The city of Cleveland will pay $6 million to settle a lawsuit filed by the relatives of Tamir Rice, a 12-year-old boy shot and killed by a police officer in 2014, according to a settlement announced Monday.

Under the terms of the agreement, which still has to be approved by a probate court, the city will pay $3 million this year and $3 million next year to settle the lawsuit. The bulk of the money will be paid to Rice’s estate.

The settlement does not include any admission of wrongdoing, U.S. District Judge Dan Polster wrote in a one-page document filed Monday.

This lawsuit was filed not long after a Cleveland police officer fatally shot Tamir, who was playing with a toy gun in a park when authorities were called to the scene. While the call about a man with a gun specified that the person may have been a child with a toy weapon, the officers – Timothy Loehmann and Frank Garmback – were not told that when they responded.

WASHINGTON - Attorney General Loretta E. Lynch on Monday is expected to announce a broad set of prison reforms that are intended to reduce recidivism and help inmates when they re-enter society.

But the attorney general also wants to help with a specific, practical problem: getting IDs for inmates once they’re released.

It might seem like a nuisance, but not having identification can have significant, real world consequences for those struggling to build a life outside of confinement. An ID is often necessary to secure a job or a place to live, to register for school or to open a bank account. And, according to the attorney general, it’s not always easy for prisoners in the federal system to get state identification after they are released. In letters to the 50 state governors and the mayor of D.C., she said the Justice Department wanted to work with state officials to change that, developing a way for convicts to exchange their federal inmate identification cards and release documents for state IDs.

Some people want to watch the world burn. Others - like Jeremy Buckingham, a member of the Australian Parliament - will settle for rivers.

In an act of protest against coal seam fracking, the Green Party member recently took an aluminium boat down the Condamine River in Queensland, Australia. This was no lazy afternoon cruise. The surface of the river fizzed with bubbles of methane gas. Methane is colorless and odorless – but it’s also quite flammable. Buckingham leaned over the side of the boat, and, as though lighting a barbecue, set the methane ablaze.

Presto: Instant river flambe. “We did not expect it to explode like it did,” Buckingham told The Washington Post early Monday in a phone interview. He’s calling for the gas industry to halt fracking in Australia until the source of the methane can be determined.

The Condamine River isn’t the first flaming body of water to spark environmental health concerns. When a layer of oil and trash on top of Cleveland’s Cuyahoga River caught flame in 1969, the resulting furor led to the passage of the Clean Water Act. In 2014, a discarded cigarette set a polluted river on fire in Wenzhou, China; a year later, flaming waste floating on a lake in India oozed sulfuric fumes so pungent they ruptured a bystander’s cornea.

Washington Post