Family demands federal investigation into mysterious death of student

Al Sharpton, who spoke at an event demanding an investigation into the death of Kendrick Johnson

The family of Kendrick Johnson is demanding a federal investigation into his death.

While the Georgia Bureau of Investigation has ruled the death of an accident, his family disagreeing, arguing that Johnson was murdered at the school.

According to a story on ABC local station WALB News 10, officials believe Johnson, who died back in January, “was in the gym alone, reached into the mat to get something he dropped, and got stuck.”

The final autopsy report ruled the death accident as a result of “positional asphyxia.”

The family is not convinced. A Facebook page and organizations like Atlanta's National Action Network, have brought attention to the case, claiming that it was bungled: the coroner's office wasn't notified until hours after Johnson's death; that the body was moved and his clothes misplaced.

The sheriff denies that the body or clothes were moved, butt the coroner's office has expressed anger at not being contacted sooner.

"We want an independent investigation, let's just say by an agency with higher credentials than Lowndes County," chapter president Marcus Coleman told WALB.

"There's been a number of what we feel are inconsistencies, are mishandlings, and for that very reason is why we want another set of eyes," he added.

The family has organized community protests in Valdosta, one attended by the civil rights activist Al Sharpton.

The reverend started a fund, for which he contributed $500, to give to anyone who had evidence that would prove the 17-year-old’s death not to be accidental.

"It puts Valdosta on the map for real,” Johnson’s aunt, Susie Kier, said. She added, “It lets the people of Valdosta Georgia know that Kendrick Johnson's life stood for something. Let them know that he was a great little boy. That we loved him dearly."

According to the Examiner, the family has requested a coroner’s inquest, and Lowndes County Coroner Bill Watson agreed to proceed.

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Analysis: Obama's climate agenda may face setbacks in federal court

By Valerie Volcovici

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Barack Obama's plan to use federal agencies, and the Environmental Protection Agency in particular, to drive his second-term climate change agenda might be in peril if he cannot fill vacant seats on the federal court that has jurisdiction over major national regulations, legal experts say.

Obama is the first full-term president in more than a half century not to have appointed a single judge to the powerful U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.

The court, considered the second most important in the nation, decides cases challenging agency regulations such as those involving the EPA's Clean Air Act and often serves as a feeder to the Supreme Court.

New York attorney Caitlin Halligan, Obama's first nominee to fill one of four vacant seats on the 11-judge bench, announced her withdrawal on Friday after Republicans twice blocked her nomination over concerns about a 2001 case in which she represented New York state and argued that gun manufacturers had created a "public nuisance" under state law.

Obama said in a statement on Friday that he was "deeply disappointed" that a minority of senators continued to block an up-or-down vote on her nomination after two and a half years.

Meanwhile, Obama's second pick, former corporate lawyer Sri Srinivasan, will have a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing in the next few weeks after being delayed in 2012 by Republican requests for more information about his role in the settlement of a housing act case as a U.S. deputy solicitor general.

While some fault Republicans for slow-walking the appointment of judges that would shift the balance of the court to Democrat-appointed judges, others fault Obama for not taking advantage of the now-four open seats and making judicial appointments a political priority. Two of the four vacant seats have been open since Obama came into office in January 2009. The seat Halligan was nominated for has been vacant since 2005.

Some legal experts warn that under the status quo - four Republican appointees and three Democratic appointees among active judges - Obama's plan to bypass a deeply partisan Congress to address climate change using existing authorities will not be easy.

"There is really no moving forward with regulation without going to the DC Circuit and the decision of the court could really have major consequences," said Michael Livermore, executive director of the Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University's law school.

The court hears all challenges to government agency regulations.

And regardless of the political balance, some warn the short-staffed court will have a hard time handling a growing case load of challenges to increasingly complex EPA regulations.

"There is a reason why there are 11 judges on that court of appeals," said John Cruden, director of the Environmental Law Institute. "They (cases) will take longer to resolve than they are right now because they are more complicated and they require and demand a lot of attention."

