10 things you need to know today: March 6, 2015

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1. State Department begins investigation of Hillary Clinton emails
2. Harrison Ford injured in plane crash
3. Michael Brown's family plans lawsuit over his death
4. ISIS bulldozes ancient Nimrud archaeological site
5. Delta jet skids off New York runway
6. Jodi Arias avoids death penalty as jury deadlocks
7. Economists expect jobs report to show continued gains
8. NASA scientists say Mars once had a massive ocean
9. Former New York archbishop Egan dies at 82
10. Ringling Bros. announces end to circus elephant acts

published 6 March 2015

1. State Department begins investigation of Hillary Clinton emails

The State Department is reviewing tens of thousands of pages of Hillary Clinton's emails from her time as secretary of State to determine whether her use of a private email account violated security rules. A State Department official said Clinton's use of personal email did not necessarily constitute a violation of the rules, but the review will determine whether she ever included sensitive information required to be handled using a secure government system.

Actor Harrison Ford was injured Thursday crash landing his small World War II vintage plane on a golf course in Los Angeles. Ford's son Ben, a chef, tweeted from the hospital that his father, who reportedly suffered gashes to his head, was "Battered but OK!" The 1942 Ryan Aeronautical ST3KR plane stalled on take-off and Ford had radioed the Santa Monica Airport control tower to report engine trouble and said he was immediately returning, but he only made it to the golf course, which is across a busy road from the runway.

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Lawyers for the parents of Michael Brown, the unarmed black teenager killed by a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, last August, announced Thursday that they will file a lawsuit in his death. The wrongful death suit will name the city of Ferguson and former police officer Darren Wilson as defendants, attorney Daryl Parks said. The announcement came after the Justice Department accused Ferguson's police department of routine racial discrimination but declined to charge Wilson in Brown's death.

The Iraqi government said Thursday that Islamic State militants had "bulldozed" northern Iraq's Nimrud archaeological site in what UNESCO called an "appalling attack on Iraq's heritage." Meanwhile, thousands of people have fled the Iraqi city of Tikrit as Iraqi forces, Shiite militias, and Kurdish peshmerga conduct an offensive aiming to push ISIS fighters out of the city, United Nations officials said. ISIS forces reportedly set fire to oil fields in an attempt to slow the Iraqi military's progress.

A Delta Airlines jet skidded off a runway while landing at New York's LaGuardia Airport on Thursday. The plane smashed through a fence and into a snowy embankment, stopping just a few feet from Flushing Bay. There were 127 passengers on board. Two people were taken to a hospital with minor injuries. Emergency escape chutes failed to deploy, so passengers had to scramble to the ground over the wing of the MD88 aircraft.

Jodi Arias avoided the death penalty for the murder of her boyfriend when an Arizona jury deadlocked over her sentence on Thursday. This was the second jury to fail to reach a unanimous vote on the sentence. The jury first deadlocked two years ago after a trial laced with lurid testimony in which Arias was convicted of stabbing her on-off boyfriend, Travis Alexander, to death in 2008. Judge Sherry Stephens now will decide whether Arias will get life in prison or have the possibility for parole after 25 years. Capital punishment is off the table.

Economists expect the federal jobs report coming out Friday to show that the U.S. employment added 240,000 jobs in February, after gaining 257,000 in January. If the predictions are accurate, February will mark the 12th straight month of gains above 200,000 jobs, the longest such streak since 1994. Another month of improvement could help push down the unemployment rate and show that the economy is improving enough for the Federal Reserve to go ahead and start raising interest rates in June.

Mars had a mile-deep sea 4.3 billion years ago that covered 20 percent of the Red Planet and was bigger than the Arctic Ocean, NASA scientists reported in an article published Thursday in Science magazine. A team led by Geronimo Villanueva of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center reached its conclusions by conducting a ground-based analysis of the water in Mars' atmosphere, giving them what Villanueva called a "solid estimate of how much water Mars once had, by determining how much water was lost to space."

Edward Cardinal Egan, who served as the Catholic archbishop of New York from 2000 to 2009, died Thursday of cardiac arrest. He was 82. Cardinal Egan served as archbishop of Bridgeport, Connecticut, for 12 years before becoming the ninth archbishop to serve New York's 2.5 million Catholics. He was made a cardinal in 2001. Many people credited Egan with inspiring and soothing New Yorkers after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus said it will get rid of elephant acts by 2018, citing growing public concern about the animals' treatment. "Things have changed," Kenneth Feld, president of the circus' parent company, told AP. "How does a business be successful? By adapting." The elephants will reportedly retire to the company's Center for Elephant Conservation in Florida. Other circus animals, like camels, will continue performing.

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Harold Maass is a contributing editor at The Week. He has been writing for The Week since the 2001 debut of the U.S. print edition and served as editor of TheWeek.com when it launched in 2008. Harold started his career as a newspaper reporter in South Florida and Haiti. He has previously worked for a variety of news outlets, including The Miami Herald, ABC News and Fox News, and for several years wrote a daily roundup of financial news for The Week and Yahoo Finance.