NATION IN BRIEF : MISSOURI : Court Rules Against Burning of Flag

A federal appeals court in St. Louis refused to strike down a Minnesota conviction stemming from the burning of an American flag. A panel of the U.S. 8th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled 2 to 1 that the case differed from one in which the Supreme Court ruled that flag-burning is protected free speech. The court ordered William Charles Cary Jr. to serve his three-month prison sentence for “knowingly casting contempt upon a flag of the United States by publicly burning it in violation of federal statutes.” Cary’s lighting of a flag in the midst of a violent demonstration and tossing it into a building warranted his conviction, the court said.