WASHINGTON, D.C. – U.S. Senator Roy Blunt (Mo.) released the following statement today regarding the Obama Administration’s newly-announced ozone rule:
“As Americans prepare to celebrate Thanksgiving with their friends and families, the Obama Administration has taken the opportunity to roll-out what some experts estimate could be the most expensive regulation ever.
“Almost 9 million people are still looking for good-paying jobs nationwide. The last thing workers and families in Missouri need is yet another burdensome regulation that will further stifle jobs and economic opportunity. I look forward to participating in a thorough review of this costly rule in the new Republican-led Congress.”
Background Information:
Blunt is a co-sponsor of U.S. Senator John Thune’s (S.D.) bipartisan, bicameral Clean Air, Strong Economies (CASE) Act, which would block the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) from lowering the National Ambient Air Quality Standards (NAAQS) for ground-level ozone below 75 ppb until 85 percent of the current non-attainment counties achieve compliance with the existing standard.
The CASE Act would require the EPA to consider the costs and feasibility of the lower standard, which the EPA currently does not consider. The legislation would also prohibit the EPA from using unreliable modeling to expand non-attainment areas to rural counties that otherwise would not be impacted by the expensive regulation.
JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. (AP) — The Missouri Veterans Commission poorly communicated with veterans when handling pension and disability claims, according to Auditor Tom Schweich’s report released Wednesday.
Schweich’s office found the Veterans Service Offices properly handled pension and disability claims but repeatedly failed to inform veterans about what actions they took.
The audit follows seven complaints from federally elected officials.
In one complaint, a veteran called the office repeatedly over the course of three years to check the status of a denied claim. The veteran mistakenly asked about an appeal to the case, which never was filed. The case instead had been reopened and was under review.
The audit found the office correctly handled the claim but did not give the veteran any written notification of their actions.
Commission spokesman Daniel Bell said the office now uses written communication forms to give details to veterans or their guardian on their cases. It also plans to include contact information and availability for service officers in a written compliance form given to veterans.
“We believe it will improve our already outstanding service to Missouri’s veterans,” Bell said of the audit.
Schweich’s office will conduct a full audit of the commission next year. Schweich spokesman Spence Jackson said that audit is unrelated and follows a regular schedule of reviewing state departments.
The last audit of the commission was in 2010.
WASHINGTON (AP) — Researchers say an experimental Ebola vaccine appears safe and has triggered signs of immune protection in the first 20 volunteers to test it.
According to a study in the New England Journal of Medicine, the vaccine is designed to spur the immune system’s production of anti-Ebola antibodies. Some of those given the vaccine developed antibodies within four weeks of getting the shots at the National Institutes of Health. Half of the test group received a higher-dose shot, and those people produced more antibodies.
The study also found that some people also developed a different set of virus-fighting immune cells, called T cells. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases director Dr. Anthony Fauci (FOW’-chee) calls both types of immune responses “a promising factor.”
The researchers reported no serious side effects.
Scientists are racing to develop ways to prevent or treat the Ebola virus. It has killed more than 5,600 people in West Africa, most of them in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone.
BETHANY- A Missouri woman was injured in an accident just after 6 a.m. on Wednesday in Harrison County.
The Missouri State Highway Patrol reported a 2002 Chevy Cavalier driven by Jennifer L. Whisler, 47, Cainsville, was westbound on U.S. 136, four miles east of Bethany.
The driver lost control on the ice-covered road. The vehicle turned 180 degrees, traveled off the south side of the road and struck a ditch.
Whisler was transported to Harrison Co. Community Hospital. The MSHP reported she was not wearing a seat belt.
HOLBROOK MOHR, Associated Press
DAVID A. LIEB, Associated Press
PHILLIP LUCAS, Associated Press
FERGUSON, Mo. (AP) — Some witnesses said Michael Brown had been shot in the back. Another said he was lying face-down when Officer Darren Wilson finished him off. Still others acknowledged changing their stories to fit published details about the autopsy, or admitted that they didn’t see the shooting at all.
An Associated Press review of thousands of pages of grand jury documents reveals numerous examples of statements made during the shooting investigation that were inconsistent, fabricated or probably wrong. Prosecutors exposed these inconsistencies before the jurors, which likely influenced their decision not to indict Wilson in Brown’s death.
Bob McCulloch, the St. Louis County prosecutor, said the grand jury had to weigh testimony that conflicted with physical evidence and conflicting statements by witnesses as it decided whether Wilson should face charges.
“Many witnesses to the shooting of Michael Brown made statements inconsistent with other statements they made and also conflicting with the physical evidence. Some were completely refuted by the physical evidence,” McCulloch said.
The decision Monday not to charge Wilson with any crime set off more violent protests in the St. Louis suburb of Ferguson and around the country, many by people claiming the unarmed black teenager was shot while peacefully surrendering to the white officer. Brown’s death has been followed by months of tension in this majority African American city, and some of the details have become intertwined with what many see as an abuse of power and a symbol of racial inequality in America.
Media coverage of the aftermath made it into the grand jury proceedings. Before some witnesses testified, prosecutors showed jurors clips of the same people making statements on TV. Their inconsistencies began almost immediately after the shooting, from people in the neighborhood, the friend walking with Brown during the encounter and even one woman who authorities suggested probably wasn’t even at the scene at the time.
Jurors also were presented with dueling versions from Wilson and Dorian Johnson, who was walking with Brown during the Aug. 9 confrontation. Johnson painted Wilson as provoking the violence, while Wilson said Brown was the aggressor.