A former D.C. circuit judge on the court from 1979 to 1999 last month termed the ongoing vacancies a cause of "extreme concern" because the court lacks the manpower to carry out its "weighty mandate," which includes cases ranging from environmental protection to civil rights to national security.

Patricia Wald, who was an appointee of Democratic President Jimmy Carter, wrote in a February 28 op-ed in the Washington Post that the number of pending cases per judge has grown to 188 today from 119 in 2005.

Although the court's six senior status judges can hear cases, they cannot participate in re-hearings. Five of those six judges are Republican appointees.

AUTOMATIC CHALLENGE

Obama said in his February State of the Union address that he would direct his cabinet to take steps to curb carbon emissions if lawmakers fail to enact legislation - a likely outcome in the deeply divided Congress.

The EPA is expected to be at the center of Obama's climate efforts. It is due this year to finalize emissions standards for new power plants and industrial facilities. After that, it will set a standard for the country's power plants and industrial sources that account for nearly 40 percent of domestic emissions.

The proposed regulations will almost certainly be challenged by industry, including electric utility companies and manufacturers, who argue the agency is wrongly interpreting the Clean Air Act to write its standards.

"He (Obama) can lean as heavily as he wants on the EPA and its all for nothing if he gets the wrong panel reviewing what they do," said Tom McGarity, a law professor at the University of Texas law school in Austin, who specializes in environmental and administrative law.

Three-judge panels are assigned randomly to resolve cases brought to the court. With just seven active judges, many of the same judges will deliberate similar EPA challenges.

Some analysts say the court has become more polarized on these issues, making the outcome largely dependent on the panel that gets selected - a roll of the dice.

Some also expect delays or revisions to the EPA's proposed standard for new power plants beyond an April 13 deadline as the agency anticipates inevitable challenges in the DC circuit and uncertainty about how the judges will rule.

"It's certainly possible that the EPA has recognized that it needs to be a little less aggressive in its interpretation and implementation of its authority," said Jonathan Adler, a law professor at Case Western Reserve University.

Recent setbacks in the DC circuit might have reminded EPA that its technical and legal analysis needs to be bullet proof.

One such loss was the court's 2-1 decision in August to strike down an EPA rule to curb sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide emissions from power plants that cause acid rain and smog across state lines. The decision called on the agency to rewrite the rules, a process that could take years.

Two of the three judges ruling on the case said the EPA exceeded its "jurisdictional limits" in interpreting the Clean Air Act. The EPA asked for a full-court hearing in January but it was denied.

The court ruled more favorably for the EPA in June, though, when it upheld agency rules on greenhouse gas emissions, including the scientific justification to regulate them because they endanger public health.

But new standards for power plants, mercury and hazardous materials, ozone rules and other controversial regulations will face uncertain fates in the court if the status quo continues.

NYU's Livermore said that, while recent decisions on the EPA's interpretation of the Clean Air Act have been mixed, the court has clearly demonstrated it is not afraid to strike down rules and send the agency back to the drawing board.

"This is not a court that is afraid to act and use its powers. There is no getting around these guys. It is small, so one or two judges can make a big difference in the ultimate decision," he said.

Observers say Obama needs to make more nominations for the court or broker a deal with Republicans to get at least some of his judicial picks confirmed, or he will risk missing out on a chance to leave his mark on the court.

"If we continue on the current path of invalidating critically important rules, the DC circuit will be the graveyard for all programs, initiatives that are being pushed by the Obama administration and will affect all of us," said Nan Aron, president of the judicial rights group Alliance for Justice.

"The DC circuit has that much power."

(Reporting By Valerie Volcovici.; Editing by Ros Krasny and Andre Grenon)

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Colleges say federal cuts could cause brain drain

BOSTON (AP) — At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, faculty fret about the future of the school's Plasma Science and Fusion Center.

Thirty miles away, administrators at the state university campus in Lowell worry that research aimed at designing better body armor for soldiers could suffer.

The concerns have emerged because of automatic federal budget cuts that could reduce government funding for research done at educational institutions, spending that totaled about $33.3 billion in 2010, Department of Education statistics show. And the possible cuts add to another anxiety at those schools and others across the country: brain drain.

