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More than a thousand inmates in the nation's prisons who were sentenced as juveniles to life without the possibility of parole can now challenge those punishments, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled Monday.

The decision extended a 2012 ruling, which invalidated future life-without- parole sentence for juvenile murderers, to all such offenders who were given life sentences in the past.

Monday's case involved Henry Montgomery, a Louisiana man who at age 17 killed a deputy sheriff in East Baton Rouge. The court in his trial was barred by law from considering arguments that his age should matter, "including evidence that as a scared youth, Mr. Montgomery shot in panic as the officer confronted him playing hooky," his lawyers said.

At the trial of Peter Liang, the jurors kept returning to the 11.5-pound trigger of his New York Police Department standard-issue 9mm Glock.

Liang was the officer who killed Akai Gurley, a 28-year-old father, for no reason but that Gurley had walked into a dark stairwell.

iang’s defense had been that he kept his finger off the trigger, but that in the dark stairwell a loud sound surprised him. His finger twitched, leading to what Liang’s lawyers called “a tragic accident.”

Los Angeles County Sheriff Jim McDonnell has scheduled a news conference Sunday to discuss the fatal shooting by sheriff’s deputies of a man wielding a gun at a busy Lynwood intersection, an incident caught on a dramatic video that has sparked protests in the neighborhood.

The sheriff and homicide detectives will discuss the shooting at a news conference at 11 a.m. at the Hall of Justice downtown. A group of civil rights organizations are planning their own news conference and are calling for a meeting with McDonnell.

The activists they want the U.S. Department of Justice to investigate the shooting and launch a broader probe into the use of force by the Sheriff’s Department.

The National Rifle Association chief executive, Wayne LaPierre, said on Sunday bump stocks, novelty devices that may have been used in the Las Vegas shooting, “fuzz the line” between semi-automatic and fully automatic weapons.

Gun control advocates in Congress continued to push for broader gun restrictions, saying that even if tougher laws might not have stopped the Las Vegas shooting, they would have an impact on the more than 80 Americans killed in gun suicides and homicides every single day.

“You have to go beyond simply clarifying Americans shouldn’t have automatic weapons in this country,” said Chris Murphy, a Connecticut senator who represents the town where 20 children and six adults were killed at Sandy Hook elementary school in 2012.

implicated in these and other maladies is the breakdown of the country’s bourgeois culture.

That culture laid out the script we all were supposed to follow: Get married before you have children and strive to stay married for their sake. Get the education you need for gainful employment, work hard, and avoid idleness. Go the extra mile for your employer or client. Be a patriot, ready to serve the country. Be neighborly, civic-minded, and charitable. Avoid coarse language in public. Be respectful of authority. Eschew substance abuse and crime.

They could be followed by people of all backgrounds and abilities, especially when backed up by almost universal endorsement.

At least 138 Salvadorans have been killed in the past seven years after being deported by U.S. authorities, a rights group said Wednesday in a report that highlighted the risk of returning migrants to the Central American nation.

“U.S. authorities knew or should have known they were going to return these people to harm,” Parker told The Washington Post. “Therefore they should not have done it.

Many of those killed after their return to El Salvador were targeted by gangs, which control huge swaths of the country.

Our self-confidence, verging on hubris, should be shaken by the coronavirus. The United States has been a laggard, not a world leader, in confronting the pandemic

self-confidence has been bolstered by a century of achievements: We saved Western civilization from German and Soviet militarism, built the most prosperous society in history, and landed a man on the moon.

a German company shipped more than 1.4 million diagnostic tests for the World Health Organization by the end of February. During that same time, U.S. efforts to produce our own test misfired. By Feb. 28, only 4,000 tests from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had been used

In his 2011 book The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, Harvard University psychologist and famed intellect Steven Pinker argues humans are now living in the most peaceful era in the history of our species.

there is plenty of evidence supporting Pinker’s claim. Most scholars agree the percentage of people who die violent war-related deaths has plummeted through history; and that proportionally violent deaths decline as populations become increasingly large and organized, or move from “nonstate” status—such as hunter–gatherer societies—to fully fledged “states.”

the percentage of a population suffering violent war-related deaths—fatalities due to intentional conflict between differing communities—does decrease as a population grows. At the same time, though, the absolute numbers increase more than would be expected from just population growth.

In Chicago, McDonald’s will join a slew of other companies — among them food giant Kraft ­Heinz, farming supplier ADM and telecommunications firm Motorola Solutions — all looking to appeal to and be near young professionals versed in the world of e-commerce, software analytics, digital engineering, marketing and finance.

Such relocations are happening across the country as economic opportunities shift to a handful of top cities and jobs become harder to find in some suburbs and smaller cities.

Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel (D) said the old model where executives chose locations near where they wanted to live has been upturned by the growing influence of technology in nearly every industry. Years ago, IT operations were an afterthought. Now, people with such expertise are driving top-level corporate decisions, and many of them prefer urban locales.

The suspect in the Boulder, Colo. grocery store shooting that left 10 people dead made his first appearance in court Thursday in a brief hearing that called for a mental health assessment. On Wednesday night, hundreds of people gathered to mourn the victims and support those affected by senseless gun violence.

Ahmad Al Aliwi Alissa, 21, is facing 10 counts of murder in the first degree and one count of attempted murder over the horrific attack at a King Soopers supermarket. The victims include a police officer who responded to calls for help. The ages of those who died range from 20 to 65.

Alissa appeared in court alongside his attorney, Kathryn Herold of the Colorado Public Defender's Office. Alissa wore a white face mask and what looked to be a purple hospital gown. Because of an injury to his leg, the suspect was seated in a wheelchair.

