FERGUSON (AP) – Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon has ordered the National Guard to Ferguson to help restore order to the St. Louis suburb after a week of sometimes-violent protests over the fatal police shooting of an unarmed black teenager.
Nixon made the announcement in statement issued early Monday after another night of clashes between police and protesters in Ferguson.
Officers used tear gas to clear demonstrators off the streets late Sunday.
Capt. Ron Johnson of the Missouri Highway Patrol is command in Ferguson. He says authorities were responding to reports of gunfire, looting, vandalism and protesters who hurled Molotov cocktails.
WASHINGTON (AP) — Sometime in elementary school, you quit counting your fingers and just know the answer.
Now, scientists have put youngsters into brain scanners to find out why, and watched how the brain reorganizes itself as kids learn math.
The take-home advice: drilling your kids on simple addition and multiplication may pay off.
Healthy children start making that switch between counting to what’s called fact retrieval when they’re 8 years old to 9 years old, when they’re still working on fundamental addition and subtraction.
How well kids make that shift to memory-based problem-solving is known to predict their ultimate math achievement.
TOPEKA, Kan. (AP) — Democrats’ hopes for upsetting three-term Republican Sen. Pat Roberts rest on challenger Chad Taylor’s belief that he can escape President Barack Obama’s shadow, even in GOP-leaning Kansas.
The 40-year-old Taylor is the Shawnee County district attorney, and his low-budget campaign is trying to tap into frustration with Washington and anti-incumbent sentiments. The 78-year-old Roberts began his political career as a congressional aide in the late 1960s.
Roberts and other Kansas Republicans have prospered by making the Democratic president their political foil, and Roberts is doing it now. Taylor said he won’t be anybody’s lapdog and believes he can lure enough votes from GOP moderates and unaffiliated voters to win.
But Taylor’s bid to unseat Roberts is complicated by the entry of independent candidate and 44-year-old Olathe businessman Greg Orman.
FERGUSON, Mo. (AP) — For more than a week now, protesters have lined a suburban St. Louis street not far from the place where a white police officer shot an unarmed black teenager.
The neighborhood has become the focal point of what some demonstrators consider a modern civil rights movement.
Some protesters come from the neighborhood where 18-year-old Michael Brown was shot. Many others live in the greater St. Louis area. And some have flown in from out of state — drawn by the chance to participate in chants and marches being broadcast across the nation.
Most of the protesters have remained peaceful, though some have looted stores and clashed with police.
The daily demonstrations have become a way to vent frustration about what the protesters describe as a pattern of harassment by police.
KANSAS CITY (AP) – Efforts to bar Missouri payday lenders from accepting payments for utility bills have been dealt a setback.
Opponents of the practice said utility customers who pay their bills at payday lending stores are vulnerable to taking out high-interest loans at the same time.
The opponents want Missouri’s Public Service Commission to ban the practice. The PSC regulates utilities.
But The Kansas City Star reports the PSC staff has concluded there’s no evidence of consumers being harmed by paying utility bills at payday loan shops.
The staff also said it’s unclear that the commission has the authority to ban the practice.
KANSAS CITY, Kan. (AP) — Authorities in Kansas City, Kansas, have a homicide suspect in custody following a chase that ended with a police officer shooting the man.
Officers were on patrol around 9:30 p.m. Saturday when they saw the man in a vehicle. The officers chased the suspect’s vehicle until it crashed into a fence behind a building.
Police said the man got out of the vehicle carrying a handgun. One of the officers then shot the suspect.
The suspect was taken to a hospital with non-life threatening injuries. Police say the man is also the subject of a federal warrant.
The man’s name and the details of the homicide in which he’s a suspect were not released Sunday.
SPRINGFIELD (AP) – Members of a Missouri National Guard unit are home after nine months of repairing military equipment in Afghanistan and Kuwait.
KYTV reported 100 members of the Guard’s 1107th Aviation Group were cheered at homecoming ceremony Sunday in Springfield. The deployment was the fourth for the Springfield-based Aviation Group, which has nearly 500 soldiers.
Sgt. First Class Robert Wilson was greeted by his wife, Patricia Wilson, who said seeing her husband again felt “unreal.”
The returning soldiers said they’re most looking forward to spending time with loved ones. Robert Wilson says it was difficult to be away from his youngest family members, including young grandchildren.
Wilson also says he missed his favorite food, cashew chicken. He said military cooks tried to duplicate the Springfield specialty, but it just wasn’t the same.
What in the heck is going on with the police in Ferguson, Missouri, and journalists?
The St. Louis suburb has been the scene of peaceful protests and charged emotions, and nightly chaos and rampant looting, following the Aug. 9 shooting death of a black teenager, Michael Brown, by a yet-to-be-identified police officer.
Gene Policinski is senior vice president of the First Amendment Center
In the confusion and violence of the first nights of violence, journalists first reported being ordered away from where rioting occurred or barred from entering the city. A St. Louis Post-Dispatch photojournalist who had been assaulted Sunday night by a looter sought refuge in a police line — only to be asked later by an officer “why are you here?”, taken into custody and transported to a police station.
