News on the go: Aug. 29, 2013

Carrie Blazina

Tens of thousands of Americans marched to the National Mall in Washington on Wednesday to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech. President Barack Obama urged each marcher to stand for economic justice and racial harmony. “The arc of the moral universe may bend toward justice, but it doesn’t bend on its own,” Obama said.

A military jury Wednesday sentenced Maj. Nidal Hasan to death for the Fort Hood shooting deaths of 13 people in 2009. Hasan had represented himself in the trial and said he was a martyr; his justification for the shooting was that he was saving Islamic insurgents abroad from American aggression. Some survivors and family members of the dead had testified they did not feel Hasan deserved death because by arguing he was a martyr, giving him death was fulfilling what he wanted.

Fast-food workers across the country are set to stage walkouts Thursday as part of an effort to get chains such as McDonald’s, Wendy’s and Taco Bell to raise workers’ pay. Workers say they want $15 an hour, which is twice the minimum wage and would give them $31,000 a year.

An appeals court sided Wednesday with the Akron Children’s Hospital in a suit it brought against an Amish family whose 10-year-old daughter had been undergoing chemotherapy treatment for leukemia. They stopped her treatment in June because of its side effects, but a judge said a lower court must reconsider appointing a guardian to make her medical decisions.

Contact Carrie Blazina at [email protected].