Austin
DeLay exonerated: An appellate court last week overturned former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay’s 2010 conviction for money laundering. The Texas Republican had been facing a three-year prison term for illegally influencing the 2002 Texas Legislature election by channeling $190,000 in corporate political donations to conservative candidates. Once elected, the recipients of those funds helped redraw congressional district lines in the state, resulting in five new Republican seats in the U.S. House of Representatives in the 2004 election. The appellate court ruled that the evidence was “legally insufficient” for a conviction. “I just thank the Lord for carrying me through all this,” said DeLay, who spent $12 million fighting what he claimed was a political witch hunt against him. He now plans to write a book and join the lecture circuit. The Austin-based Travis County district attorney’s office, which brought the case, said it will appeal the ruling.
Oklahoma City
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Adoption dispute: A 4-year-old Cherokee girl at the center of a cross-country custody battle was returned this week to her adoptive parents in South Carolina. Veronica Brown had been under the adoptive care of Matt and Melanie Capobianco for the first two years of her life, until a South Carolina court returned her to the biological father, Dusten Brown, a member of the Cherokee Nation. The court cited the 1978 Indian Child Welfare Act, which aimed to reduce the high adoption rates of American Indian children by non-Indian families, but the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in June that the law didn’t apply to Veronica because her father lacked custody when she was adopted. This week, the Oklahoma Supreme Court lifted a ruling keeping Veronica with her father. “We will not lose hope,” said Cherokee Nation Attorney General Todd Hembree. “Veronica Brown will always be a Cherokee citizen.”
Chicago
Mass shooting: Two gang members armed with a handgun and a semiautomatic assault rifle with a high-capacity magazine fired indiscriminately into a crowded Chicago park last week, hitting a 3-year-old boy in the head and injuring 12 others. Bryon Champ, 21, and Tabari Young, 22, allegedly carried out the drive-by shooting at a basketball court in Cornell Square Park—believed to be under the control of a rival gang—in retaliation for a gang-related shooting earlier in the day, in which one of them was grazed. The two have been charged, along with a purported lookout and the suspected supplier of the assault weapon, with attempted murder and aggravated battery with a firearm. The shooting kicked off a weekend of gun violence in Chicago in which 25 other people were shot, five of them fatally.
Washington, D.C.
Presidential bid: Hillary Clinton this week openly admitted for the first time that she is considering running for president in 2016. In an interview with New York magazine, the former secretary of state said she was wrestling with the idea, but wasn’t “in any hurry” to make a decision. According to a close confidant interviewed by the magazine, however, Clinton’s candidacy is a “foregone conclusion”—though she doesn’t know it yet. “She’s doing a very Clintonian thing,” said the source. “In her mind, she’s running for it, and she’s also convinced herself she hasn’t made up her mind.” Should she run, Clinton will apparently force longtime aide Huma Abedin to choose between her career and her disgraced husband, failed New York mayoral candidate Anthony Weiner. “Huma has a choice to make,” said a close associate of Clinton’s.
Washington, D.C.
FBI leaker: A former FBI agent has agreed to plead guilty to leaking classified information about a foiled al Qaida bomb plot to the Associated Press last year, the Justice Department said this week. In May 2012, the AP published a story detailing al Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula’s disrupted plan to deploy a bomb similar to the one that failed to go off in the 2009 Christmas Day underwear plot. Federal investigators said they had identified the source of that leak, former bomb technician Donald Sachtleben, 55, after secretly obtaining the phone logs of AP reporters—a move that caused an outcry among journalists and lawmakers when it was disclosed in May. Sachtleben agreed to serve 43 months in prison for the leak, in addition to 97 months for a separate child pornography case against him.
Goldsboro, N.C.
Nuclear disaster: The U.S. Air Force came perilously close to detonating a hydrogen bomb over North Carolina in 1961, according to declassified documents published last week. The incident occurred when a B-52 bomber broke up in midair over Goldsboro, dropping two Mark 39 hydrogen bombs with a payload of 4 megatons each—260 times more powerful than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. Three of the four safety mechanisms in one of the bombs failed, causing a firing signal to be sent to the nuclear core of the device. Luckily, one final low-voltage safety switch engaged, preventing the massive bomb from detonating and killing millions, with fallout reaching as far as New York. The incident was just one of 1,200 accidents involving nuclear weapons between 1950 and 1968, according to Eric Schlosser, who requested the documents while researching a book on nuclear weapons.