But Johnson also declared on TV, in a clip played for the grand jury, that Wilson fired at least one shot at his friend while Brown was running away: “It struck my friend in the back.”
Testifying to the grand jury, Johnson said the shot he described caused Brown’s body to “do like a jerking movement, not to where it looked like he got hit in his back, but I knew, it maybe could have grazed him, but he definitely made a jerking movement.”
The physical evidence ultimately showed that Brown’s back wasn’t struck by any bullet.
Other witness accounts also were clearly wrong.
One woman, who said she was smoking a cigarette with a friend nearby, claimed she saw a second police officer in the passenger seat of Wilson’s vehicle. When quizzed by a prosecutor, she elaborated: The officer was white, “middle age or young” and in uniform. She said she was positive there was a second officer — even though there was not.
Another woman testified that she saw Brown leaning through the officer’s window “from his navel up,” with his hand moving up and down, as if he were punching the officer. But when the same witness returned to testify again on another day, she said she suffers from mental disorder, has racist views and that she has trouble distinguishing the truth from things she had read online. Prosecutors suggested the woman had fabricated the entire incident, and wasn’t even at the scene the day of the shooting.
Another witness had told the FBI after the shooting that he saw Wilson shoot Brown in the back, and then stand over his prone body to finish him off. But in his grand jury testimony, this witness, acknowledged that he had not seen that part of the shooting, and that what he told the FBI was “based on me being where I’m from and that can be the only assumption that I have.”
The witness, who lives in the predominantly black neighborhood where Brown was killed, also acknowledged that he changed his story to fit details of the autopsy that he had learned about on TV.
“So it was after you learned that the things you said you saw couldn’t have happened that way, then you changed your story about what you seen?” a prosecutor asserted.
“Yeah, to coincide with what really happened,” the witness replied.
Another man, describing himself as a friend of Brown’s, told a federal investigator that he heard the first gunshot, looked out his window and saw an officer with a gun drawn and Brown “on his knees with his hands in the air.” He added: “I seen him shoot him in the head.”
But when later pressed by the investigator, the friend said he hadn’t seen the actual shooting because he was walking down the stairs at the time, and instead had heard details from someone in the apartment complex.
“What you are saying you saw isn’t forensically possible based on the evidence,” the investigator told the friend.
Shortly after that, the friend asked if he could leave.
NEW YORK (AP) — The Rev. Al Sharpton has joined the families of three unarmed black men who recently died at the hands of police officers.
Sharpton’s meeting Wednesday came two days after the decision not to indict a white Ferguson, Missouri, police officer in the shooting death of one of the men, Michael Brown.
Brown’s parents flew in from Missouri for the meeting at the Harlem headquarters of Sharpton’s National Action Network.
They were joined by the families of two New York men killed by police this year.
Eric Garner died in July after being placed in a chokehold. Akai Gurley was shot in Brooklyn last week.
Sharpton said he hopes “America realizes the pain of these families.”
The appearance came after two days of protests over the Missouri grand jury’s decision.
JEFFERSON CITY (AP) – A Missouri judge says taxes from three people suing Gov. Jay Nixon won’t go to a group creating tests for the Common Core education standards.
Cole County Circuit Judge Daniel Green said Tuesday in a temporary restraining order that the lawsuit has a shot at success.
Fred Sauer, Anne Gassel and Gretchen Logue allege that Nixon illegally partnered with the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium to draft tests for Common Core.
Gassel and Logue are members of Missouri Coalition Against Common Core.
Nixon and other officials have been criticized by the coalition for working with the test consortium. Opponents say the learning standards were adopted without enough public input.
The plaintiffs say they don’t want their tax money to pay for more than $1 million in membership fees to Smarter Balanced.
NEW YORK (AP) — Singer Garth Brooks has canceled a Thanksgiving appearance on NBC’s “Tonight” show because he said it “seemed distasteful” given the reaction to the decision not to prosecute Ferguson, Missouri, police officer Darren Wilson for the shooting of Michael Brown this summer.
NBC on Wednesday confirmed the postponement, saying Brooks was being replaced on the show by Whoopi Goldberg and Tom Colicchio.
Brooks wrote on his Facebook page that he landed in New York on the night the grand jury’s decision was announced “to the news of the civil unrest that was going on in our nation. To spend the day promoting our stuff like nothing was wrong seemed distasteful to me.”
He offered to reschedule. There was no immediate comment from his spokesperson about what other appearances were canceled.
JEFFERSON CITY (AP) – A western Missouri man has been sentenced to life in prison without parole for killing his neighbor following a feud.
Attorney General Chris Koster’s office handled prosecution of 70-year-old Lonny Leroy Mays of Clinton. Koster said Wednesday that Judge Mark Pilley also sentenced May to 15 years for armed criminal action.
The sentences will be served at the same time.
Mays’ attorney did not immediately return calls from The Associated Press.
A jury in September found May guilty of first-degree murder in the 2012 death or 66-year-old Rudy Romdall, Mays’ neighbor on Truman Lake.
Romdall’s body was found March 26, 2012, in his truck near the Henry County town of Tightwad. Police said at the time that the two men had been involved in a disturbance earlier in the day.
WASHINGTON, D.C. – U.S. Senator Roy Blunt (Mo.) released the following statement today regarding the Obama Administration’s newly-announced ozone rule:
