WORLD DIGEST || S.A. police shoot, kill striking miners

Police shoot, kill striking miners

JOHANNESBURG

South African police opened fire Thursday on a crowd of striking miners that charged a line of officers trying to disperse them, killing some and wounding others in one of the worst shootings by authorities since the end of the apartheid era.

Police declined to offer casualty figures after the shooting at the Lonmin PLC mine near Marikana, a dusty town about 40 miles northwest of Johannesburg. However, police ministry spokesman Zweli Mnisi acknowledged late Thursday some of the miners there had been killed as more police and soldiers surrounded the hostels and shacks near Lonmin’s shuttered platinum mine.

Forecast: Drought in US is leveling off

ST. LOUIS

The worst drought in the U.S. in decades may be leveling off or even be easing ever so slightly in some lucky locales, federal weather forecasters announced Thursday in a report of little comfort for farmers and ranchers who already have begun tallying this year’s losses.

Though the latest forecast from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Climate Prediction Center calls for the drought to linger in the nation’s breadbasket and parts of some mountain states at least through November, it provided a silver lining with the news that conditions aren’t expected to get worse.

Dallas plans aerial spray to fight virus

DALLAS

The last time Dallas used aerial spraying to curb the mosquito population, Texas’ Lyndon Johnson was in the White House, Mission Control in Houston was launching Gemini missions and encephalitis was blamed for more than a dozen deaths.

But for the first time in more than 45 years, the city and county planned Thursday to resume dropping insecticide from the air to combat the nation’s worst outbreak of West Nile virus, which has killed 10 people and caused at least 200 others to fall ill.

Although commonplace in other major cities, the efforts are provoking a debate in the Dallas area between health officials trying to quell disease risk and people concerned about insecticidal mist drifting down from above.

Nearly half of all West Nile cases in the United States so far this year are in Texas, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Lawyer ordered to pay $4.5M to student

DETROIT

A jury on Thursday awarded a gay University of Michigan student-body president $4.5 million in his lawsuit against a former Michigan assistant attorney general who posted about him in an anti-gay blog.

The U.S. District Court jury ruled in favor of Christopher Armstrong, who claimed he suffered distress after a blog created by Andrew Shirvell accused him of enticing minors with alcohol and recruiting people to become homosexual.

Postal carrier admits stealing $275,000

CHICAGO

A veteran postal carrier admitted Thursday stealing nearly 30,000 letters containing cash, checks or money orders that he was supposed to deliver to a charity on his mail route in Berwyn, Ill., federal authorities said.

Frederick L. Taylor, stole $275,000 meant for the charity over the yearlong scheme, according to a guilty plea he entered at the Dirksen U.S. Courthouse.

Combined dispatches