QUOTE OF THE DAY
“We are pleased that congressional leaders in the House have apparently relented.” Josh Earnest, White House spokesman, after the House passed a measure to fund the Homeland Security Department through September without reversing executive orders on immigration
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Jurors picked for trial on Boston bombing
BOSTON — A panel of eight men and 10 women — including a self-employed house painter, an executive assistant to a managing partner at a law firm, an air traffic controller and an unemployed auditor — was chosen Tuesday to decide the fate of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, who is accused in the deadly Boston Marathon bombing.
The jury is all white, with one man of Iranian descent.
Tsarnaev, 21, has pleaded innocent to 30 counts against him, stemming from the explosion of two bombs at the marathon finish line in April 2013. The bombs killed three people and injured more than 260 others. The counts include the subsequent slaying of an MIT police officer. Seventeen of the 30 counts carry the death penalty.
Opening statements were to begin today.
Four of the jurors said under questioning that they believed Tsarnaev was guilty but said they could keep an open mind and base their decisions on the evidence. All the others said they had made no determination as to his guilt.
All said they were willing to sentence him to death, which is a requirement to sit in a death-penalty case; one woman said she was against the death penalty but could still consider imposing it.
U.S. foreseen hitting debt limit in fall
WASHINGTON — The U.S. probably won’t need to raise the debt ceiling until October or November, the Congressional Budget Office said Tuesday.
The Treasury Department will have enough revenue coming in for the next few months from tax returns and its “well-established toolbox of so-called extraordinary measures” to avoid a potential default on the debt.
Congress voted last year to suspend the debt limit until March 15. Once that date passes, the ceiling will be raised to reflect the current debt of about $18.1 trillion, according to the budget office.
U.S. lawmakers have struggled to raise the debt limit since Republicans won control of Congress in 2010, nearing the brink of default in 2011 and 2013. The latter fight coincided with a lapse in government funding.
Republicans typically want to pair the debt-limit increase with budget cuts. President Barack Obama, after agreeing to such cuts in 2011, has since called for debt-limit increases with no strings attached.
Cloudy drug delays Georgia execution
ATLANTA — Georgia prison officials were indecisive about whether to proceed with a cloudy lethal injection drug, at one point saying they weren’t sure whether they checked “this week’s or last week’s” batch, according to court documents.
Ultimately, they postponed the execution of Kelly Renee Gissendaner late Monday night. A day later, they decided to temporarily halt all executions until they could more carefully analyze the cloudy pentobarbital.
The cloudy drug bolstered death-penalty opponents, who have been vocal in their opposition after several botched executions in other parts of the country and the increasing use of compounding pharmacies for execution drugs.
Gissendaner had originally been set for execution last week, on Feb. 25, but her execution was postponed because of a threat of bad weather.
Attorneys for Gissendaner, who was convicted of murder in the February 1997 slaying of her husband, said in a filing with the U.S. Supreme Court that a lawyer for the state called them around 10:25 p.m. Monday to say the execution would be postponed several days because the state’s pharmacist had determined the drug was cloudy.
High court: U.S. can hear online-tax suit
WASHINGTON — A unanimous Supreme Court ruled Tuesday that federal courts can hear a dispute over Colorado’s Internet tax law. One justice, Anthony Kennedy, suggested it was time to reconsider the ban on state collection of sales taxes from companies outside their borders.
The ruling is a win for business groups that want to challenge the state’s so-called Amazon tax, which requires extensive reporting by out-of-state retailers that don’t collect the state’s 2.9 percent sales tax from Colorado customers.
Online retailers claim that Colorado is violating protections for companies doing business in other states. A federal court agreed that the law violates the Commerce Clause of the U.S. Constitution.
But a federal appeals court ruled that cases challenging state laws about tax collection can only be filed in state court.
The high court reversed the decision, finding that retailers were not challenging the actual collection of taxes, only a law giving state officials information about people who owe taxes.