Hawaii to inspect all earthen dams
Fearing another dam break like the one that killed as many as seven people earlier this week on Kauai, state officials invoked emergency authority Thursday to enter private property and inspect earthen dams across the state.
Heavy rain continued Thursday on Kauai, flooding low-lying areas.
The state’s action came as search teams continued to look for five people missing after a privately owned earthen dam burst two days before, unleashing a torrent of water that obliterated two houses. One body was found in a streambed; another was discovered in debris washed out to sea.
Jackson, Miss.
No FBI charges in Emmett Till case
The FBI said Thursday that no federal charges will be filed in the grisly 1955 killing of 14-year-old Emmett Till, a case that helped galvanize the civil rights movement.
After a reopened investigation that included the exhumation of Till’s body for an autopsy last June, FBI agent John G. Raucci said in a statement that the five-year statute of limitations on federal civil rights violations had expired.
The FBI gave its long-awaited report to District Attorney Joyce L. Chiles, who will decide on any state charges.
Till, a black teenager from Chicago, was visiting relatives in Mississippi in August 1955 when he was beaten and shot, purportedly for whistling at a white woman.
Phoenix
Fire danger higher across Southwest
The wildfire danger will be higher than usual this spring across the Southwest, much of the Plains and parts of the South, the government warned Thursday.
Wildfires have already ravaged broad areas of Texas and Oklahoma this winter. In its annual spring weather outlook, the National Weather Service said severe drought and above-normal temperatures across the region are expected to persist.
Besides the Southwest and the southern Plains, Florida, Louisiana and Nebraska, and parts of California, South Dakota, Illinois, Missouri, Arkansas and Mississippi, show above-average wildfire potential, as does Alaska.
Washington
Election plans OK’d for New Orleans
The Justice Department on Thursday approved plans for the first New Orleans election since Hurricane Katrina, despite objections from civil rights groups who said the voting arrangements do not adequately accommodate the city’s displaced black voters.
The storm has tilted the racial balance of city residents in favor of whites, many believe, and controversy has surrounded the question of what kind of accommodations should be made to allow the tens of thousands of black evacuees to vote from out-of-state.
The state plan for the election calls for sending mass mailings to evacuees, easing restrictions on absentee ballots, and setting up satellite polling stations around Louisiana. But it stops short of arranging for balloting in other states such as Texas, Mississippi and Georgia where many evacuees are dispersed.