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SCOTUS social media cases echo Trump

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court said Monday it will decide whether public officials can block critics from commenting on their social media accounts, an issue that previously came up in a case involving former President Donald Trump. Two years ago the Supreme Court dismissed a case over Trump’s efforts to block critics from his personal Twitter account. A lower court had said Trump violated the First Amendment whenever he blocked a critic to silence a viewpoint. But the Supreme Court said the case should be dismissed because there was nothing left to it after Trump was ...

4 Muskegon County officers avoid jail time in inmate‘s death

MUSKEGON, Mich. (AP) — Four corrections officers in western Michigan avoided incarceration with plea bargains Thursday in the 2019 death of a jailed man who suffered multiple seizures while in a cell. Muskegon County sheriff‘s Sgt. David Vanderlaan and Deputies Jeffrey Patterson, Crystal Greve and Jamal Lane pleaded no contest to a misdemeanor charge of willful neglect of duty and were sentenced in Muskegon County Circuit Court to 100 hours of community service and fined $1,000. The four originally were charged with involuntary manslaughter in the death of Paul Bulthouse, 39, who ...

Man gets 10 months in prison for Black Lives Matter threats

DETROIT (AP) — A judge sentenced a Michigan man to 10 months in prison Wednesday after he pleaded guilty to two hate crime charges for intimidating and attempting to intimidate people protesting in support of Black Lives Matter. U.S. District Judge Thomas Ludington also sentenced Kenneth Pilon, 62, of Saginaw to one-year of supervised release. Pilon was accused of calling nine Starbucks stores in Michigan and telling the employees answering his calls to relay racial threats to Starbucks employees wearing Black Lives Matter T-shirts. Pilon also threatened to kill Black people, ...

Judge on Michigan’s top court getting mental-health care

DETROIT — A Michigan Supreme Court justice announced Tuesday that he is getting mental-health treatment outside the state and will not hear a case next week. “I encourage everyone who struggles to seek the help they need,” Richard Bernstein said in a statement released by the court. Bernstein, who is blind, has been a justice since 2015 and was reelected last November to another eight-year term. He caused controversy in January when he publicly criticized Justice Kyra Harris Bolden for hiring a law clerk who had turned his life around after serving 14 years in prison for ...

See the EVs eligible for tax credits – and why most aren’t

By TOM KRISHER AP Auto Writer DETROIT — Ten electric or plug-in hybrid vehicles will be eligible for a $7,500 U.S. tax credit, while another seven could get $3,750 under new federal rules that went into effect on Tuesday. But under the Treasury Department rules and other provisions of last year’s Inflation Reduction Act, most of the more than 60 electric or plug-in hybrids on sale in the U.S. won’t get any tax credits. That could slow acceptance of electric vehicles and could delay reaching President Joe Biden’s ambitious goal that half of new passenger vehicles sold in ...

House where King planned Alabama marches moving to Michigan

By COREY WILLIAMS Associated Press DEARBORN— A lot was happening in March 1965 in the bungalow in Selma, Alabama, that then-4-year-old Jawana Jackson called home, and much of it involved her “Uncle Martin.” There were late-night visitors, phone calls and meetings at the house that ...