Suspected killer of officer is slain
AUBURN, Mass. — The suspect in the fatal shooting of a Massachusetts police officer Sunday was fatally wounded in an exchange of gunfire as authorities closed in on him at a small-town residence, authorities said.
The man, identified as Jorge Zambrano, 35, opened fire on the officers as they approached him inside a duplex apartment in Oxford, Worcester County District Attorney Joseph Early Jr. said at a news conference. Zambrano was taken to a hospital, where he died.
A Massachusetts state trooper also was wounded and was scheduled to undergo surgery late Sunday, authorities said. He suffered a gunshot wound to his left shoulder. The name of the state trooper wasn’t released.
Auburn police officer Ronald Tarentino was shot about 12:30 a.m. Sunday after stopping a vehicle on a residential road, Police Chief Andrew Sluckis said. The vehicle’s occupant shot Tarentino and then fled the scene, Sluckis said.
Tarentino, 42, was taken to UMass Medical Center in Worcester, where he was pronounced dead.
Iowa landowners challenge pipeline
DES MOINES, Iowa — Landowners have filed two lawsuits in northwest Iowa in an attempt to block construction of a $3.8 billion oil pipeline.
The Des Moines Register reports that the landowners are trying to keep the pipeline company from being able to use eminent domain powers to secure access to their land for the project.
Houston-based Dakota Access LLC wants to build the pipeline from northwest North Dakota to a storage facility in south-central Illinois.
Lawyer Bill Hanigan, who represents both couples that sued on Friday, said the landowners hope the court will block Cherokee County proceedings to set the value of the land Dakota Access wants to build the pipeline on.
The lawsuits argue that because Dakota Access is not a utility, it should not be able to use eminent domain.
Banker: Rate talks will ignore politics
WASHINGTON — The U.S. economy should be solid enough to merit an interest-rate increase this year, and the central bank won’t cave to political pressure to refrain from tightening during a presidential election year, said John Williams, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco.
While global threats to growth have forced a “balancing act” against encouraging data in the U.S., Fed officials probably will raise the benchmark interest rate sometime this year, Williams said Sunday on Fox News.
“It will, in my view, be appropriate to start raising rates again later this year,” Williams said.
“We’ve proven over and over again that we can act in presidential election years, taking controversial policy decisions. We’ve done that before,” he said. “We’ll do that again.”
A Section on 05/23/2016