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CHICAGO (Reuters) – A judge on Thursday found three Chicago policemen not guilty of conspiring to protect white fellow police officer Jason Van Dyke after he fatally shot a black teenager in 2014 in an incident that helped fuel the “Black Lives Matter” movement.

A jury convicted Van Dyke in October of second-degree murder and 16 counts of aggravated battery in the shooting of Laquan McDonald, 17.

Judge Domenica Stephenson of the Illinois Circuit Court of Cook County also found David March, Joseph Walsh and Thomas Gaffney not guilty of official misconduct and obstruction of justice. The trial began on Nov. 27.

Walsh and March, who was a detective, are no longer with the police force. Gaffney was suspended without pay.

“I got my life back,” March said outside the courtroom, declining further comment.

Police killings of mostly unarmed black men elsewhere in the United States helped spark the Black Lives Matter movement and were mentioned in the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign. McDonald was carrying a knife when he was shot 16 times.

Stephenson called the testimony of a key witness inconsistent and not credible. She said it was indisputable that McDonald ignored commands to drop his knife.

Prosecutor Patricia Brown Holmes had argued Van Dyke’s colleagues offered accounts of the shooting that conflicted with video footage to shield Van Dyke from prosecution. Defense attorneys said the prosecution’s case lacked evidence.

A dashboard camera video released in 2015 – more than a year after the shooting – provided the evidence to convict Van Dyke in a case that laid bare tensions between the black community and police in the third-largest U.S. city.

The Van Dyke verdict was the first time an on-duty Chicago police officer was held criminally accountable for the killing of an African-American. The conviction followed numerous acquittals or mistrials of police officers facing criminal charges across the country in the deaths of black men.

The video of McDonald’s shooting prompted days of protests, the ouster of the city’s police superintendent and calls for Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel to resign. Emanuel decided not to seek a third term in next month’s mayoral election.

Van Dyke, 40, is in jail awaiting sentencing, which is expected on Friday. He faces up to 20 years in prison for the second-degree murder conviction and up to 30 years for each of the 16 counts of aggravated battery, one for each shot he fired at McDonald.

Eric Russell, executive director of Tree of Life Justice League, a police accountability advocacy group from Chicago’s West Side, said he and other leaders expected hundreds to protest the verdict on Friday before Van Dyke’s sentencing.

McDonald’s great uncle, Marvin Hunter, told reporters the verdict was a step backward for the black community’s struggles for justice.

“To say these men are not guilty is to say Jason Van Dyke is not guilty,” Hunter said.

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – Negotiators for striking Los Angeles teachers and America’s second-largest school district returned to the bargaining table on Thursday for the first time since talks collapsed last week, as a walkout by some 30,000 educators entered its fourth day.

In the first teachers’ strike in the Los Angeles Unified School District in 30 years, members of the United Teachers Los Angeles union are seeking higher pay, smaller classes and more support staff, while denouncing their current working conditions as an “injustice.”

“They are resolute on reaching an agreement,” the union’s president, Alex Caputo-Pearl, said at a news conference, referring to the union’s bargaining team ahead of Thursday’s talks.

School District Superintendent Austin Beutner has said the demands, if fully met, would place too great a strain on the district’s budget.

The union is seeking a 6.5 percent pay raise. School district teacher pay currently averages $75,000, according to state figures. The district has offered a 6 percent hike with back pay.

A statement from the office of Mayor Eric Garcetti, who attended a teachers’ rally earlier this week and has voiced strong support for their cause, said early Thursday afternoon that the bargaining teams “have returned to the table and negotiations have begun.”

Garcetti, serving as a mediator in the renewed talks, met earlier in the day with Caputo-Pearl and Beutner at City Hall, his office said. It was not clear whether the mayor spoke with the two together or individually.

Union leaders said Garcetti had met with both parties on Wednesday, and that California’s top education official, state Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond, was also in contact with each side and had offered his support in efforts to reach a settlement.

Thurmond could play a key role in helping the district secure extra funds it may need to close a deal with the teachers.

Negotiators for the district and the union last met face-to-face last Friday, when union leaders rejected the district’s latest contract offer. The union disputes Beutner’s assertions that the district lacks sufficient resources to accept teachers’ demands.

Caputo-Pearl said on Wednesday that the union was “engaged” with Thurmond and California Governor Gavin Newsom to “try to push on the state as well for additional funding.”

