Military jury gets Army shooting case
FORT HOOD, Texas – The Army psychiatrist on trial for the 2009 shooting rampage at Fort Hood passed on his final chance to address jurors on Thursday, even after prosecutors insisted he carried out a planned attack and asked jurors for a verdict that would allow the death penalty.
Maj. Nidal Hasan is acting as his own attorney but declined to plead his case after prosecutors wrapped up their closing argument. When the judge told Hasan he could begin, he said: “The defense chooses not to make a closing statement.”
Hasan is facing numerous counts of premeditated murder for the attack that killed 13 people and wounded more than 30 others at the Army post in central Texas. It was the deadliest mass shooting ever on a U.S. military base.
Prosecutors insisted there was no question that Hasan planned and carried out the attack.
Computer glitch again halts Nasdaq trading
NEW YORK – Trading on the Nasdaq stock exchange halted for three hours Thursday, renewing concerns about the pitfalls of computer-driven trading.
The outage disrupted what otherwise had been a quiet summer day on Wall Street, and sent brokers and traders scurrying to figure out what went wrong. It was the latest in a growing list of snafus to hit financial markets, though hardly as stunning as the “flash crash” that set off a sudden stock-market plunge in May 2010.
“The market has gotten quite complex and needlessly so,” said Sal Arnuk, co-founder of the brokerage Themis Trading.
The Nasdaq, a stock exchange dominated by the biggest names in technology, sent out an alert shortly after noon, saying it was stopping trading because of problems with its system for disseminating prices. The Nasdaq composite index spent much of the afternoon stuck at 3,631.17.
Trading resumed at 3:25 p.m. Thirty-five minutes later, trading ended for the day with the index up 38 points, or 1 percent, at 3,638.71.
Justice officials sue Texas over voter law
AUSTIN, Texa – The Justice Department sued Texas on Thursday over the state’s voter ID law and will seek to intervene in a lawsuit over its redistricting laws that minority groups complain are discriminatory but Texas Republicans insist are designed to protect the state’s elections from fraud.
Attorney General Eric Holder said the action marks another step in the effort to protect voting rights of all eligible Americans. He said the government will not allow a recent Supreme Court decision to be interpreted as open season for states to pursue measures that suppress voting rights.
“This represents the department’s latest action to protect voting rights, but it will not be our last,” the attorney general said.
Holder is concentrating on Texas because of years of litigation over the state’s Voter ID law and redistricting maps that federal judges in Washington have determined would either indirectly disenfranchise minorities and the poor, or intentionally discriminate minorities.
Associated Press
