Apr
17
2013
North Dakota’s Republican governor Jack Dalrymple has signed legislation outlawing abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy based on the disputed premise that at that point a foetus can feel pain.
The law is the latest among a raft of measures passed in North Dakota this session that are meant to challenge the US supreme court’s 1973 Roe v Wade ruling that legalised abortion up until viability, usually at 22 to 24 weeks.
Abortion-rights campaigners have called the …
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Apr
17
2013
(Reuters) – The Supreme Court on Wednesday limited the ability of police to take involuntary blood samples from suspected drunken drivers without a search warrant.
The court ruled that a blood test administered on a Missouri driver without a warrant violated his right to be free from unreasonable search and seizures under the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
Missouri state police administered the test after the driver, Tyler McNeely, refused to submit to a breathalyzer test.
Justice …
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Apr
17
2013
(Reuters) – The Swiss government is considering a possible solution to a long-running dispute with U.S. authorities over Swiss banks accused of helping wealthy Americans evade billions of dollars of tax.
A source familiar with the talks has told Reuters the two sides have agreed an outline for a deal that would divide over 300 Swiss banks according to the extent they had helped U.S. clients hide money, to determine how they are dealt with.
A Swiss …
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Apr
17
2013
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court has limited the ability of foreign victims of human rights abuses to use American courts to seek accountability and monetary damages for their suffering.
The justices unanimously agreed Wednesday to shut down a lawsuit filed by Nigerians against Royal Dutch Petroleum, or Shell Oil, over claims that the company was complicit in murder and other abuses committed by the Nigerian government against its citizens in the oil-rich Niger Delta …
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Apr
17
2013
Jonathan Cohn’s devastating piece on the inadequacies of American day care in The New Republic does exactly what good muckraking investigative journalism should do—it makes you ask why on earth we let this continue. As Cohn says, other countries (notably France) have safe, well-regulated, subsidized, affordable daycare for all. In contrast, daycare in the U.S. is expensive ($15,000 a year per infant on average) and of shockingly low quality. Child care workers are paid less …
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Apr
17
2013
“If we could appoint King Solomon, who was the first domestic relations judge, as special master we could do it,” said Justice Anthony Kennedy during Tuesday’s oral argument in Adoptive Couple v. Baby Girl. “But we can’t do it.”
In family cases, though, even Solomon was no Solomon. Faced with two competing claims of maternity, Solomon threatened to hack the baby in half with a sword.
There were no swords in the chamber Tuesday, but …
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Apr
17
2013
A twenty-year-old man who had been watching the Boston Marathon had his body torn into by the force of a bomb. He wasn’t alone; a hundred and seventy-six people were injured and three were killed. But he was the only one who, while in the hospital being treated for his wounds, had his apartment searched in “a startling show of force,” as his fellow-tenants described it to the Boston Herald, with a “phalanx” of …
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Apr
17
2013
I ran the Boston Marathon back in 1968, and, my feet covered with blisters inside my Keds sneakers, dragged across the finish line to meet my waiting uncle at a time of about 3 hours and 40 minutes. It was close enough to the time that the current bombing happened in this year’s race — about four hours from the starting gun — that had I been running it this year, I might still been …
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Apr
17
2013
Only the government knows the exact statistics, but four years after Barack Obama ordered the closure of the Guantanamo Bay detention camp, and eleven years since the first people were imprisoned there, detainees at Gitmo are involved in what may be the largest and longest single act of civil disobedience in the camp’s history.
“I’ve never seen [a protest] of this magnitude that’s gone on for this long,” says Col. Morris Davis (Ret.), a …
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Apr
17
2013
The country’s largest non-union workers’ group will soon announce plans to establish chapters in every state, achieve financial self-sufficiency and extend its organizing—so far focused on politics and policy—directly into the workplace.
“This organization has done really what nobody else thought could be done,” AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka told The Nation, “and that’s recruit more than three million people without a union to be part of the labor movement.”
That organization is Working America, the AFL-CIO affiliate …
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