President Barack Obama and lawmakers failed to agree on a plan to reduce the nation's deficit that would have avoided the automatic spending cuts, which began to roll out this month. Included in the cuts are 5 percent of the money for programs that fund education research, a Department of Education spokesman said Friday. But because negotiations over how to balance the budget are ongoing, the timing and size of many cuts to be made by government agencies remain unclear.

"One of the questions we don't know is if agencies will elect to cut funding by not making new grants or cutting back on old grants," said Terry Hartle, a senior vice president at American Council on Education.

In the meantime, professors are left wondering how many young scientists will become discouraged by domestic funding challenges and either leave for careers abroad or change fields.

At MIT, doctoral candidate Nikolai Begg said he's lucky the research he's working on now has corporate sponsorship.

"It's kind of scary to be hearing that a lot of that support is going away," he said of government cuts. "How do we keep America technologically relevant has been a question on everybody's mind. And the sequester only makes that harder."

The 25-year-old mechanical engineer recently won a $30,000 Lemelson-MIT award for inventions that aim to make surgical procedures less invasive. But Begg is concerned about whether government funding losses could force undergraduates who are contemplating higher degrees to enter the workforce for financial reasons, meaning a loss of American ingenuity in the end.

"I wonder if this whole issue is going to prevent people from going into more advanced research where they can really innovate ... We don't really know what it's going to do yet. There's not enough information out. You know the storm is coming."

Some university officials say a loss of federal funding from the cuts aggravates a current trend: Scientists already have less time to spend in their labs because they have to spend more time seeking grants.

"What the sequester has done is make more dramatic this trend," said Scott Zeger, Johns Hopkins University's vice provost for research. "... It means that people aren't spending quiet time thinking about how nature works."

Breast cancer researcher Dr. Debu Tripathy, a professor at Keck School of Medicine of University of Southern California, compared a scientist who doesn't spend enough time in a lab because of grant writing to a politician who is too busy campaigning for re-election to serve constituents.

He worries the country's commitment to a war on cancer, going back to the signing of the National Cancer Act in 1971, could falter. Tripathy said a lot of good science isn't getting funded and bright minds aren't coming into the field.

"If we don't engage the brightest minds to continue the trajectory we're on, then that will affect a whole generation," the doctor said.

At Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, dean Dr. Larry Shapiro said the automatic cuts are causing anxiety among young researchers who are wondering what career options they'll have if the current economic climate becomes "the new normal."

"This is all that's being discussed in the hallways and over coffee," he said.

He said two genetics researchers recently decided to leave the university and move their labs to the United Kingdom amid the climate of funding losses.

"Scientists are passionate about their work, and they'll go where they have the best opportunity to accomplish it," Shapiro said.

Washington University School of Medicine could be looking at $30 million to $40 million in budget cuts because of cutbacks at the National Institutes of Health, and possibly having to cut 300 scientific personnel jobs, according to Shapiro. The school is part of a consortium working on new therapies for Alzheimer's disease, and he said that work would be slowed considerably because the NIH is a big funding source.

At University of Massachusetts-Amherst, school officials are projecting that they could lose about $8 million in research money, which could affect projects including biofuels research.

But UMass-Amherst chemistry professor Paul Lahti, who is leading research on better ways to harvest solar energy, said it's the job of senior faculty members to keep students encouraged and excited about the future of discovery despite negative economic factors.

"You carry on and do the best work you can," Lahti tells them.

"The science is going to get done," the professor said. "The younger people in the end are the ones that are our most important project."

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Arkansas health plan for poor to add limited federal costs: report

By Suzi Parker

LITTLE ROCK, Arkansas (Reuters) - A cost analysis released on Monday shows that a state plan to move Medicaid-eligible low-income citizens into a "private option" under upcoming federal healthcare exchanges would result in little additional federal costs.

"These estimates find that the private option can be fully funded with existing resources at the state level and would add less than 15 percent to federal health-care costs in Arkansas," the report said. "In some realistic scenarios, there could be no additional federal costs at all."

