Here’s the task facing the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA): It has about 2,000 employees devoted to inspecting 8 million workplaces throughout the United States. Two thousand inspectors for 8 million locations means 4,000 workplaces per OSHA specialist. No wonder more than 4,300 people lost their lives at work in 2012.   read more

While Republicans in the U.S. House continue to hold up immigration reform, a strong majority of Americans—including a majority of GOP voters—say illegal immigrants should have a way to become citizens. A survey conducted by the nonpartisan Public Religion Research Institute found 63% of respondents support a pathway to citizenship for unauthorized immigrants, who number 11.7 million in the United States.   read more

Assistant Attorney General Stuart Delery told the courtroom that those living in the U.S. have “no reasonable expectation” to privacy when it comes to the phone calls they make. Delery made his remark while pointing out that because Americans go along with telecommunications companies keeping records of their calls, they have no basis to challenge the NSA’s large-scale collection of that data.   read more

So far this year, Vermont shipped prisoners to Arizona and Kentucky; Idaho sent prisoners to Colorado; California exported prisoners to Arizona, Oklahoma and Mississippi; and Hawaii sent prisoners to Arizona. A fifth state, West Virginia, intends to ship 400 inmates to private out-of-state prisons. Prisoners in these private out-of-state facilities are held between 450 and 3,000 miles from their home states.   read more

Numerous specialists in the field were surprised and not pleased by the board’s decision—some saying they expect it to lead to major setbacks. One of them, Dr. Elizabeth Stier of the Boston Medical Center, has been treating male patients for a decade and expected to sign up about 100 men for the anal cancer trial. Those men will have to be replaced with women.   read more

More than 1,400 wastewater treatment plants in the U.S. and Canada discharge 4.8 billion gallons of treated water into the Great Lakes basin every day. The study found that six chemicals (an herbicide, an anti-seizure drug, two antibiotics, an antibacterial drug and an anti-inflammatory drug) were detected frequently and had a low rate of removal in treated effluent.   read more

Thirty-nine out of the 50 largest fines assessed over the five-year period reviewed were never collected. This included a Shasta County facility that operated without a license and was fined $250,000, but never paid a dime.   read more

Many drivers apparently were not made aware that it was a voluntary process. Furthermore, it was later discovered that the consent forms they were told to sign included fine print that “passive alcohol sensor readings” had been conducted “before the consent process has been completed.” In other words, secret sensors were being employed to test motorists’ breath without their knowledge or consent.   read more

In light of the fact that Connecticut case law holds that trial judges need not explain what factors they considered or how they calculated alimony in their written decisions, the complaint argues that, “meaningful judicial review of trial court awards of alimony is impossible.” The Supreme Court has long held that a statute is unconstitutional if it so vague that an appeals court cannot determine if a trial court’s decision is consistent with it or not.   read more

Any hesitancy that Kollar-Kotelly may have indicated in giving approval to the program was outweighed by the assumption of a legitimate need on the part of the George W. Bush administration. “Deference should be given to the fully considered judgment of the executive branch in assessing and responding to national security threats and in determining the potential significance of intelligence-related information,” she wrote.   read more

Alaskan Natives are treated differently under federal law than Native Americans elsewhere. Not only has the Alaskan government managed to obtain court rulings that Alaska Natives have no “Indian Country” over which to exercise public safety jurisdiction, but Alaska’s legislators frequently get Congress to exempt Alaska from Indian law reforms. In 2012, Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski inserted language into the Violence Against Women Act ensuring that its reforms would not apply to Alaska Natives.   read more

Anthera was also required to survey all patients six months after the end of the trial period to see if they were still alive. But the company collected that data for only 31% of the patients, which made it impossible to gauge whether the drug increased the risk of death. The trial was terminated by a safety monitoring committee after early results showed patients who got the drug actually had a higher risk of cardiovascular problems, mainly heart attacks, than those who received a placebo.   read more

Sotomayor mentioned some of the strange justifications cited by Alabama judges in overriding jury verdicts. In one case, the judge noted that a defendant who had an IQ of 65 “intentionally test[ed] low on standard IQ tests.” In another case, a judge up for reelection when he sentenced a 19-year-old defendant said, “If I had not imposed the death sentence, I would have sentenced three black people to death and no white people.”   read more

One longtime Canton store employee—who requested her name not be used for fear of being fired—found the Walmart campaign “demoralizing” and “kind of depressing.” “Why would a company do that?” OUR Walmart strike organizer Vanessa Ferreira said to the Plain Dealer. “The company needs to stand up and give them their 40 hours and a living wage, so they don't have to worry about whether they can afford Thanksgiving.”   read more

Winona (2010 pop.: 27,592) sees about 100 sand trucks go through town every day from silica mines in neighboring Wisconsin, and will be the first local government in the United States to address air pollution caused by the shipment of fracking sand. A single fracking well may need as much as 10,000 tons of sand during its lifetime, and about 50 new such wells are being drilled in the U.S. every day.   read more

Chin wrote, " It has given scholars the ability, for the first time, to conduct full-text searches of tens of millions of books. It preserves books, in particular out-of-print and old books that have been forgotten in the bowels of libraries, and it gives them new life. It facilitates access to books for print-disabled and remote or underserved populations."   read more