The U.S. Border Patrol has been criticized by immigrant advocates for showing children how to shoot humanlike targets with paintball guns. Photos taken last summer at a law enforcement expo in San Ysidro, California, located just north of the border with Mexico, showed Border Patrol agents demonstrating the use of non-lethal force against a “migrant effigy.” Pedro Ríos, chair of the San Diego Immigrant Rights Consortium, called the event insensitive and inappropriate.   read more

A Texas man who killed a law enforcement officer during a search of his home will not be charged with murder, a grand jury decided. The December raid began in the early morning hours without warning, which startled Henry Magee. Thinking someone was breaking into his home, Magee grabbed one of his guns and opened fire. “This was a terrible tragedy that a deputy sheriff was killed, but Hank Magee believed that he and his pregnant girlfriend were being robbed,” Magee's counsel told AP.   read more

The Humane Society, which was the leading proponent of Proposition 2 in 2008, says the California demands amount to leaving the birds enough space to reduce the incidence of salmonella, and make it easier to keep the cages clean of excrement, flies, rats and disease. The lawsuit claims a dual threat to Missouri. Farmers can either “incur massive capital improvement costs to build larger habitats” or walk away from California.   read more

The manufacturer of a blood-thinning drug tried to hide results of an internal study that the manufacturer feared would hurt sales of the widely-advertised medication, according to recently-unsealed court documents. Boehringer Ingelheim, manufacturer of Pradaxa, is being sued by patients and their families, charging it failed to properly warn users about possible dangers of the drug. More than 1,000 of those using Pradaxa have died from bleeding.   read more

Nearly a dozen shipments of oil coming out of North Dakota were mislabeled by oil producers, potentially creating hazardous risks, federal regulators have found. The Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration, which oversees the transportation of petroleum, said samples taken from 11 out of 18 truck shipments en route to rail loading stations were misclassified. The companies responsible for the errors were Hess Corp., Whiting Oil and Gas Corp., and Marathon Oil Co.   read more

Physicians for Integrity in Medical Research has sued the FDA over the heart medication roflumilast, claiming it should be pulled off the market. Intended to treat chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), the Forest Laboratories product does more harm than good, according to the plaintiff. The group says roflumilast (trade name Daliresp) “does not work as stated.” Side effects of roflumilast include an increase in suicide, cancer and acute pancreatitis, the doctors say.   read more

Police cannot punish drivers for flashing their headlights to warn others of speed traps, a federal judge has ruled in a case involving the First Amendment. The ruling arose after police in Ellisville, Missouri, ticketed Michael Elli for using his headlights to inform motorists that officers were lying in wait to ticket those exceeding the speed limit. The ACLU, which sued on behalf of Elli and other drivers, argued that the plaintiffs’ actions constituted a form of free speech.   read more

The latest news on suicides in the U.S. Army was both promising and discouraging, as the number of suicides among active-duty personnel went down, but those involving National Guard and Army Reserves went up. Overall, the total number of Army suicides declined from 325 in 2012 to 301 in 2013, representing the first reduction in more than a decade. But the good news was diminished by the fact that the number of suicides in the Guard and Reserves increased from 140 in 2012 to 151 in 2013.   read more

The release of this information “creates some good headlines for tech companies on the defense in the wake of the NSA leaks,” wrote the Post's Andrea Peterson. “But that's all transparency reports produced by tech companies are about: good PR. They don't represent a meaningful way to measure the true scope of governments' access to private data.” “Congress should require the government to publish basic information about the full extent of its surveillance,” said ACLU's Alex Abdo.   read more

The death of actor Philip Seymour Hoffman has elevated the issue of heroin addiction and its fatal consequences in the United States, where use of the narcotic has increased significantly in recent years. Nationally, almost 670,000 Americans over the age of 12 used heroin in 2012—an increase of nearly 300,000 people, compared to the number of users in 2007.   read more

Dissatisfied with President Barack Obama’s reforms for the NSA and Congress’ lack of progress on the same front, state lawmakers across the country are introducing legislation to limit the spy agency’s snooping on Americans. To date, a dozen states ranging from Alaska to Mississippi are considering bills to limit their state’s involvement with NSA surveillance programs.   read more

Pregnant women living near natural gas wells face a higher risk of giving birth to children with neurological and heart defects, a new study shows. Specifically, babies born to mothers in areas with many wells (more than 125 per mile) were more than twice as likely to have spinal or brain defects—and had a 38% greater risk of congenital heart defects—than those living with no wells within 10 miles. Both types of birth defects are considered fairly rare.   read more

HealthCare.gov may be working better, but it still has some serious problems that are causing headaches for tens of thousands of Americans who tried to sign up for insurance. At least 22,000 individuals experienced errors while choosing a health plan, and these Americans contend they were charged too much for their insurance, were given the wrong coverage, or were denied coverage altogether.   read more

Congressional aides in the U.S. House are supposed to wait at least one year after quitting their jobs to become lobbyists or accept other private sector jobs that utilize their Capitol Hill experience. But many former staffers avoid this restriction by exploiting loopholes in federal rules. About 1,650 congressional aides have become lobbyists within a year of leaving Capitol Hill. At least half of them were able to do so without any restrictions.   read more

How successful you think Obamacare is might depend on the state in which you live. In states controlled by Democrats, more than twice the percentage of eligible people are enrolled in Affordable Care Act (ACA) insurance programs than in states controlled by Republicans, according to a Kaiser Family Foundation study reported in the National Journal.   read more

Some environmental activists question the report’s validity, saying that the contractor hired to prepare an earlier draft of it has ties to TransCanada, the company hoping to build the pipeline. The State Department’s inspector general investigated ERM Group’s financial links to TransCanada, according to The Washington Post. But the IG refused to release its findings on that matter.   read more