Police and protest organizers laid the groundwork on Friday for steps to avert street violence once a St Louis-area grand jury decides whether to indict the white police officer who fatally shot unarmed black teenager Michael Brown in August.
Against the backdrop of heightened tension, the FBI arrested two men suspected of buying explosives they intended to detonate during demonstrations in Ferguson, Missouri, a law enforcement official said.
In a sign that a grand jury decision is imminent in the Brown case, prosecutors told media organizations they were making plans for a press conference to announce the outcome, although the date, time and location remained undetermined.
A 12-member St Louis County grand jury has been weighing evidence on the disputed circumstances of the Aug. 9 slaying of Brown by police officer Darren Wilson in Ferguson, a predominantly black suburb of 21,000 people. The panel met behind closed doors again on Friday.
Lawyers for Brown’s family say the youth was trying to surrender when he was gunned down, and a companion has said Brown, 18, had his hands raised.
Wilson’s supporters insist he shot Brown in self-defense.
The killing instantly became a flashpoint for strained US race relations, triggering weeks of sometimes violent protests in Ferguson calling for the arrest of Wilson. He has instead been placed on administrative leave and gone into seclusion.
US President Barack Obama added his voice to the chorus of politicians, civic leaders and activists appealing for calm ahead of the grand jury decision and renewed protests that are expected to follow.
“I think first and foremost, keep protests peaceful,” Obama said during an ABC News interview taped for today’s This Week program.
“This is a country that allows everybody ... to protest actions that they think are unjust,” he said. “But using any event as an excuse for violence is contrary to rule of law, contrary to who we are.”
The specter of violence was raised again by news that two reputed members of a militant group called the New Black Panther party were arrested in the St Louis area in an FBI sting operation.
As initially reported by CBS News, the men were suspected of acquiring explosives for pipe bombs they planned to set off during protests in Ferguson, said the law enforcement official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to publicly discuss the case.
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is to visit Russia next month for a summit of the BRICS bloc of developing economies, Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) said on Thursday, a move that comes as Moscow and Beijing seek to counter the West’s global influence. Xi’s visit to Russia would be his second since the Kremlin sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022. China claims to take a neutral position in the conflict, but it has backed the Kremlin’s contentions that Russia’s action was provoked by the West, and it continues to supply key components needed by Moscow for
Japan scrambled fighter jets after Russian aircraft flew around the archipelago for the first time in five years, Tokyo said yesterday. From Thursday morning to afternoon, the Russian Tu-142 aircraft flew from the sea between Japan and South Korea toward the southern Okinawa region, the Japanese Ministry of Defense said in a statement. They then traveled north over the Pacific Ocean and finished their journey off the northern island of Hokkaido, it added. The planes did not enter Japanese airspace, but flew over an area subject to a territorial dispute between Japan and Russia, a ministry official said. “In response, we mobilized Air Self-Defense
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
The pitch is a classic: A young celebrity with no climbing experience spends a year in hard training and scales Mount Everest, succeeding against some — if not all — odds. French YouTuber Ines Benazzouz, known as Inoxtag, brought the story to life with a two-hour-plus documentary about his year preparing for the ultimate challenge. The film, titled Kaizen, proved a smash hit on its release last weekend. Young fans queued around the block to get into a preview screening in Paris, with Inoxtag’s management on Monday saying the film had smashed the box office record for a special cinema