Fourteen years ago, the Rehnquist court interrupted a string of law enforcement victories to rule that when looking for illegal drugs, the police couldn’t simply walk down the aisle of an intercity bus and squeeze the bags and soft-sided luggage on the overhead rack.
The common tactic amounted to an unconstitutional search, Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist wrote for the 7-to-2 majority in Bond v. United States. While passengers certainly expect that their luggage “may be handled,” the chief justice said, that expectation didn’t extend to supposing that anyone “will, as a matter of course, feel the bag in an exploratory manner.” Continue reading Linda Greenhouse: The Supreme Court Rules in Favor of Cellphone Privacy | NYTimes→
The prospect of electing an intemperate Tea Party candidate who was openly nostalgic for Confederate days was so repellent to many black voters in Mississippi that they did a remarkable thing on Tuesday, crossing party lines to help give the Republican Senate nomination to Thad Cochran, in office for 36 years. Now it’s time for Mr. Cochran to return the favor by supporting a stronger Voting Rights Act and actively working to reduce his party’s extreme antigovernment policies.
In Mississippi, as in many Southern states, politics has become so racially polarized that blacks generally vote for Democrats and whites for Republicans. But after Mr. Cochran came in second during the first round of primary voting earlier this month, he made an unusual appeal for help from black voters in the runoff. Many responded, the precinct results showed, and the reason was clear: Chris McDaniel, who was challenging Mr. Cochran, threatened to return the state to an era they loathed. Continue reading Editorial: Thad Cochran’s Debt to Mississippi | NYTimes→
Yes, you read those headlines right: real GDP contracted at a 2.9% rate according to revised data released this AM. That’s contracted, as in went down.
Nope. That was a truly lousy quarter but it’s highly unlikely to be repeated any time soon. The particularly bad winter weather played a role; both residential and commercial building were negative. Heavy inventory buildups in earlier quarters were reversed, which usually implies a positive bounce-back in coming quarters. Exports were revised down and imports up, so the trade deficit subtracted a large 1.5 points from the bottom line; that drag will likely diminish in coming quarters. Continue reading Jared Bernstein: Whoa! Whassup With That Big Negative Q1 GDP Revision?→
by Heather Vogell, ProPublica, June 19, 2014, 5 a.m.
Carson Luke, who is autistic, was 10 years old when public school staff members crushed his hand in a door while trying to close him in a seclusion room at the Southeastern Cooperative Education Program’s Deep Creek facility in Chesapeake, Va., three years ago. (Photos courtesy of the Luke Family)
Sometimes, Carson later told his mother, workers would run the fan to make him stop yelling. A thick metal door with lockswhich they threw, clank-clank-clank separated the autistic boy from the rest of the decrepit building in Chesapeake, Virginia, just south of Norfolk.
But such limits don’t apply to public schools.
Definitions and Terms
Restraints are any holds in which a student’s ability to move their head, torso, arms or legs are limited.
“Mechanical” restraints use something like straps, handcuffs or bungee cords to do the restraining.
“Seclusion” refers to situations in which a student is confined against their will in a room they are prevented from leaving — often with a locked door. This is different from a “time out” in which a student is separated from others to allow him or her a chance to calm down. Link
Young children who dig into a bowl of fortified breakfast cereal may be getting too much of a good thing when it comes to certain vitamins and minerals, a new report says.
A new report says that “millions of children are ingesting potentially unhealthy amounts” of vitamin A, zinc and niacin, with fortified breakfast cereals the leading source of the excessive intake because all three nutrients are added in amounts calculated for adults.
Outdated nutritional labeling rules and misleading marketing by food manufacturers who use high fortification levels to make their products appear more nutritious fuel this potential risk, according to the report by the Environmental Working Group (EWG), a Washington, D.C.-based health research and advocacy organization.
Although the Food and Drug Administration is currently updating nutrition facts labels that appear on most food packages, none of its proposed changes address the issue of over-consumption of fortified micronutrients, or that the recommended percent daily values for nutrition content that appear on the labels are based on adults,, says Renée Sharp, EWG’s director of research. Continue reading WUSA: Report: Over-fortified cereals may pose risks to kids→
Writing about Rep. Eric Cantor’s (R-Va.) stunning primary defeat last week, I warned Democrats that the House majority leader’s loss was as much a wake-up call for them as it was for the GOP. Well, now I want to warn them about a very real possibility: President Obama will be impeached if the Democrats lose control of the U.S. Senate.
Gluten-free bread can be tasty. It is our experience that gluten-free bread is best enjoyed when one does away with the expectation of duplicating the taste and texture of wheat. It’s very difficult, when all you’ve ever known are gluten breads, to suddenly find satisfaction in something that isn’t gluten. But satisfaction can be achieved.
After a seven-week freeze following Clayton Lockett’s botched execution in Oklahoma, three states executed three death-row inmates in less than 24 hours last week. Georgia, Missouri, and Florida had tangled with defense lawyers for months over the secrecy surrounding their lethal-injection cocktails and where they were obtained, a key issue in Lockett’s death. Florida also addressed concerns about its inmate’s mental capacity; his lawyers claimed he had an IQ of 78. The U.S. Supreme Court rejected all appeals, however, and the three inmates—Marcus Wellons, John Winfield, and John Henry, respectively—were successively executed without apparent mishap.
In addition to their fates, Wellons, Winfield, and Henry have something else in common: They are among the disproportionate number of black Americans to have been executed since the Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in 1976.
In the three states where they were executed, blacks constitute a disproportionate share of the death-row population relative to the state population. In Oklahoma and Missouri, black Americans are overrepresented on death row by nearly a factor of four. Continue reading Race and the Execution Chamber |The Atlantic→
Justice Sotomayor appeared on ABC News’ This Week to speak on Affirmative Action. She rightly points out that the alternatives that have been suggested in the past don’t work.
I agree. Whether or not we end up providing free college education to all doesn’t change the fact that there is rampant race-based discrimination at every point, from college admissions through employment. Making an education available to all Americans doesn’t change what African Americans still endure.
By Matt Ford