Mar
21
2013
Art Brennan, an Army veteran of the 82nd Airborne division who served for 20 years in the army reserves and went on to be a superior court judge in New Hampshire for 15 years, was asked in 2007 to head up the State Department’s anti-corruption unit in Baghdad. He served only a month on the job before concluding that “the Department of State has contributed to the killing and maiming of U.S. soldiers; the deaths …
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Mar
21
2013
Forever 21 founders and husband-and-wife team Do Won Chang and Jin Sook can’t duck the federal government anymore.
On March 7, U.S. District Court Judge Margaret Morrow ordered the wildly popular Los Angeles-based fashion retailer to comply with a subpoena issued by the U.S. Department of Labor’s Wage and Hour Division and turn over documents involving wages, hours, and employment practices at Forever 21’s contractors and manufacturers.
For months, Forever 21 executives have refused to hand over …
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Mar
21
2013
With the inmate population steadily increasing, Sheriff Lee Baca will ask the Board of Supervisors Tuesday to study replacing the dilapidated and violence-plagued Men’s Central Jail with a $932.8-million high-tech facility, and consider relying more on electronic monitoring devices and other alternatives to incarceration.
The proposal at this stage is to hire a contractor to prepare a conceptual design and environmental impact review.
In a letter to the board, Baca and county chief executive officer William Fujioka …
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Mar
21
2013
Wikipedia editors have accused BP of editing their own page entry to whitewash their environmental impact in the public record. As CNet reported Thursday, “angry Wikipedia editors estimate that BP has rewritten 44 percent of the page about itself, especially about its environmental performance.” Via CNet:
BP is not directly editing its page, but instead has apparently inserted a BP representative into the editing community who provides Wikipedia editors with text.
…
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Mar
21
2013
The National Museum of American History, and a billionaire who has funded a new exhibit there, would like you to know that we’re going to need more wars if we want to have freedom. Never mind that we seem to lose so many freedoms whenever we have wars. Never mind that so many nations have created more freedoms than we enjoy and done so without wars. In our case, war is the …
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Mar
21
2013
CHICAGO (CBS) – Chicago Public Schools officials have begun informing schools about which buildings are being targeted for closure or consolidation at the end of the school year.
The district has yet to announce exactly how many schools would be affected, or how many students would be moved to new schools, but sources said about 50 schools will be closed. The Chicago Board of Education must approve any school closings, and a final vote is expected …
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Mar
21
2013
The National Labor Relations Board has issued a complaint against four companies involved in staffing and managing Walmart’s largest distribution center in the United States. The NLRB complaint—similar to an indictment—alleges that the companies repeatedly threatened and punished warehouse workers for labor organizing, including by firing activists involved in a September strike that helped to inspire November’s Black Friday retail walkout.
“They had targeted the organizers ever since we got back to the warehouse,” Philip Bailey, …
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Mar
21
2013
SIX people have set themselves on fire in Bulgaria in less than a month. Three have died. The death by self-immolation of Plamen Goranov, a 36-year-old amateur photographer and rock climber, especially shocked the public. Mr Goranov has become Bulgaria’s Jan Palach (the student who set himself on fire in 1969 to protest against the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia), a symbol of the protests that have rocked the country in recent weeks. “You fired up …
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Mar
21
2013
According to the latest estimates from the CDC, as many as 1 in 50 kids in U.S. schools have autism. That’s a high number, even higher than last year’s estimate of one in 88 schoolchildren.
The statistic includes all disorders on the autism spectrum, including Asperger’s Syndrome. The study, which compared diagnoses in 2007 (at 1 in 86, according to their study) to those in 2011-’12, attributes “much” of the increase in prevalence to …
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Mar
21
2013
What’s it like inside a factory farm? If the livestock and meat industries have their way, what little view we have inside the walls of these animal-reviewing facilities may soon be obscured. For the second year in a row, the industry is backing bills in various statehouses that would criminalize undercover investigations of livestock farms. The Humane Society of the US, one of the animal-welfare groups most adept at conducting such hidden-camera operations, counts active …
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