Today’s edition of quick hits:
* Chauvin sentenced: “Derek Chauvin, the former Minneapolis police officer convicted of murder in the death of George Floyd, was sentenced Friday to 22 and a half years in prison, closing a chapter on a case that sparked global outrage and protests. He was granted credit for time served.”
* The latest from Surfside: “A desperate search for survivors of the Florida condo collapse entered a second day Friday as the number of those dead and unaccounted for continued to rise…. There were 127 people accounted for from the building and 159 people unaccounted for, Miami-Dade County Mayor Daniella Levine Cava said Friday.”
* Trump Org: “The Trump Organization is expected to be hit with criminal charges as soon as next week by Manhattan District Attorney Cy Vance’s office in a case that Trump attorneys say is tied to tax-related conduct, multiple people familiar with the matter tell NBC News.”
* This probably won’t generate a lot of chatter, but it’s important: “The House voted Friday to restore a rule targeting leaks of methane from oil and gas operations, reinstating Obama-era standards for limiting the potent greenhouse gas that had been dismantled under President Donald Trump.”
* The UFO report: “The U.S. government can’t explain 143 of the 144 cases of unidentified flying objects reported by military planes, according to a highly anticipated intelligence report released Friday. That report, released by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, was meant to shed light on the mystery of those dozens of flying objects, spotted between 2004 and 2021, but instead said it didn’t have adequate data to put all but one of them into a category.”
* Jan. 6 fallout: “The US Department of Justice has reached 500 arrests in cases connected to the Capitol riot.”
* The Stephen Calk case: “One of the best-known but short-lived members of former President Donald Trump’s White House staff, Anthony Scaramucci, took the stand as a prosecution witness Thursday at a federal trial of a Chicago banker accused of trying to trade millions of dollars in loans for a senior post in the Trump administration.”
* The Kevin Strickland case: “Missouri Gov. Mike Parson on Wednesday said he is not convinced that Kevin Strickland is innocent, making him the first official to publicly doubt prosecutors’ assertions that the Kansas City man was wrongly convicted four decades ago.”
* This won’t end well: “House Republicans plan to hold their own public hearing on the origins of Covid-19 next week, featuring ‘many respected doctors, scientists’ and ‘members of Congress who’ve been investigating this on their own,’ House Minority Whip Steve Scalise, R-La., said Thursday.”
* What a weird story: “FBI agents were looking for an extremely valuable cache of fabled Civil War-era gold — possibly tons of it — when they excavated a remote woodland site in Pennsylvania three years ago this month, according to government emails and other recently released documents in the case.”
Have a safe weekend.
