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| 2.Hillary Clinton asks the State Department to release her emails |
| Hillary Clinton said late Wednesday that she had asked the State Department to release her emails. “I want the public to see my email,” Clinton said via Twitter in her first public response to reports that she had used a private email address during her years as secretary of State. A State Department spokeswoman said the department “will undertake this review as quickly as possible. Given the sheer volume of the document set, this review will take some time to complete.”
Source: Fox News, Reuters |
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| 3.Senate Republicans fail to override Obama’s Keystone pipeline veto |
| The Republican-led Senate on Wednesday fell five votes short of the 67 needed to override President Obama’s veto of legislation to approve construction of the Keystone XL pipeline. The 1,179-mile pipeline would carry Canadian tar-sands oil to refineries on the U.S. Gulf Coast. Obama vetoed the bill over unanswered questions about its environmental impact. There also is a court challenge to the pipeline’s proposed route in Nebraska. Republicans say the project should go forward because the construction phase would create thousands of jobs.
Source: The Wall Street Journal |
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| 4.No civil rights charges against ex-Ferguson-cop Darren Wilson |
| The Justice Department reported Wednesday that it would not file federal civil rights charges against Darren Wilson, the white former Ferguson, Missouri, police officer who fatally shot unarmed black teen Michael Brown last year. Prosecutors found no evidence countering Wilson’s assertion that he fired to protect himself. The case touched off months of protests of police treatment of African Americans. The Justice Department separately found that Ferguson needed to completely overhaul its approach to policing to correct discrimination that stoked racial tensions.
Source: CNN, The New York Times |
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| 5.High court hears arguments in ObamaCare challenge |
| Supreme Court justices heard arguments Wednesday in a legal challenge to President Obama’s health-care law, with the court’s conservative and liberal wings sharply divided. The conservative plaintiffs argued that the law says insurance subsidies are available to those buying coverage on exchanges “established by the state,” so people buying insurance on the federal exchange should lose their subsidies. Potential swing vote Justice Anthony Kennedy said there was a “serious constitutional problem” with that logic.
Source: Reuters, The Washington Post |
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| 6.Liberia releases its last Ebola patient |
| Liberia released its final Ebola patient from a Chinese-built hospital in the capital, Monrovia, on Thursday, according to Tolbert Nyenswah, the head of the country’s Incidence Management System. The recovered patient is the last known case of Ebola in Liberia, and if no new cases emerge in the next 42 days, the country will be declared Ebola-free. Almost 10,000 people have died since the world’s worst Ebola outbreak started a year ago, and Liberia shouldered the highest number of deaths.
Source: The Associated Press |
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| 7.Sweet Briar supporters rally to keep the college from shutting down |
| Students and alumnae of Sweet Briar College in Virginia united on social mediaWednesday, vowing to keep the 114-year-old private women’s college open. The surge of support came after the school’s board of directors voted to close the 3,250-acre campus on Aug. 25, citing financial reasons. A website was launched aiming to raise $250 million to keep Sweet Briar alive. The remote school’s annual tuition is $47,000, but it has had to offer deep discounts to slow declining enrollment.
Source: The Associated Press |
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| 8.Alabama judges stop issuing marriage licenses to gay couples after state high court order |
| Judges across Alabama stopped issuing marriage licenses to gay couples after the state’s Supreme Court ordered them to respect a state same-sex marriage ban. The Alabama high court’s ruling directly defied a federal court ruling overturning the ban. Montgomery County Probate Judge Steven Reed, the first in the state to announce he would issue licenses to gay couples, said he was obliged to obey the state high court “whether I agree with it or not.” The U.S. Supreme Court could be called on to resolve the stand-off.
Source: Montgomery Advertiser |
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| 9. Possible GOP presidential candidate Ben Carson apologizes for comments on homosexuality |
| Potential 2016 GOP presidential candidate Ben Carson ignited controversyWednesday when he claimed that homosexuality is “absolutely” a choice, contrary to what the American Psychological Association and most of the medical community says. “A lot of people who go into prison go into prison straight, and when they come out they’re gay,” the neurosurgeon told CNN. He said that “thwarts” the argument that being gay was not a choice. Carson later apologized for his “hurtful and divisive” words, saying he only meant that the science was not definitive.
Source: CNN |
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| 10.Scientists unearth jawbone of earliest known human |
| Scientists have found a fossilized jawbone they say belonged to one of the first humans, according to a pair of papers published Wednesday in the journalScience. The broken left mandible, with five intact teeth, was found in volcanic ash and sediment in an East African hillside. It is 2.8 million years old, about 400,000 years older than any previously known fossil from the human genus, Homo, closing the gap between the first humans and the more ape-like Australopithecus genus that included the 3 million year-old “Lucy.”
Source: Los Angeles Times |
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