Public schools are becoming underfunded dumping grounds for the nation’s poor students, and a new report says that for the first time in nearly 50 years “a majority of public school children in 17 states … were low income students” at the close of 2011 school year. Thirteen of the 17 states are in the South, and the remaining four (New Mexico, California, Oregon and Nevada) are in the West.   read more

Prisons across the United States have subjected inmates to solitary confinement for years and even decades, raising the question whether this practice constitutes cruel and unusual punishment, or even torture. On any given day about 81,000 prisoners in the U.S. are confined within some sort of “restricted housing” unit inside a correctional facility, where they have virtually no human contact.   read more

Some experts on bullying question the wisdom of bringing criminal charges against such young girls. “The decision to charge them almost seems to take responsibility away from the adults,” argued Nadine Connell, a professor of criminology at the University of Texas at Dallas, who thinks adolescents are too immature to grasp the consequences of bullying, and that the real blame should be placed on parents and school officials for failing to intervene more decisively.   read more

It has been revealed that some of the people targeted by the elections board were still eligible to vote. Further adding to the controversy is the fact that the board’s legal adviser is state Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli, the Republican candidate for governor who, according to recent polls, is trailing Democrat Terry McAuliffe.   read more

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) sued the city on behalf of several plaintiffs, including Marlene Baldwin, a 77-year-old disabled Hopi woman who was arrested for panhandling. Baldwin was arrested in February and later released after begging for $1.25 for bus fare from an undercover police officer. Political support for the law has waned. In late September, the Flagstaff City Council voted unanimously to stop enforcing the statute, and agreed to settle the lawsuit.   read more

“Much like a private homeowner is able to tell his guests whether they can bring a gun into his yard, FedEx should have the right to decide what it will and will not allow on its private property,” Mark Hogan, vice president of U.S. security for FedEx Express told Tennessee lawmakers last year, according to The Wall Street Journal. Gun-rights advocates claim the laws increase worker safety, and say that workers have a right to protect themselves during their commutes.   read more

“NGI shall return the incorrect candidate a maximum of 20% of the time, as a result of facial recognition search in support of photo investigation services,” the FBI report said. NGI was a little more accurate when the search involved a “repository” of data, bumping the success rate up from 80% to 85%. The system’s iris-scan technology was found to be 98% accurate as long as the repository was in play, otherwise the rate dropped to 90%.   read more

In many cases, Jeong said, the videos and materials used during anti-bullying programs gave kids new ways of tormenting others, including the use of texting and social media. “The schools with interventions say, ‘You shouldn’t do this,’ or ‘you shouldn’t do that.’ But through the programs, the students become highly exposed to what a bully is and they know what to do or say when questioned by parents or teachers,” Jeong said.   read more

The U.S. Department of Justice prosecuted a 10-year-old boy as a sex offender two years ago, it now has been revealed, sparking a debate about trying juveniles using laws intended for adult pedophiles. In 2011, federal prosecutors won a delinquency finding against a boy accused of engaging in sex acts when he was 10 with five younger boys (ages 5-7) living at Fort Huachuca, an Army base in Arizona. The child was one of the youngest defendants ever pursued by the Justice Department.   read more

Winters have grown shorter, and in New Hampshire, that has exposed moose to more ticks. Some animals have been found carrying as many as 100,000 of the parasites. Milder winters are occurring more often now, which is bad for an animal made for cold weather. This development has led to heat stress, which can cause exhaustion and death for the moose.   read more

Segarra found out that during the $23 billion El Paso/Kinder Morgan merger in 2012, Goldman had a $4 billion stake in Kinder while also advising El Paso on the deal—a clear conflict of interest. Segarra thought that Silva would back her up, based on comments he had made the prior December that he was worried that if the extent of Goldman’s conflict management problems became public, clients might leave the firm and cause serious financial damage, according to Segarra’s notes.   read more

Parents-to-be whose DNA has been tested for various traits would access a database of sperm and egg donors whose DNA has also been tested, allowing the former to select a donor based on the odds of particular characteristics being expressed in potential offspring. Nothing but higher odds is, or could be, promised.   read more

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) took legal action for the first time against a drone pilot. The drone operator, Raphael Pirker, got into trouble over a video he made from a drone flying over the University of Virginia, with the citation alleging that the video records a series of aviation violations, including flying too low over vehicles, buildings, people, streets and structures, and even aiming the craft at a person, who Pirker says was his spotter.   read more

Obama inherited a culture of secrecy from the George W. Bush administration. But rather than change it, Obama became “more aggressive” by increasing the use of the 1917 Espionage Act to pursue those accused of leaking classified information. Under Obama, the Espionage Act has been used to go after six government employees and two contractors accused of revealing secrets to the press. In all previous administrations, there had been just three such prosecutions.   read more

Research published in March by University of Wisconsin researchers David Kindig and Erika Cheng found that female mortality rates went up in nearly half of U.S. counties between 1992 and 2006. For men, only 3% of counties witnessed increases in male mortality over the same period.   read more

According to the study report, a team of researchers based in Europe found that 145 of the Internet’s top 10,000 websites use Flash-based fingerprinting, and that 404 of the top 1 million sites use JavaScript-based fingerprinting to track non-Flash devices. But the researchers found the websites used device fingerprinting to track visitors even when they explicitly request not to be tracked by enabling the Do Not Track HTTP header, and that few sites informed visitors of the practice.   read more