The report by the state Department of Human Services, with input from the Arkansas Insurance Commission and consultants, addresses concerns that private insurance would cost up to 50 percent more than standard Medicaid. A Congressional Budget Office estimate last year said Medicaid costs $6,000 per enrollee versus $9,000 for private insurance.

The Arkansas proposal, the report said, would introduce 250,000 new low-income adults into the private market, creating competition and price pressure.

The report said that by including Medicaid-funded adults in the exchange, the federal treasury would spend about $700 million less on tax subsidies in Arkansas.

Arkansas state officials have created a unique plan to expand Medicaid, spearheaded by Governor Mike Beebe, a Democrat.

The governor's proposal would expand coverage to state residents who earn up to 133 percent of the poverty line, or $15,415 per year.

The Arkansas legislature did not want to expand Medicaid for those under 133 percent of the federal poverty line, an option under the Affordable Care Act. Instead, it wanted to use billions in Medicaid funding to buy private insurance for that same population.

Under a verbal agreement with Secretary of Health Kathleen Sebelius, state officials say they could use Medicaid funds to obtain private coverage for poor adults with incomes ranging from zero to 133 percent of the federal poverty level.

The insurance would be purchased through a health insurance exchange that Washington is scheduled to begin operating with Arkansas on January 1, 2014. The online marketplace would allow people with incomes of up to 400 percent of the poverty line to obtain private coverage at federally subsidized rates.

The Arkansas deal could provide a template for other states. Ohio Governor John Kasich, a Republican, is already in talks with state legislators in Columbus about the prospects of a similar deal.

Earlier this month, hundreds of people rallied on the Arkansas state Capitol steps about Medicaid reform. Beebe said then that he and Republican lawmakers were on track to provide health coverage to more low-income Arkansans.

Conservatives like the Arkansas concept because the privatization avoids a government expansion.

Three-fourths of the state House and Senate, both of which are Republican-controlled, are needed for the package to become law.

(Additional reporting by David Morgan; Editing by Barbara Goldberg and Eric Walsh)

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Colleges say federal cuts could cause brain drain

BOSTON (AP) — At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, faculty fret about the future of the school's Plasma Science and Fusion Center.

Thirty miles away, administrators at the state university campus in Lowell worry that research aimed at designing better body armor for soldiers could suffer.

The concerns have emerged because of automatic federal budget cuts that could reduce government funding for research done at educational institutions, spending that totaled about $33.3 billion in 2010, Department of Education statistics show. And the possible cuts add to another anxiety at those schools and others across the country: brain drain.

President Barack Obama and lawmakers failed to agree on a plan to reduce the nation's deficit that would have avoided the automatic spending cuts, which began to roll out this month. Included in the cuts are 5 percent of the money for programs that fund education research, a Department of Education spokesman said Friday. But because negotiations over how to balance the budget are ongoing, the timing and size of many cuts to be made by government agencies remain unclear.

"One of the questions we don't know is if agencies will elect to cut funding by not making new grants or cutting back on old grants," said Terry Hartle, a senior vice president at American Council on Education.

In the meantime, professors are left wondering how many young scientists will become discouraged by domestic funding challenges and either leave for careers abroad or change fields.

At MIT, doctoral candidate Nikolai Begg said he's lucky the research he's working on now has corporate sponsorship.

"It's kind of scary to be hearing that a lot of that support is going away," he said of government cuts. "How do we keep America technologically relevant has been a question on everybody's mind. And the sequester only makes that harder."

The 25-year-old mechanical engineer recently won a $30,000 Lemelson-MIT award for inventions that aim to make surgical procedures less invasive. But Begg is concerned about whether government funding losses could force undergraduates who are contemplating higher degrees to enter the workforce for financial reasons, meaning a loss of American ingenuity in the end.

"I wonder if this whole issue is going to prevent people from going into more advanced research where they can really innovate ... We don't really know what it's going to do yet. There's not enough information out. You know the storm is coming."

