Your Friday night briefing from the staff of Courthouse News
Top eight stories for today including the Senate broke for the long holiday weekend without a deal to create a commission studying the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol; An Iowa jury found a Mexican immigrant guilty of first-degree murder for the stabbing death of college student Mollie Tibbetts; Germany and France made historic gestures seeking forgiveness in Africa, and more.
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National
1.) More than a dozen hours of Senate debate on calls for a commission to investigate the causes of the Jan. 6 insurrection stretched overnight only to break Friday afternoon with lawmakers unable to muster a filibuster-proof majority.
2.) Last summer, a court in the United Kingdom found that actor Johnny Depp was not defamed by a British newspaper’s article describing him as a “wife beater.” Now an attorney for Depp’s ex-wife, Amber Heard, wants a Virginia judge to embrace those findings in a separate defamation case unfolding in the U.S.
3.) The Biden administration on Friday released its $6 trillion budget proposal, a package that pits the president’s push to revamp the nation’s infrastructure and social programs against a ballooning national debt.
4.) With inflation concerns and labor shortages on the one hand, and dropping unemployment and rising GDP on the other, investors slow-walked their way to a winning week on Wall Street.
5.) One year after the murder of George Floyd sharpened demands in America for police reforms, a Trump-appointed judge held arguments Friday afternoon on one of the early protests that brought the issue into somewhat improbable relief.
Regional
6.) As the president seeks to spend billions to fix the nation’s aging roads and bridges, a long-running project along North Carolina’s Outer Banks illustrates the complexities of transportation infrastructure.
7.) An Iowa jury on Friday found Cristhian Bahena Rivera guilty of first-degree murder for the 2018 stabbing death of college student Mollie Tibbetts.
International
8.) This week, Germany and France made historic gestures seeking forgiveness in Africa after Berlin acknowledged its former colonial empire committed genocide in Namibia and Paris took responsibility for its role in not doing more to stop the 1994 Rwanda genocide.
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