ST. LOUIS (AP) — Attorneys for Missouri death row inmate Earl Ringo Jr. are asking Gov. Jay Nixon to halt the execution scheduled for next week over concerns that race was a factor in Ringo’s conviction and death sentence.

Ringo, who is black, was convicted of killing two people in a Columbia restaurant robbery in 1998. Attorney Kay Parish says Ringo was tried by a white judge and sentenced to death by an all-white jury. Her request to Nixon on Thursday also asks that the governor appoint an independent board of inquiry to examine the role race played in the case.

Messages seeking comment from Nixon’s office were not immediately returned.
Ringo is scheduled to die by injection at 12:01 a.m. Wednesday. He would be the ninth Missouri inmate executed since Novemb

NEW YORK (AP) — Joan Rivers, the raucous, acid-tongued comedian who crashed the male-dominated realm of late-night talk shows and turned Hollywood red carpets into danger zones for badly dressed celebrities, died Thursday. She was 81.

Rivers was hospitalized last week after she went into cardiac arrest at a Manhattan doctor’s office following a routine procedure. Daughter Melissa Rivers said she died surrounded by family and close friends.

Rivers — who opened her routine with the trademark “Can we talk?” — never mellowed during a decades-long career. She moved from longtime targets such as Elizabeth Taylor, whom she famously ridiculed as fat, to new faces, and continued to appear in clubs and on TV into her 80s

FERGUSON, Mo. (AP) — City officials in Ferguson, Missouri, are pledging their full cooperation with a federal civil-rights investigation into their police department following the death of 18-year-old Michael Brown.

Attorney General Eric Holder was expected to announce the investigation into the department Thursday afternoon at a news conference in Washington.

The north St. Louis County city issued a two-paragraph written statement vowing “our willingness to be transparent and forthright as we continue the process of earning back the trust of our residents and our neighbors in the St. Louis region.”

Brown, who was black and unarmed, was shot and killed on Aug. 9 by a white officer, Darren Wilson.

The statement notes that city officials have already met several times with Justice Department community mediators since the shooting.

WASHINGTON (AP) — The federal appeals court in Washington has thrown out a ruling that called into question the subsidies that help millions of low- and middle-income people afford their premiums under the president’s health care law.

The U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia said Thursday that its full complement of judges will re-hear a challenge to Obama administration regulations that allow health insurance tax credits under the Affordable Care Act for consumers in all 50 states.

The announcement diminishes the prospect of Supreme Court review of the issue in the near term. The initial appeals court ruling in Washington came out the same day that a panel of appellate judges in Richmond, Virginia, sided with the administration on the same issue.

MAE ANDERSON, AP Technology Writer

NEW YORK (AP) — The government says Google has agreed to pay full refunds totaling at least $19 million to consumers who were charged for purchases that children made via apps without parental consent from the Google Play app store.

The Federal Trade Commission says since 2011, consumers reported hundreds of dollars of unauthorized charges by children made within kids’ apps downloaded from the Google Play store. The charges range from 99 cents to $200.

The government says when Google first introduced in-app charges to the Google Play app store in 2011, children could buy virtual items just by clicking on popup boxes within an app while they used it. In mid- to late-2012, Google instituted a pop-up box that asked for a password before a payment could be made.

The First Lady made a guest appearance this week in the funny or die video Snackpocalypse

The web site describes the video, “In a world where junk food is king, one girl dared to eat an apple a day.”

LAWRENCE, Kan. (AP) — Prosecutors are taking another look at a woman’s claims she was raped at a University of Kansas residence hall last year.

District Attorney Charles Branson said Wednesday that he received new information last week about another encounter between the accuser and the same man. The Lawrence Journal-World  reports that Branson says he will consider that information and determine whether it would make a difference in a charging decision.

He declined to publicly discuss details of the alleged incident — and how those would affect the strengths and weaknesses of the case — because the alleged victim’s family asked him not to.

Branson’s comments came the same day the university’s Student Rights Committee passed a resolution condemning the school’s handling of student complaints of sexual assault.

WICHITA, Kan. (AP) — Kansas farmers are now cutting bountiful fields of corn thanks to timely rains that saved their fall crops.

The five round, steel grain bins at Randy Small’s farm in southeast Kansas are nearly full and the local grain elevator in nearby Neodesha already has about a half million bushels of corn dumped on the ground because it is running out of storage room. And corn harvest has barely begun in Kansas.

Small said Thursday he is probably going to have the best crop he has had in 10 years.

A government report released this week estimated 7 percent of the corn statewide had been cut as of the end of August, with most of the harvest activity in southeast Kansas.