Justice Department to review Uvalde response; Foo Fighters plan tribute to Taylor Hawkins | Hot off the Wire podcast

The Justice Department has named a team of nine people, including an FBI official and former police chiefs, to aid in a review of the law enforcement response to the deadly Uvalde, Texas, elementary school shooting.

Attorney General Merrick Garland announced the team during a meeting in his office in Washington on Wednesday. The critical incident review is being led by the Justice Department’s Office of Community Oriented Policing Services.

The Justice Department says the review will include an examination of police policies, training and communication, along with the deployment of officers and tactics. The school shooting left 19 children and two teachers dead. Parents outside begged police to rush in.

An 11-year-old girl who survived the mass shooting has told members of Congress how she covered herself in her dead classmate’s blood and played dead to avoid being shot. Miah Cerrillo, a fourth-grader at Robb Elementary School, told lawmakers in a pre-recorded video Wednesday that she watched a teacher get shot in the head before looking for a place to hide.

Her testimony to a House Oversight Committee was the second day of testimony from families of the victims and survivors of mass shootings in Buffalo, New York, and Uvalde.

A man carrying a gun, a knife and zip ties was arrested Wednesday near Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s house in Maryland after threatening to kill the justice. Twenty-six year-old Nicholas John Roske of Simi Valley, California was identified in a criminal complaint charging him with the attempted murder of a Supreme Court justice.

An Arizona man convicted in the 1984 killing of an 8-year-old girl was put to death in the state’s second execution since officials started carrying out the death penalty this year after a nearly eight-year hiatus. Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich says Frank Atwood died Wednesday by lethal injection for killing Vicki Lynne Hoskinson, whose body was found in the desert.

Foo Fighters will honor the rock band’s late drummer Taylor Hawkins with a pair of tribute concerts in September, with one in London and the other in Los Angeles.

The twin shows will take place Sept. 3 at London’s Wembley Stadium and Sept. 27 at The Kia Forum in Inglewood, California, featuring “his bandmates and his inspirations playing the songs that he fell in love with, and the ones he brought to life,” the band said in a statement.

Lineups for each show will be announced at a later date. Hawkins died March 25 during a South American tour with the rock band. He was 50.

A New York woman searching for her lost dog got a surprise when it was found by Oscar-winning actor Hilary Swank. While filming a movie in Albany, the actor reunited a lost pooch with distraught owner Chelsea Blackwell. 

British prosecutors say they have authorized police to charge former film producer Harvey Weinstein with two counts of indecent assault against a woman in London in 1996.

The Crown Prosecution Service said in a statement on Wednesday that “charges have been authorized” following a review of evidence gathered by London’s Metropolitan Police. After revelations about Weinstein emerged in 2017, British police said they were investigating multiple allegations of sexual assault against Weinstein over several decades.

Unlike many other countries, Britain does not have a statute of limitations for rape or sexual assault. Weinstein is serving a 23-year sentence for rape after his 2020 conviction in New York for offenses against two women.

The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development says Russia’s war in Ukraine and the energy and food crises it worsened will severely drag down global economic growth and push up inflation this year.

The Paris-based group on Wednesday said China’s “zero-COVID” policy that has scrambled manufacturing supply chains also is weighing on a world economy that was starting to rebound from the COVID-19 pandemic.

The OECD expects the global economy to expand 3% in 2022, down from the 4.5% it predicted in December. Inflation is forecast at nearly 9% for the OECD’s 38 member countries, nearly double the previous estimate.

It’s the inflation you’re not supposed to see. From toilet paper to yogurt to corn chips, manufacturers are quietly shrinking package sizes without lowering prices. It’s dubbed “shrinkflation,” and it’s accelerating worldwide.

In the U.S., a small box of Kleenex now has 60 tissues; a few months ago, it had 65. In the U.K., Nestle slimmed down coffee tins from 100 grams to 90 grams. Shrinkflation isn’t new, experts say. But it proliferates in times of high inflation as companies grapple with rising costs for ingredients, packaging, labor and transportation. 

—The Associated Press