Rina Miller and Jack Lessenberry give us a round up of the week's top news stories each Saturday.
This was quite a week for Detroit!
Governor Rick Snyder appointed Kevyn Orr as the Emergency Manager of the City of Detroit on Thursday. Lessenberry says Orr is well prepared for the formidable task he's facing. Orr is an attorney who specializes in bankruptcy. Lessenberry says "he seems to know it is a tough task, but he has a winning attitude and impressed people favorably in his first press conference."
Earlier in the week ... sweeping guilty verdicts in the trial of former Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick and Bobby Ferguson. Lessenberry says in some sense it is actually not the political scandal in the city's history. He says "there was a huge mayoral scandal in the late 1930's - early 1940's that not only involved the mayor, it involved the top Wayne county prosecutor and that mayor went to jail as did a lot of other people."
And here's one that always seems to return: Michigan lawmakers are again considering mandatory drug testing for welfare applicants and recipients. Lessenberry says it's been tried elsewhere and in Michigan in 1999. He says not only does it not really have much effect, but "the court said it violated the constitutional protections against unreasonable search and seizure. This has also been a problem in Florida." He says the law is on the books in Oklahoma, but is pretty new there.
