Are you currently serving a long federal prison sentence for a non-violent low-level drug crime? Then Uncle Sam wants you—to apply for clemency. Deputy Attorney General James M. Cole said Thursday that he’s looking for defense lawyers to locate such prisoners, many of them convicted for offenses involving crack cocaine, and urge them to apply for clemency, according to The New York Times.   read more

Currently no national statistics on how many people are shot by police each year. In some areas, such as L.A., New York City, Philadelphia and Massachusetts, police shootings have increased. Whether those numbers can be extrapolated to a national trend is not known though. Police departments are not required to release data on how many civilians are shot by officers each year and many don’t. Some observers believe that there are more police shootings than there had been five or 10 years ago.   read more

Eric Lawson was one of many actors who played the Marlboro Man in advertisements that equated tough, rugged Americanism with smoking cigarettes. Lawson died recently of a smoking-related illness, just like three others who carried on the cowboy image that Marlboro used so effectively for decades to sell its deadly products. “He knew the cigarettes had a hold on him,” his wife, Susan Lawson, told the Associated Press. “He knew, yet he still couldn't stop.”   read more

Low-income families with less education are more prone to producing obese children who don’t exercise enough, unlike families with higher earnings and college education. A study out of Harvard found obesity among teenagers with college-educated parents started to decline about 10 years ago. But just the opposite happened for teens with parents who had only a high school diploma—obesity continued to climb.   read more

Students in Utah who rely on a school lunch program to feed themselves were humiliated in front of their classmates when an official ordered their meals taken away and thrown in the garbage because their parents purportedly owed the school money. The incident involved about 40 children at Uintah Elementary in Salt Lake City. “She took my lunch away and said, ‘Go get a milk,’" said fifth-grader Sophia Isom. “She said, ‘You don't have any money in your account so you can't get lunch.’”   read more

The ruling means that lawyer Thomas Durkin will be able to examine secret authorizations from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court that allowed the FBI to spy on Daoud. Until now, only the government and federal judges have been permitted to see a FISA application or material derived from one since Congress approved FISA in the 1978.   read more

Last decade, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved 18 antibiotic additives for use in livestock and poultry despite their “high risk” to humans. These same additives would not be available today if they had been reviewed under current FDA guidelines, and yet the antibiotics are still on the market because the agency has not reconsidered its decisions from 2001 to 2010.   read more

While running the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) from 2006 to 2011, Sheila Bair said the “revolving door,” which creates lucrative private sector opportunities for government officials after they leave office, should be closed to those who regulate banks. In her book she wrote, "There should be a lifetime ban on regulators working for financial institutions they have regulated.”   read more

The plaintiffs insisted they were entitled under the Fair Labor Standards Act (pdf) (FLSA) to overtime for putting on and taking off flame-retardant jackets, pants, hoods, hardhats, work gloves, leggings, special boots, safety glasses, earplugs and respirators. But the employer rejected the claim, saying nothing in the collective bargaining agreement (CBA) between U.S. Steel and the workers’ union mandated compensation for that time.   read more

Within many of those letters of cancellation, the insurance companies said the policyholders would be switched to a new plan unless they chose one and notified the insurers of their decision. Many people only read as far as the fact that their policy was canceled and didn’t notice the switch provision deeper in the letter they received. In many cases, though, the policyholders selected a new plan and still got signed up for a second one by their insurance company.   read more

In Florida, private firms can add as much as 40% in surcharges on top of the debt owed by probationers. In Illinois, the add-on fees can amount to 30% of the standing debt. Former law enforcement officials control this industry—at least in Georgia—having leveraged their connections into profitable contracts. “This is completely dominated by retired state probation people and wardens of state prisons,” Putnam County Sheriff Howard Sills told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.   read more

Incidents of sexual abuse and harassment were committed by more than half of the prison’s staff, and more than one-third of them were found to have had sex with prisoners. There are 900 female inmates at the prison. The prison lacked any kind of system to track complaints lodged against staff, resulting in dozens of violations by individual guards, some of whom were labeled sexual predators, according to the report.   read more

During training at the Lake Cormorant, Mississippi, facility, Ghane was fatally wounded when a bullet pierced his chest just above his body armor. He was standing inside a so-called shoot house that was supposed to be protected by bulletproof walls. But a naval investigation of the incident found the building was not designed or built according to established standards. The walls of the shoot house were less than half as thick as required by the Pentagon.   read more

Leso helped write a 2002 memorandum that detailed the use, at Guantánamo, of “stress positions,” sleep deprivation, dietary manipulation, isolation and exposure to extreme cold. The memo made its way through the Pentagon bureaucracy, leading U.S. forces to apply those same abusive techniques to detainees at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison in 2003.   read more

When it comes to eating meals or playing with young offspring (5 and under), black fathers rated as high or higher than whites and Hispanics. In fact, in cases where the father does not live with his children, blacks were noticeably more present than whites and Hispanics. They also scored higher in other areas, like diapering and dressing their kids and reading to them daily.   read more

The FDA doesn’t apply the same standard of evidence to all drugs going through clinical trial, and instead approve medications based on criteria that vary widely from case to case. The researchers also found that the agency often approves new versions of existing heart devices without requiring a clinical trial. Federal regulators also have ignored early problems in drug trials that later resulted in significant delays in the approval of new medications, according to the studies.   read more