On July 19, 2021, Attorney General Merrick B. Garland banned the use of warrants, subpoenas or court orders to seize reporters’ records from communications firms, publishers, or the reporters’ employers in attempts to discover confidential sources when leaks are being investigated. The prohibition applies to testimony, telephone records, metadata, documents,... Read More »
Just after 9/11 and the invasion of Afghanistan, the military prison at Guantanamo Bay was at its peak capacity, with 675 men (or more than 800, depending upon the source) held prisoner there. Today, 39 prisoners remain, only eleven of whom have actually been charged with war crimes. Under the... Read More »
Officials from the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) and children’s products maker Fisher-Price announced recalls of two Fisher-Price products in the first week of June 2021. The products, the 4-in-1 Rock ’n Glide Soother and 2-in-1 Soothe ’n Play Gliders, have been removed from the market after four infants... Read More »
Stormwater contamination and underground storage tank spills are among dozens of environmental violations committed by theme park developers. Three dozen environmental violations resulted in an agreement between Legoland and New York State that Legoland must pay a fine of $346,000. The Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) has cited Legoland repeatedly... Read More »
The Senate voted on April 28, 2021 to restore Obama-era limits on methane leaks from gas and oil operations. This is big progress for the Biden administration’s climate goals. Sen. Edward J. Markey (D-Mass), who was a co-sponsor of the bill with Sens. Martin Heinrich (D-NM), Democratic Senate Majority Leader... Read More »
On Thursday, April 29, 2021, the Biden administration announced that menthol cigarettes and flavored cigars will be banned. In 2013, a citizen petition advocating the ban was circulated and presented. This petition resulted in a lawsuit filed by anti-smoking and medical groups last summer alleging that regulators had “unreasonably delayed”... Read More »
Some companies have started listing a completed COVID-19 vaccination as a prerequisite for getting a job with them. Either that or the employee must be willing to get one within 30 days of hire. These requirements are appearing for waitpersons in Manhattan, machine operators in Louisville, and office workers in... Read More »
On Monday, April 26, the United States Supreme Court agreed to review a New York law that strictly limits carrying guns outside the home. This will be the first major Second Amendment ruling the court has made in ten years, and it will be the first to be decided with... Read More »
President Biden asked Congress for $80 billion for the IRS over the next ten years. He intends the money to be used for enforcement; with these extra funds, the IRS could be expected to find an additional $700 billion in tax revenue lost over the past decade. This is a... Read More »
IRS Commissioner Charles Rettig announced on April 13, 2021, that the U.S. government is losing $1 Trillion in unpaid taxes annually. He claims the IRS needs more and consistent funding to hunt down tax cheats. He further told the Senate Finance Committee that the difference between taxes legally owed and... Read More »
A 911 dispatcher got a surprise in her brokerage account in February: a deposit of $1,205,619.56. The next day, Charles Schwab tried to recover the money it had put into her account by accident, but the money was already gone. Kelyn Spadoni, who worked for the Jefferson Parish, Louisiana, Sheriff’s... Read More »
On Friday, April 9, 2021, union workers in Amazon’s year-old Bessemer, Alabama, facility rejected unionization in a vote by a more than two-to-one margin. This was quite a blow to organized labor, which sees the fight with Amazon as key to labor’s survival. Amazon is the second-largest private employer (Walmart... Read More »
The U.S. Supreme Court issued a unanimous decision on a long-standing dispute between Florida and Georgia over shares of the Apalachicola River. Justice Amy Coney Barrett wrote the decision. In the decision, Justice Barrett noted that since the drought of 2012, the oyster population in Florida’s Apalachicola Bay had collapsed.... Read More »
A 65-year old Asian American woman was assaulted on March 31 in Manhattan. The attack was caught on camera. Turns out that the suspect is already on lifetime parole for killing his mom. The attacker, Brandon Elliot, 38, was arrested and charged with two counts of felony assault as a... Read More »
On March 31, 2021, another mass shooting took place. This one was in Orange, California, and four people were killed. The shooting occurred in an office building; one of the murdered people was a child. That same month, on March 16th and 22nd, mass shootings took place in Atlanta and... Read More »
