Protests, rallies set after man’s death

BALTIMORE — Amid tears and cries for justice, demonstrators poured into the streets of Baltimore carrying signs emblazoned with the name of a man who died from a spinal injury he suffered while in police custody. Tuesday’s demonstration marked the beginning of a week of protests and rallies planned across the city.

The Justice Department said earlier in the day that it has opened a civil rights investigation into the death of Freddie Gray, a 25-year-old black man who suffered a fatal spinal-cord injury under mysterious circumstances after he was handcuffed and put in the back of a police van.

At the site of Gray’s arrest, more than a thousand demonstrators gathered to remember Gray, who friends and relatives say was kind, funny and generous, and call for police reform.

USDA starts work on bird flu vaccine

MINNEAPOLIS — The U.S. Department of Agriculture is working on a potential vaccine in response to the current outbreak of a deadly strain of bird flu that has cost turkey and chicken producers more than 6.7 million birds since early March.

A pure “seed strain” would target the H5N2 virus and some other highly pathogenic viruses in the H5 family that have been detected in other parts of North America. If the USDA decides the vaccine is necessary, it will provide the seed strain to private drug manufacturers.

Experts say it isn’t clear how much a vaccine would add to the cost of producing birds.

Death penalty jury sees bomb suspect

BOSTON — As jurors looked at a photograph of Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev giving the finger to a security camera in his jail cell, a federal prosecutor described it as a defiant act by an unrepentant man who didn’t care that he had killed four people, including an 8-year-old boy and a police officer.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Nadine Pellegrini began laying out the government’s case for executing Tsarnaev, and showed the jury large, vibrant pictures of the people killed in the bombing and its aftermath. Then she revealed the photo of Tsarnaev, taken three months later in his holding cell at the federal courthouse.

“This is Dzhokhar Tsarnaev — unconcerned, unrepentant and unchanged,” Pellegrini on Tuesday told the jurors who will decide whether the 21-year-old former college student should be executed.

Judge reconsiders cheating penalties

ATLANTA — The three former educators given seven-year prison terms in Atlanta’s landmark test-cheating case are now likely to get lighter sentences because the judge has reconsidered the penalty he imposed and plans to do it over.

Judge Jerry Baxter, who oversaw the months-long cheating trial, has thought about those sentences and believes they may have been too harsh, according to text messages and e-mails his office sent to defense lawyers for some of those convicted.

He gave Tamara Cotman, Michael Pitts and Sharon Davis-Williams seven years in prison and 13 years probation, far more than prosecutors requested, on April 14. The former regional directors in the school system were convicted under Georgia’s racketeering law, for cheating on standardized tests.

From combined wire sources