Midday Roundup: U.S. delivers justice for Iraqis slain by Blackwater guards

Long time coming. A federal jury in Washington on Wednesday convicted four former Blackwater security guards of slaughtering innocent Iraqis in 2007. The State Department had hired the guards to protect American diplomats. On Sept. 16, 2007, while guarding a convoy, the men opened fire on a crowded square in Baghdad, killing 14 Iraqis and wounding 17 others. They claimed it was self-defense, but prosecutors said they found no evidence of incoming gunfire and the attack was unprovoked. The jury agreed and found one of the guards, Nicholas Slatten, guilty of first-degree murder. The other three were convicted on multiple charges of manslaughter. The judge ordered them all to jail immediately.

On guard. A 23-year-old man with mental problems climbed the White House fence last night. The man’s family told a local news station he did not mean the president harm. Unlike Omar Gonzalez, the man who earlier this month jumped the White House fence and infiltrated the building, Dominic Adesanya was stopped by Secret Service dogs almost as soon as he set foot on the lawn. He was the seventh person to breach the White House fence this year. Maybe it’s time for a taller fence?

Smoke out. Starting next year, employees of tobacco giant Reynolds American Inc. will no longer be allowed to smoke at their desks or in meetings like it’s the 1960s. The company will limit indoor smoking to designated areas to better accommodate non-smokers. “We’re just better aligning our tobacco use policies with the realities of what you’re seeing in society today,” company spokesman David Howard said. The percentage of Reynolds employees who smoke is similar to the overall smoking rate in the United States, according to the company. That is about 18 percent of adults, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Reynolds still will allow employees to use smokeless products, such as chewing tobacco and e-cigarettes, whenever and wherever they want.

Easy A. An investigation at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill has uncovered an elaborate sham to make it look like student athletes were, well, students. University employees enrolled athletes, most of them football or basketball players, in “classes” that never met and had no professor. The athletes would hand in one research paper that a secretary would grade, usually automatically assigning an A or a B, according to a report by former federal prosecutor Kenneth Wainstein. “By the mid-2000s, these classes had become a primary—if not the primary—way that struggling athletes kept themselves from having eligibility problems,” the report said. The scandal spans about two decades and included about 3,100 students, about half of whom were athletes. The NCAA has not yet said how it will use the information from the report.