Two people are dead and at least eight others were wounded after multiple shootings near the oceanfront in Virginia Beach, Va., on Friday night.

Police officials say officers were on patrol in the city's resort area when they heard multiple gunshots at 11:22 p.m., according to a statement on Saturday. When they arrived to the scene, they found several victims suffering from gunshot wounds.

One woman died at the scene and at least eight people were transported to hospitals for their injuries. Authorities said the injuries ranged from "serious to life-threatening."

Two teenage girls have been charged in the carjacking death of an Uber Eats driver this week in Washington, DC, police say.Mohammad Anwar, 66, of Springfield, Virginia, was killed Tuesday afternoon near Nationals Park, the Metropolitan Police Department said in a statement.

Anwar was working as an Uber Eats driver, says a GoFundMe page set up by his family.

The girls, 13 and 15, assaulted Anwar with a Taser while carjacking him, which led to an accident in which he was fatally injured, police said.The girls were charged with felony murder and armed carjacking, police said.

For decades, America’s gun violence researchers fought an uphill battle against the National Rifle Association to obtain the data and funding they need to study the effects of US gun laws.

California, which has much stricter gun laws than most American states, also has more detailed government data available, including records of individual handgun purchasers going back decades and statewide records about the restraining orders filed to temporarily bar at-risk people from owning or buying guns.

This more detailed personal information has allowed California researchers to conduct rigorous analyses of the state’s gun laws and policies, looking at early evidence of whether the state’s new gun violence restraining orders have helped to prevent mass shootings, studying whether buying a handgun puts a person at higher risk of dying from gun suicide, and examining whether expanding the category of people with violent records who are barred from buying guns might reduce gun violence.

The Supreme Court ruled on Thursday that judges need not determine that juvenile offenders are beyond hope of rehabilitation before sentencing them to die in prison. The decision, concerning a teenager who killed his grandfather, appeared to signal the end of a trend that had limited the availability of severe punishments for youths who commit crimes before they turn 18.

Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh, writing for the majority in the 6-to-3 ruling, said it was enough that the sentencing judge exercised discretion rather than automatically imposing a sentence of life without parole.

“In a case involving an individual who was under 18 when he or she committed a homicide,” he wrote, “a state’s discretionary sentencing system is both constitutionally necessary and constitutionally sufficient.”

With the rise of Momentum, what had been implicit in Blair and Brown’s politics — the parties’ identification with London and the university towns — became codified in the group’s support for a cultural politics that broke with Labour’s historical commitments to family, community, and nation

This politics consisted of enthusiastic support for Remain.  In the runup to the 2019 vote, the activists joined hands with the pro-Blair MPs to favor a second referendum, a “people’s vote,” which they assumed would repudiate the 2016 results

They championed “open borders,” immediate eligibility for migrants to Britain’s extensive social services, including its free National Health Services, and voting rights for migrants, regardless of their citizenship, in national elections. They extolled “diversity” and condemned supporters of Leave as bigots and xenophobes.  Patriotism itself was identified with xenophobia.

when you look over the longer history of what’s been going on in Portland — there’s something else happening. It’s not just the protests. It is not just covid-19. There is something else going on in Portland.”

Henning and others say crime was rising in the city before the pandemic shut it down and before Floyd died in Minneapolis with a White police officer’s knee on his neck. From 2019 to 2020, the number of homicides nearly doubled, something Henning called “unheard of” in Portland. This followed years with some of the nation’s lowest crime rates for a city its size.

“So these perpetrators, my guess, were coming of age, were in elementary and middle school right around the Great Recession,” said Brian Renauer, director of the Criminal Justice Policy Research Institute at Portland State. “Now they’re in their early to mid-20s. So what we’re seeing is the outgrowth of a breakdown in the family, in the economy, in those neighborhoods they came out of, if this is very much a homegrown phenomenon.”

Feb. 13, 2017

Frank Ancona, the professed leader of the Traditionalist American Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, was shot and killed in Missouri last week in what officials called a “tragic and senseless act of violence.” His wife and stepson were charged in his death on Monday.

His body was found on a riverbank on Saturday with gunshot wounds to the head, according to the Washington County coroner, Brian DeClue, who called the death a homicide.In an interview, he said that Mr. Ancona, 51, was killed with “a shotgun of some sort.” Jerrod Mahurin, the prosecutor in the case, said Mr. Ancona was also shot in the head with a 9-millimeter handgun.On Monday, Mr. Ancona’s wife, Malissa Ancona, 44, and stepson, Paul Jinkerson Jr., 24, were charged with a range of crimes in connection with the killing, including first-degree murder and the abandonment of a corpse, according to the St. Francois County Sheriff’s Department.

Today, he and a partner run a small startup in Portland, Ore., called Leaders Become Legends. They mentor people involved with gun violence and connect them with companies who are hiring for green jobs, like solar panel installation companies and recycling facilities.

Through Leaders Become Legends, Rouse has been working with a local energy company to assemble and install solar panels. He says the most important skill he's gained in this program is not technical; it's how to compartmentalize.

In the last year, Portland, Ore., — like much of the country — has seen a devastating rise in gun violence. Homicide rates here are higher than they've been in two decades.

An off-duty firefighter shot two people, killing one, at a Los Angeles County fire station Tuesday morning, officials said at a news conference.

The shooting took place around 10:50 a.m. PT when authorities received reports about a shooting at Fire Station 81 Agua Dulce, California, about 30 miles north of downtown Los Angeles, according to Los Angeles County Fire Chief Daryl Osby.

Upon arrival, first responders found a 44-year-old man with gunshot wounds to his torso who was pronounced dead at the scene, said Brandon Dean with the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department homicide bureau.