentina’s Congress legalized the procedure in late 2020.
US troops in poland brace for possible Ukrainian evacuees
Many of the nearly 5,000 troops from the 82nd Airborne Division who arrived in Poland last week are working with Polish forces to set up processing centers for tens of thousands of people, including Americans, who are expected to flee neighboring Ukraine if Russia launches a full-scale invasion of the country, U.S. military officials say. The Biden administration has repeatedly said U.S. troops will not fight in Ukraine or rescue Americans trapped there by a Russian attack. But U.S. commanders and their counterparts in Poland have been preparing parts of several Polish military facilities and erecting tents for possible evacuees.
Dr. Paul Farmer, global humanitarian leader, dies at 62
Dr. Paul Farmer, a U.S. physician, humanitarian and author renowned for providing health care to millions of impoverished people worldwide and who co-founded the global nonprofit Partners in Health, has died. He was 62. The Boston-based organization confirmed Farmer’s death on Monday, calling it “devastating” and noting he unexpectedly passed away in his sleep from an acute cardiac event while in Rwanda, where he had been teaching.
By wire sources