Allison Orr Larsen found the court had cited facts contained in amicus briefs 124 times from 2008 to 2013. In 61% of the cases, the justices did not bother to cite the original source of a “fact” included in an amicus brief. “This practice indicates that the Justices treat amici as experts, not as research tools,” wrote Larsen. Some of these “factual assertions in recent amicus briefs would not pass muster in a high school research paper,” Adam Liptak wrote.   read more

Schneider, a national trucking company, was sued by hundreds of its employees for labor violations, including not paying overtime even after some workers clocked 70 hours in a week. The business has agreed to pay $21 million to settle the matter. Fedex was sued in California because its drivers are classified as independent contractors to avoid paying overtime. The company lost its case, but is now appealing the ruling.   read more

Aminta Cifuentes fled Guatemala in 2005 with her two children after enduring abuse from her husband including weekly beatings, rape and being doused with burning paint thinner. She sought help from Guatemalan police, but was told they wouldn’t intervene in a domestic dispute. For now, the ruling applies only to women from Guatemala and those applying for asylum will have to meet strict requirements to get it.   read more

The number of households surviving on $2 per person a day went from 636,000 in 1996 (the year Congress and President Bill Clinton reformed federal welfare programs) to 1.65 million by 2011, an increase of 159%. Those households contain more than 3.5 million children. The authors then factored in those receiving food stamps, tax credits and housing subsidies, and calculated that this assistance still wasn’t enough to keep almost 1.2 million children out of extreme poverty.   read more

Congress gave the secretary of defense authority to conceal the photos for three years if their publication was deemed a threat to American soldiers’ lives. Robert Gates did just that in 2009. In 2012, then-Defense Secretary Leon Panetta asked for another three-year authorization to withhold the photos. Hellerstein ruled this week that circumstances have changed and the photos can now be released without endangering U.S. military personnel.   read more

tThe Internet is only helping polarize the United States even further, as Americans interact mostly with those who share their beliefs, much as television viewers tend to watch cable news channels that reinforce their principles. With Facebook, the researchers found that users were nearly twice as likely to join a discussion if their friends had the same viewpoints.   read more

In 1997, white student enrollment was 63.4% in schools, or 29.2 million kids, according to the Pew Research Center. Now, that total is expected to fall to 49.7%, with 24.9 million white students in classrooms. The change has been the result of a 15% decline in white student enrollment since 1997. Pew noted that most of the growth in Hispanic and Asian children has come from U.S.-born kids.   read more

The Department of Defense’s 1033 program—which funnels all kinds of military surplus goods to police—has a provision that clearly says that any participating law enforcement agency must use its equipment within one year of receiving it. If they don’t, they have to give it up.   read more

Beginning in the mid-1970s, large corporations began organizing into well-funded lobbying groups like the Business Roundtable and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. These groups, which had leaned Republican, realized that it would be more effective to influence members of Congress from both parties.   read more

For many groups of workers, the drop is significantly worse. Restaurant cooks, for instance, have experienced an 8.3% fall. For food preparation workers, it’s been 6.3%; for personal care aides, 6.3%; and for maids and housekeepers, 5.8%. The wage decline is bad news for the economy, considering that 41% of the job growth in the country since last year has been in low-wage industries.   read more

In Northern Iraq, where the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria has threatened Kurdish hopes of autonomy, the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) has joined the American-backed effort against the Muslim militants. The State Department has listed the PKK as a terrorist operation since 1997.   read more

In 75 of the biggest cities in the country 60% or more of the police officers live outside the city in which they work. Overall, 49% of black officers, 47% of Hispanic officers and only 35% of white officers live and work in the same city.   read more

But many of the Americans with a database entry are in the system only because they were arrested, even though they were never charged or convicted of a crime. Records are often not updated to reflect that an individual was found not guilty or guilty of a minor offense, such as trespassing while exercising free speech rights during a demonstration.   read more

Although the population of Ferguson is 67% African-American, the mayor is a white Republican and five of the six members of the city council are white, as are 50 of Ferguson’s 53 police officers. One of the main reasons for this disparity is that the city holds its local elections separate from state and federal balloting. Residents vote for governor or president in even-numbered years, but Ferguson residents go to the polls to elect the mayor and city council in April of odd-numbered years.   read more

The plaintiffs claim the trouble started in April 2009, when then-White House counsel Gregory Craig informed Executive Branch operations that any FOIA requests that might have “White House equities” should go through his office. The term has never been defined, but some agencies are taking it to mean any document that mentions the White House.   read more

The Public Integrity Unit at the time was focused on one of Perry’s pet projects, the Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas. One of its executives, Jerry Cobbs, was indicted last December after an $11 million grant went through the agency without proper review, according to The Dallas Morning News. The money went to Peloton Therapeutics, one of whose investors had given $440,000 to the campaigns of Perry and Lt. Governor David Dewhurst.   read more