No charges will be filed against two Minneapolis police officers who fatally shot an armed Thurman Blevins during a foot chase last month in a residential neighborhood, Hennepin County Attorney Mike Freeman announced Monday.

Witness testimony, body camera video and forensic testing all proved that Blevins had a 9-millimeter semi-automatic handgun in his hand and refused multiple commands to drop the gun during the foot chase that ended in his death on June 23, Freeman said in a statement.

"When Mr. Blevins fled from the officers with a loaded handgun, refused to follow their commands for him to stop and show his hands and then took the gun out of his pocket and turned toward the officers, Mr. Blevins represented a danger to the lives of Officer Schmidt and Officer Kelly," the statement quoted Freeman as saying. "Their decision to use deadly force against Mr. Blevins under those circumstances was authorized [under the law]."

The officers fired 14 shots from their weapons, four of which struck Blevins, Freeman said.

Congressman Rick Nolan’s former legislative director has been accused of sexual harassment — and in one case, repeated groping — by several women who used to work for the Democratic representative of Minnesota’s 8th Congressional District.

Former staffers say that in the summer of 2015, Nolan and his two most senior aides allowed Jim Swiderski to resign his post and tell colleagues he was looking for new opportunities rather than make him face formal disciplinary consequences after several female staffers raised harassment allegations. Months later, Swiderski was hired to do work for Nolan’s 2016 re-election campaign. He was only let go after a group of Nolan aides put pressure on the congressman to remove him.

MinnPost spoke to eight former employees of Nolan’s congressional office and of his campaigns, a group that included three women with specific harassment allegations, and five other staffers who corroborated details about Swiderski and provided information about the work environments in the congressman’s office and campaign. Most of these former Nolan employees remain active in Minnesota Democratic politics and requested anonymity to speak candidly without fear of retribution.

These staffers remain disturbed over the way Swiderski’s behavior was handled by Nolan and his most trusted lieutenants, particularly chief of staff Jodie Torkelson and district director Jeff Anderson.

A major U.S. defense contractor quietly detained dozens of immigrant children inside a vacant Phoenix office building with dark windows, no kitchen and only a few toilets during three weeks of the Trump administration’s family separation effort, Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting has learned.

Videos shot by an alarmed neighbor show children dressed in sweatsuits being led – one so young she was carried – into the 3,200-square-foot building in early June. The building is not licensed by Arizona to hold children, and the contractor, MVM Inc., has claimed publicly that it does not operate “shelters or any other type of housing” for children.

Defending the administration’s policy to separate families at the border in a May interview with NPR, White House chief of staff John Kelly promised: “The children will be taken care of – put into foster care or whatever.”

Whether or not these children were taken from their parents, that “whatever” for them was the vacant building tucked away in a midtown Phoenix neighborhood. It is not listed among shelters operating through the federal Office of Refugee Resettlement or on the state child care licensing website.

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Comedian Andy Dick has been charged with groping a woman on a Los Angeles street earlier this year.

City Attorney’s spokesman Frank Mateljan, says misdemeanor sexual battery and battery charges were filed Wednesday. He is scheduled to be arraigned on July 18.

Mateljan says a woman reported that Dick groped her on April 5.

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He has been arrested and sued over several groping accusations, including a 2010 incident involving a bouncer and patron at a West Virginia bar. Criminal charges were dismissed after Dick completed a pretrial diversion program.

More than 60 percent of America’s middle and high school students rely on alt-right internet sites as credible sources for their research papers. The students are using alt-right sites to write papers on topics that range from free speech and the Second Amendment to citizenship, immigration and the Holocaust.

These were among the key findings of a preliminary survey of 200 teachers I conducted recently to develop a snapshot of how common it was for middle and high school students to turn to alt-right websites.

As a researcher who specializes in teaching what is known as “hard histories,” including slavery, the Holocaust and other genocides, this finding is of concern, particularly as the nation approaches the one-year anniversary of the tragedy in Charlottesville, Virginia.

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Instead of ignoring these sites, I’d suggest teachers might do best to teach students how to critically examine the sites. In order to do that, however, teachers must know what is out there. While this is not an exhaustive list, the following six alt-right websites were most commonly cited by teachers as those that students use for their papers. They are: National Policy Institute, Radix Journal, American Renaissance, Taki’s Magazine and Voat.