The case began three years ago after two students at Easton Area Middle School, Brianna Hawk and Kayla Martinez, were suspended from the school and banned from a school dance for wearing the bracelets on campus to honor family members who had died of breast cancer. The Keep a Breast Foundation, a non-profit group based in Carlsbad, California, distributes the bracelets as part of its national campaign to make young people aware of the disease.   read more

Adding to the agencies’ frustration is the fact that the NSA’s stonewalling flies in the face of a 2008 executive order modification intended to facilitate NSA’s sharing of surveillance data with other agencies that submitted requests deemed “relevant” to its own investigations. The NSA also has been less than forthcoming with lawmakers about the agency’s work.   read more

William Lietzau, who is stepping down as the Pentagon’s deputy assistant defense secretary for detainee affairs, told the British newspaper The Daily Mail that Guantánamo should never have been created. He added that the detainees should have been legally designated as prisoners of war and held in Afghanistan, or charged with crimes and taken to U.S. federal prisons. Lietzau also recommended that Obama announce that the war with al-Qaeda is over in order to shutter Guantánamo.   read more

Cell phone “information is, by and large, of a highly personal nature: photographs, videos, written and audio messages (text, email and voicemail), contacts, calendar appointments, web search and browsing history, purchases and financial and medical records.” Stahl also wrote: “It is the kind of information one would previously have stored in one’s home,” and accessing that by police has historically involved getting a warrant first.   read more

Up until about a decade ago, the FBI didn’t even bother to keep track what crimes its informants were committing. But the bureau had to change its ways after it was revealed that FBI agents allowed Boston mob boss James “Whitey” Bulger to run his illegal operations in exchange for information about the Mafia.   read more

• In 2011, Thomas and Scalia were the main speakers at a fundraiser for the Federalist Society, a conservative legal group with strong ties to Republican politics. • In 2010, both attended secretive political events sponsored by Koch Industries intended “to review strategies for combating the multitude of public policies that threaten to destroy America as we know it,” just months after they voted in the landmark Citizens United case to allow corporate money to flood politics.   read more

Feinstein's proposal defines journalists as those who earn salaries regardless of their qualifications. Thus, under Feinstein’s bill, if Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Seymour Hersh does volunteer work for WikiLeaks, he would not be a journalist, but if Fox News pays Sean Hannity to be on TV, he is.   read more

Until recently, chemical and other related industries opposed federal laws governing their products, but have changed their tune since individual states have become more aggressive in overseeing their behavior. Conservative arguments about states’ rights trumping federal authority have morphed into an argument that allowing individual states to set policy preempts the authority of other states by pressuring industries to change on a national scale.   read more

Republican legislators in Missouri—and in fourteen other states—want to have their cake and eat it too when it comes to the Affordable Care Act, aka ObamaCare, by refusing to set up state health insurance exchanges for their residents, but then regulating the federal exchanges to make them harder for consumers to use. More than 850,000 Missouri residents are uninsured. Many could qualify for coverage through the exchange, if they are able to understand the system and claim their rights.   read more

Several Exxon employees testified during the 2009 trial that MTBE “might render water undrinkable,” and that they informed Exxon managers that it has “low taste and odor thresholds.” A jury found Exxon liable for product liability, failure to warn the public about the dangers of MTBE, trespass, public nuisance and negligence.   read more

When the mistake was discovered, Chong was severely dehydrated, he had lost 15 pounds, his liver and kidneys were giving out, his sodium levels were off the charts, his muscles had atrophied and he was hallucinating. He had broken his glasses and tried using shards to carve a goodbye message to his mother on his body. He only got as far as an “S” for “sorry.” He was finally found covered in feces and taken to Sharp Hospital, where he ended up in intensive care.   read more

The issue arose during a 2011 antitrust trial between two drug companies (SmithKline Beecham and Abbott Labs) fighting over the anti-HIV medication Norvir when a lawyer for Abbott used a peremptory strike to eliminate an apparently gay man (who said of his “partner” that “he’s retired,” and “he doesn’t have to work”) from the jury pool.   read more

A person who is arrested for a felony may have this fact in their FBI file—but if the charges were dismissed or reduced, this latter information may not be on hand with the FBI. That means a background check would reveal a job candidate was arrested for a felony, but it would not reveal to the potential employer that the person was never convicted or even went to trial. One-third of felony arrests in the U.S. are ultimately dismissed and charges are frequently reduced.   read more

Two former Republican leaders in Florida subsequently admitted that their party’s efforts to limit voter fraud were really about preventing Democrats from getting to the polls on Election Day. Indeed, about 60% of voters discouraged by the long precinct lines in Florida would have voted Democratic, according to Ohio State University professor Theodore Allen.   read more

Clarksville decided to train several dozen of its teachers and staff to qualify as armed security rather than “tying our money up in [hiring] a guard 24/7,” according to Hopkins. The cost to the school district for Clarksville’s program is $50,000 for training and ammunition, and $1,100 per participant for the purchase of a handgun and holster. The training sessions involve role-playing scenarios, performed on the campus.   read more

Anyone can use wget to store downloaded files, and yet the government managed to convince the military court that Manning’s use of it amounted to computer fraud. Prosecutors argued that wget was not on the list of “approved” programs for use in the facility where Manning worked. They also claimed that using an unauthorized program to help store the secret documents amounted to a digital “trespass,” thus computer fraud.   read more