Three new police officers were fired for making comments on a group chat about using Miami’s primarily black neighborhoods for target practice, a newspaper reported Friday.

Officers Kevin Bergnes, Miguel Valdes and Bruce Alcin were let go on Dec. 23, after an internal affairs investigation concluded that they violated department policies, said the Miami Herald (http://hrld.us/2hxDZZp), citing documents it obtained.

The remarks angered local civil rights activists keeping tabs on a department that is currently scrutinized by the U.S. Department of Justice for a pattern of excessive force.

“It’s indicative of the casual conversations and comments that young and even more seasoned police officers are used to making without a lot of repercussions,” said Julia Dawson, an activist who has been part of law enforcement oversight panels in Miami.

As Kentuckians conjure up plans and predictions for the new year, Gov. Matt Bevin has already put his own stamp on 2017 by declaring it the "Year of the Bible" in Kentucky.

In a proclamation he signed this week, the governor promoted a Bible-reading marathon that will be held throughout the commonwealth for the second year in a row starting next month.

Proclamations don't carry the weight or force of the law behind them the way legislation does, said Amber Duke, communications director for the American Civil Liberties Union of Kentucky. But she still considers Bevin's new proclamation "disappointing."

The governor is "once again using his official position to promote his personal religious beliefs," Duke said. She suggested that the best way to respect Americans' right to religious freedom is for government officials to refrain from promoting specific religious books. "Here in Kentucky, (and) across this country, we’re free to practice religion - or not - without our government officials giving endorsements to some beliefs over other beliefs," Duke said.

"No fan of the Clintons am I, by a long shot. But I’m a New Yorker, Donald Trump is a New Yorker. And the New Yorkers I know, we’ve lived with this guy for 30 years. I’ve seen Donald Trump say things one day, and then I saw what he did the next. I’ve seen up close how he does business. Just like if you lived in a small town, you’d get to know the sheriff, the guy who runs the hardware store, the guy who runs the filling station — Trump comes from that era of guys you followed, guys you knew about every day: Trump, Giuliani, Al Sharpton, Curtis Sliwa. I’d see him at Studio 54, for fuck’s sake. I’m not saying I know the guy personally, not like I’d hug him, but I’m saying that as a New Yorker, we pretty much are neighbors. And my many years of living in his orbit have not left me with a favorable impression, let’s put it that way. There’s so many reasons to find the guy troubling. When Scott Baio’s the only guy you can find to show up at your convention, you’re in trouble."

"I think it’s going to be hard times. Is he gonna do anything near what he promised? Of course not. But he will be forced to do something, by the people around him. He will have to do something, and it will be extraordinarily ugly..."

"We are a violent nation, from the beginning. I’m not arguing for current gun policy, but I think it’s worth acknowledging that this is a country founded in violence, a country that has always worshipped outlaws, loners, cowboys, and people who got the things they got by the gun. We glorify it, we created an entertainment industry that does little but glorify solving complex problems with simple violence."

"But I think to mock constantly, as so much of the left has done — to demonize, to ridicule, to treat with abject contempt people who live in a very different America than they live in — is both ugly and counterproductive. There are a lot of people who are pissed off, they’re tired of being talked to like that. There are a lot of people in this world who, when an Applebee’s moves to their town, it’s a big deal — and I don’t mean that in a dismissive way. Where somebody coming to take your guns away is a big concern. Look, I don’t think racism can ever be forgiven. It’s a conversation-ender for me, for sure. But if you grew up isolated, no interaction or little interaction, the only interaction you’ve had has been negative, and you’re fearful of the Other, and somehow everything you read in the paper makes it seem like they’re getting all the breaks, especially when, in the news environment we live in now, it’s perfectly permissible to lie."

In a year-end interview with The Canadian Press, Trudeau was asked where he would draw a line in the sand between himself and Trump, who promises to be a less-than-ordinary president of the world's only superpower and Canada's most important trading partner.

"I do not want to dive into the hypothetical, but you're asking me, 'where is the line?' The line, for me, is that I will act in a way that ensures that Canadians do not suffer and have all the benefits and opportunities that I can possibly give them," he said.

Trudeau said his top responsibility is to serve the interests of the country that elected him. That means creating good jobs, fostering trade with the United States and settling differences with Canada's largest trading partner; but it goes beyond the economy.

"It is also in the interest of Canadians to have a more open, more tolerant, more secure world," he said.

Georgia led the nation this year in the number of inmates put to death, an anomaly that's due at least in part to executions in Texas dipping into single digits for the first time in 20 years.

With nine lethal injections in 2016, Georgia accounted for nearly half of the 20 executions nationwide. It was the most inmates the state has put to death in a calendar year since the U.S. Supreme Court allowed executions to resume 40 years ago. It was almost twice as many as the state's previous record of five, set in 1987 and matched last year.

Texas, meanwhile, executed seven inmates, the fewest the state has put to death since 1996, when three people were executed. Alabama had two executions, and Florida and Missouri had one apiece.

Executions and new death sentences have been on the decline in recent years for a variety of reasons, and that continued in 2016.

Follow the pills and you'll find the overdose deaths. The trail of painkillers leads to West Virginia's southern coalfields, to places like Kermit, population 392. There, out-of-state drug companies shipped nearly 9 million highly addictive — and potentially lethal — hydrocodone pills over two years to a single pharmacy in the Mingo County town.

Rural and poor, Mingo County has the fourth-highest prescription opioid death rate of any county in the United States.

The trail also weaves through Wyoming County, where shipments of OxyContin have doubled, and the county's overdose death rate leads the nation. One mom-and-pop pharmacy in Oceana received 600 times as many oxycodone pills as the Rite Aid drugstore just eight blocks away.

In six years, drug wholesalers showered the state with 780 million hydrocodone and oxycodone pills, while 1,728 West Virginians fatally overdosed on those two painkillers, a Sunday Gazette-Mail investigation found.

No, minority workers are not taking jobs away from white people.

Yet, that’s the conclusion some drew from a controversial report recently released by the Economic Cycle Research Institute. After a New York Times columnist wrote about the report this week — highlighting the disparity in recent job gains by race — readers have resolved whites were “left out” of the nation’s financial recovery and are victims of “economic disenfranchisement.”

But other economists argue that the analysis tells an incomplete story of what the economic recovery has meant for various demographic groups.

To start, the report asserts that of the more than 5 million jobs added since November 2007, the pre-recession employment peak, more than half went to Hispanics — a stunning proportion that accounts for four times their share of the labor force that year.