“The money’s there. There’s no doubt about it. California is the richest state in the country,” he told reporters on Wednesday. “The money is there for kids.”

The teachers, who have been without a contract for nearly a year, walked off the job on Monday. District officials have kept all 1,200 schools open on a limited basis with a skeleton staff of administrators and substitute teachers, but attendance has been running at roughly a third of normal.

Thousands of striking teachers fanned out across the sprawling school district for a series of rallies and picketing on Thursday, braving a fourth day of showers that did little to dampen their spirits.

“It’s important that we show the example of what we can do and the power that we have as the people,” high school music teacher Justin Polk said at the news conference alongside Caputo-Pearl. “Our strength comes in numbers.”

Los Angeles’ walkout follows a wave of teacher strikes last year across the United States over pay and school funding, including work stoppages in West Virginia, Kentucky, Oklahoma and Arizona.

In Denver, teachers could vote to strike by Saturday if no deal on a new contract is reached by then.

Beutner, a former publisher and investment banker, said the district had proposed staff increases that would cost $130 million a year – more than county officials have said is available – while the union’s demands would cost $800 million.

LONDON (Reuters) – Britain’s last-minute scramble to shape its exit from the EU, its biggest policy upheaval in half a century, hit the rocks on Thursday as Prime Minister Theresa May and opposition Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn dug in their heels for competing visions.

After May’s two-year attempt to forge an amicable divorce with an independent trade policy was crushed by parliament in the biggest defeat for a British leader in modern history, May asked party leaders to forget self-interest to find a solution.

Yet there was little sign on Thursday that either of the two major parties — which together hold 88 percent of the 650 seats in parliament — were prepared to compromise on key demands.

Corbyn said May had sent Britain hurtling towards the cliff edge of a sudden exit on March 29 with no transition period, and urged her to ditch her “red lines”. But he repeated his own condition for talks: a pledge to block a no-deal Brexit.

“The government confirmed that she would not take ‘no-deal’ off the table,” Corbyn said in a speech in Hastings, scene of a battle in 1066 that ushered in the Norman conquest of England.

“So I say to the prime minister again: I am quite happy to talk, but the starting point for any talks about Brexit must be that the threat of a disastrous no-deal outcome is ruled out.”

But the further May moves towards softening Brexit, the more she alienates dedicated Brexit supporters in her own Conservative party who think the threat of a no-deal exit is a crucial bargaining chip and should anyway not be feared.

May’s spokeswoman said the prime minister had held “constructive” talks on Thursday with lawmakers, including some from Labour, to explore ways of winning support for her deal.

If she fails to forge consensus, the world’s fifth-largest economy will drop out of the European Union on March 29 without a deal or will be forced to delay Brexit, possibly holding a national election or even another referendum.

Corbyn said that, under certain conditions, he would look at options including another referendum — a remark that increased expectations in financial markets that the political chaos would ultimately delay or even stop Brexit.

But a second referendum would take a year to organise, according to official government guidance shown to lawmakers on Wednesday, a source in May’s office said.

DEAL BY PARLIAMENT?

Corbyn wants May to call another election, something she has refused, having lost her parliamentary majority in a snap poll in 2017 that left her reliant on the support of a small Northern Irish pro-Brexit party.

She has also repeatedly said another referendum would corrode faith in democracy among the 17.4 million people who voted to leave the EU in 2016. Her spokesman said Britain had not raised the idea of delaying Britain’s exit with the EU.

As the United Kingdom tumbles towards its biggest political and economic shift since World War Two, other members of the European Union have offered to talk.

“We will do everything we can so that Britain exits with, and not without, an agreement,” German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas told Berlin’s lower house of parliament.

The EU’s chief negotiator, Michel Barnier said the bloc was open to the possibility of a “more ambitious” Brexit deal than May’s rejected agreement, which he said could not be improved on under the principles she had originally set out.

But they can do little until London decides what it wants.

Ever since the UK voted by 52-48 percent to leave the EU in June 2016, British politicians have failed to find agreement on how or even whether to leave the EU. If there is a solution to the riddle, it may be for parliament’s backbenchers to find it.

May will on Monday put forward a motion in parliament on her proposed next steps. Over the following week, lawmakers will be able to propose alternatives.

On Jan. 29, they will debate these plans, and voting on them should indicate whether any of them could get majority support.

If a way forward emerges, May could then go back to the EU and seek changes to her deal. Parliament would still need to vote on any new agreement, and it is not clear when that might happen.