On Wednesday night, incidents involving journalists involved tear gas and arrests:
A KSDK TV crew reported that seconds after filming police tussling with a man, their video camera was hit by a “bean-bag round,” the type of non-lethal weapon police were reported to be using to break up demonstrations. The crew later was approached by police with drawn weapons and ordered to leave the area.
A tear gas canister was fired at an Al Jazeera America TV crew, which had set up a camera on a sidewalk outside an established police perimeter. As the journalists fled the gas, armed officers were videotaped tilting the crew’s camera toward the ground.
Wesley Lowery, a reporter for The Washington Post, and Ryan Reilly of The Huffington Post, were detained and led away by armor-clad police carrying assault weapons who ordered journalists to leave a McDonald’s where news media were working and recharging equipment. Both were later released without explanation, with one report saying their release came after the city police chief was asked by The Los Angeles Times about the arrests.
At a midday press conference Thursday, Ferguson Chief of Police Jon Belmar said, in response to questions about the various incidents, “The media is not a target.”
But David Boardman, president of the American Society of News Editors, said just hours earlier in a posted statement that “from the beginning of this situation, the police have made conscious decisions to restrict information and images coming from Ferguson. Of course, these efforts largely have been unsuccessful, as the nation and the world are still seeing for themselves the heinous actions of the police. For every reporter they arrest, every image they block, every citizen they censor, another will still write, photograph and speak.”
Reilly said the scene during his arrest Wednesday was “madness.” In a account posted by Politico, he said he “was not moving quickly enough for their liking … I was told I had 45 seconds, 30 seconds, pack up all my stuff and leave, at which point the officer in question … held me back, grabbed my things and shoved them into my bag.” After being handcuffed, Reilly said, “The worst part was he slammed my head against the glass purposely on the way out of the McDonald’s then sarcastically apologized for it.”
Martin D. Baron, executive editor of The Washington Post, said “there was absolutely no justification for Lowery’s arrest” and that the organization “was appalled by the conduct of the officers involved.” Baron said that Lowery “was illegally instructed to stop taking video of officers (and) … after contradictory instructions on how to exit, he was slammed against a soda machine and then handcuffed.” Baron said police behavior was “wholly unwarranted and an assault on the freedom of the press to cover the news.”
On Twitter, Lowery wrote, “Apparently, in America, in 2014, police can manhandle you, take you into custody, put you in cell & then open the door like it didn’t happen.”
No, the government may not do that — to journalists or any other citizen, all of whom enjoy the rights guaranteed by the First Amendment. The nation’s founders provided constitutional protection for a free press precisely to keep authorities from figuratively or literally manhandling or muzzling what they intended to be a “watchdog on government.”
To effectively fulfill that watchdog role, journalists must be able to see and report to their fellow citizens what government is doing — whether that is a Grand Jury investigation into Brown’s death or how police are responding to what clearly is, at times, lawless behavior in the streets of Ferguson.
Local citizens and the nation need to know, from a variety of sources, what is happening in this strife-torn city, and to be sure no stone is left unturned in investigating how Brown came to be shot. And press conferences and official statements alone are not enough to overcome the distrust over yet another shooting of a black teen by a police officer.
Freedom to report the news necessarily means the freedom to gather it, whether a journalist for mainstream media or a citizen using a cell phone camera.
Police and others in Ferguson anxious about those reporting on their activities should know that “no news” is not “good news” — for them or anyone else in their city or in America.
Gene Policinski is chief operating officer of the Washington-based Newseum Institute and senior vice president of the Institute’s First Amendment Center. gpolicinski@newseum.org
WASHINGTON (AP) — U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder has asked for the Justice Department to arrange an autopsy on the body of Michael Brown by a federal medical examiner.
Justice Department spokesman Brian Fallon said in a news release on Sunday that Holder asked for the additional autopsy because of the “extraordinary circumstances involved in this case” and at the request of Brown’s family.
The 18-year-old Brown was shot and killed by a Ferguson, Missouri, police officer on Aug. 9. Brown was black and unarmed. Officer Darren Wilson is white.
Fallon says the autopsy will take place as soon as possible.
He also said the Justice Department will still take the state’s autopsy into account during the investigation.
ST. LOUIS (AP) – Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon said he didn’t know the surveillance video from a convenience store was going to be released.
Nixon appeared on NBC’s “Meet the Press” Sunday and said the release of the footage “put the community, and quite frankly, the nation on alert again.”
Nixon said on ABC’s “This Week” that he was not happy with the release of the video, which police said shows 18-year-old Michael Brown stealing a box of cigars before he was killed by a white officer on Aug. 9.
Nixon said the video “appeared to cast aspersions” on Brown. Ferguson Police have said Officer Darren Wilson didn’t know the 18-year-old was a suspect at the time of the shooting.
The governor also appeared on CNN’s “State of the Union,” where he said it’s important that St. Louis County prosecutors and the U.S. Justice Department “get (the investigation) right.”
Nixon imposed a curfew Saturday after days of protests.
FERGUSON (AP) – Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon has ordered the National Guard to Ferguson to help restore order to the St. Louis suburb after a week of sometimes-violent protests over the fatal police shooting of an unarmed black teenager.