Labour says it would back a deal with a permanent customs union with the EU — which would resolve the intractable problem of managing the land border between Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic — as well as a close relationship with its single market and greater protections for workers and consumers.

Most Conservative lawmakers reject a customs union because it would prevent Britain having an independent trade policy — one of their main demands.

Without any deal, trade with the EU would default to basic World Trade Organization rules — a worrying prospect for manufacturers dependent on smooth, uncomplicated supply lines.

Company chiefs are aghast at the political crisis over Brexit and say it has already damaged Britain’s reputation as Europe’s pre-eminent destination for foreign investment.

From Channel Tunnel operator Eurotunnel to Scottish whisky distillers, firms have called for urgent and decisive government action and warned of the consequences of a no-deal Brexit.

“If anybody believes that you can just go ahead without some sort of an agreement here, I think that that is reckless,” said John Bason, finance chief of Associated British Foods (ABF.L), a food and retail group with annual sales of over $20 billion.

CHICAGO (Reuters) – A judge on Thursday found three Chicago policemen not guilty of conspiring to protect white fellow police officer Jason Van Dyke after he fatally shot a black teenager in 2014.

A jury convicted Van Dyke in October of second-degree murder and 16 counts of aggravated battery in the shooting of Laquan McDonald, 17.

Judge Domenica Stephenson of the Illinois Circuit Court of Cook County also found David March, Joseph Walsh and Thomas Gaffney not guilty of official misconduct and obstruction of justice. The trial began on Nov. 27.

Walsh and March, who was a detective, are no longer with the police force. Gaffney was suspended without pay.

Prosecutor Patricia Brown Holmes said Van Dyke’s colleagues offered accounts of the shooting that conflicted with video footage to shield Van Dyke from prosecution. Defense attorneys argued that the prosecution’s case lacked evidence.

NEW YORK (Reuters) – The U.S. government may have separated “thousands” more immigrant children from their parents than previously known but inadequate record-keeping means the exact number is still unclear, an internal watchdog said on Thursday.

The Office of Inspector General at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) said the agency had identified many more children in addition to the 2,737 included as part of a class action lawsuit challenging family separations brought by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) last year.

The administration of President Donald Trump implemented a ‘zero tolerance’ policy to criminally prosecute and jail all illegal border crossers even those traveling with their children, leading to a wave of separations last year. The policy sparked outrage when it became public, and the backlash led Trump to sign an executive order reversing course on June 20, 2018.

But the auditor said in a report that prior to the officially announced ‘zero tolerance’ policy, the government began ramping up separations in 2017 for other reasons related to a child’s safety and well-being, including separating parents with criminal records or lack of proper documents.

The report also said more than 100 minors, including more than two dozen under five years old, were separated after the President’s executive order.

Katie Waldman, a spokeswoman for U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) said the practice of separating apprehended minors from adults to protect the interests of the children has been standard practice “for more than a decade.”

Reuters reported in June that from October 2016 through February 2018, before the official ‘zero tolerance’ policy was in place, nearly 1,800 immigrant families were separated at the U.S.-Mexico border.

These separations, though, were only tracked informally, making it impossible for the auditor to know the exact number overall.

The Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR), which is run by HHS and is responsible for the care of immigrant children, initially recorded separated minors in an Excel spreadsheet and later a database program. “However, use of these tools was not formalized in procedures, and access was limited,” the auditor said.

ORR said in an statement that the agency “has only limited resources,” and that counting prior DHS separations would take away from its main focus of caring for children in government custody. It said it has modified its case management process to interview children at intake and flag cases where there are signs of separation.

The government was ordered to reunite the more than 2,700 families covered by the ACLU lawsuit and report back about the progress of those reunifications regularly to a federal district court in California, including the status of around 400 parents that were deported without their children.

But little is known about the fate of the potentially thousands of children who were released but not covered by the class action, the auditor said. Legally the length of time immigrant children can be held in detention is limited and the government is charged with finding adequate sponsors or care for children who cross the border alone or are separated.

“ORR was unable to provide a more precise estimate or specific information about these children’s placements,” for example if they were placed with relatives or in foster care.

Lee Gelernt, the lead attorney in the ACLU case said in a statement: “We will be back in court over this latest revelation.”

Congressional Democrats said they have already started investigating the issue and plan to hold oversight hearings.

SEPARATIONS CONTINUE

Separations have also continued since Trump’s June executive order ending ‘zero tolerance.’ At least 118 children were separated between July 1 and Nov. 7, 2018, 82 of them were under the age of 13 and 27 of them under the age of 5, according to the report.

Of those, 65 were separated because the parents had a criminal history but in some cases the agency did not provide the details of that history. Other reasons cited included a parent’s gang affiliation, illness or hospitalization or an adult claiming to be a legal guardian of a child without proof.

Anthony Enriquez, director of the unaccompanied minors program at Catholic Charities in New York, said his agency is representing dozens of children who were separated from their parents after June last year.

He said there seems to be no standard for information sharing between the agencies, even months after the government was ordered to reunite many of the families by a court.

“These children are constantly asking, ‘Where is my parent?’,” he said.

The auditor raised concerns that the government is still not adequately counting separation cases.

“It is not yet clear whether recent changes to ORR’s systems and processes are sufficient to ensure consistent and accurate data about separated children,” the report said.

LONDON (Reuters) – Queen Elizabeth’s husband, Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh, 97, escaped uninjured from a car crash while driving on Thursday near the Sandringham estate in eastern England, Buckingham Palace said.

Police said two people in a car that collided with the prince’s had been treated for minor injuries.

Pictures from the scene showed a Range Rover overturned on the side of the road. The accident occurred when Philip had been pulling out of a driveway onto a main road, the BBC reported. It quoted a witness as saying the Duke was very shaken.

“The Duke of Edinburgh was involved in a road traffic accident with another vehicle this afternoon,” the palace said in a statement. “The Duke was not injured. The accident took place close to the Sandringham Estate.”

A palace spokeswoman later confirmed Philip was at the wheel and that he was checked by a doctor afterwards. He did not go to hospital and was now back at Sandringham, the private country residence owned by Queen Elizabeth in Norfolk, in the east of England.

Local police said they were called to the scene around 1500 GMT following reports of a collision involving two cars.

Philip married Elizabeth in 1947 and has been by his wife’s side throughout her long reign.

Since retiring from official solo duties in 2017, he has appeared in public alongside the Queen and other members of the royal family at events and church services. He had successful hip replacement surgery last year.

The former naval officer did not accompany the Queen to a church service on Christmas Day last month though a royal source said he was in good health.

One of the last acts of NASA’s Cassini spacecraft before its death plunge into Saturn’s hydrogen and helium atmosphere was to coast between the planet and its rings and let them tug it around, essentially acting as a gravity probe.

Eric Betzig didn’t expect the experiment to work.

An international team of scientists is challenging our understanding of a part of Earth’s history by looking at the Moon, the most complete and accessible chronicle of the asteroid collisions that carved our solar system.

LONDON (Reuters) – Former British Prime Minister Gordon Brown said on Thursday the government should delay the formal process of leaving the European Union by a year to hold citizens’ assemblies to break the political impasse over Brexit.

With the clock ticking down to March 29, the date set in law for Brexit, the United Kingdom is now in the deepest political crisis in half a century as it grapples with how, or even whether, to exit the European project it joined in 1973.

Earlier this week, Prime Minister Theresa May’s two-year attempt to forge an amicable divorce with an independent trade policy was crushed by parliament in the biggest defeat for a British leader in modern history.

Brown, Labour prime minister from 2007 to 2010, said there was rising public anger over what people perceive as an out-of-touch elite and a paralysed parliament.

“It is the lethal combination of a deadlocked parliament, an ever-more divided country and the mounting distrust between parliament and people that makes me fear for our cohesion,” he said in a speech in Edinburgh.

“If parliament on its own cannot solve the problems it has created and if we are in uncharted waters – like a boat at sea, with no compass, no map and no life jackets – it is time to think afresh.”

Citizens’ assemblies, which have been deployed around the world, see members of the public confront social or political challenges politicians have been unable to resolve.

Facilitated by experts, they are aimed at removing the conflicts of interest and loyalties that can hamper politicians in reaching a conclusion.

Brown said they have been used in Canada, the United States Ireland to tackle thorny political topics such as abortion legislation.

He said that over the past two centuries, parliament had eventually been able to resolve other political crises by compromise and reform. But the current situation was unique because parliament seemed incapable of breaking the deadlock.

“Precisely because parliament has reached an impasse, citizens’ assemblies offer a fresh opportunity for parliament to hear how representative groups of people across all regions and nations think unity can be restored,” he said.