Some university officials say a loss of federal funding from the cuts aggravates a current trend: Scientists already have less time to spend in their labs because they have to spend more time seeking grants.

"What the sequester has done is make more dramatic this trend," said Scott Zeger, Johns Hopkins University's vice provost for research. "... It means that people aren't spending quiet time thinking about how nature works."

Breast cancer researcher Dr. Debu Tripathy, a professor at Keck School of Medicine of University of Southern California, compared a scientist who doesn't spend enough time in a lab because of grant writing to a politician who is too busy campaigning for re-election to serve constituents.

He worries the country's commitment to a war on cancer, going back to the signing of the National Cancer Act in 1971, could falter. Tripathy said a lot of good science isn't getting funded and bright minds aren't coming into the field.

"If we don't engage the brightest minds to continue the trajectory we're on, then that will affect a whole generation," the doctor said.

At Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, dean Dr. Larry Shapiro said the automatic cuts are causing anxiety among young researchers who are wondering what career options they'll have if the current economic climate becomes "the new normal."

"This is all that's being discussed in the hallways and over coffee," he said.

He said two genetics researchers recently decided to leave the university and move their labs to the United Kingdom amid the climate of funding losses.

"Scientists are passionate about their work, and they'll go where they have the best opportunity to accomplish it," Shapiro said.

Washington University School of Medicine could be looking at $30 million to $40 million in budget cuts because of cutbacks at the National Institutes of Health, and possibly having to cut 300 scientific personnel jobs, according to Shapiro. The school is part of a consortium working on new therapies for Alzheimer's disease, and he said that work would be slowed considerably because the NIH is a big funding source.

At University of Massachusetts-Amherst, school officials are projecting that they could lose about $8 million in research money, which could affect projects including biofuels research.

But UMass-Amherst chemistry professor Paul Lahti, who is leading research on better ways to harvest solar energy, said it's the job of senior faculty members to keep students encouraged and excited about the future of discovery despite negative economic factors.

"You carry on and do the best work you can," Lahti tells them.

"The science is going to get done," the professor said. "The younger people in the end are the ones that are our most important project."

View the original article here

Federal judge rules surveillance provisions unconstitutional

By Bernard Vaughan

NEW YORK (Reuters) - A federal judge has ruled unconstitutional national security provisions that permit federal investigators to access customer information from some companies without court approval.

The provisions "suffer from significant constitutional infirmities," and violate the First Amendment and separation of powers, Judge Susan Illston of the District Court for the Northern District of California wrote in an order on Thursday.

The judge's decision stems from a "National Security Letter" that the Federal Bureau of Investigation issued to an unnamed telecommunications company, according to the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

The National Security Letter provision of the Patriot Act expanded the FBI's authority to demand personal customer records from Internet service providers, financial institutions and credit companies without prior court approval, according to the American Civil Liberties Union.

The letter to the telecommunications company sought "subscriber information" from the company, and warned that the letter's disclosure could result "in a danger to the United States," among other ramifications, according to the decision.

In the lawsuit, the company challenged the constitutionality of the laws, while the government opposed it and filed its own lawsuit, according to the decision.

"The government has a strong argument that allowing the government to prohibit recipients of NSL's from disclosing the specific information sought in NSL's to either the targets or the public is generally necessary to serve national security in ongoing investigations," Illston wrote. "However, the government has not shown that it is generally necessary to prohibit recipients from disclosing the mere fact of their receipt of NSLs."

(Reporting By Bernard Vaughan)

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City Councilman Loses Federal Appeal on School Drug Searches

A city councilman and his wife lost a federal appeals court ruling against their son's school district regarding a drug dog search at their son's high school in Springfield, Mo. Doug Burlison filed a lawsuit against Springfield Public Schools and the county sheriff after an April 2010 incident in which drug dogs from the Greene County Sheriff's Department conducted a random search of a science classroom in Central High School.

* A three-judge panel upheld a lower court's ruling that affirmed the right of the district to conduct such searches. Despite the decision, Burlison isn't convinced the search is constitutional, according to the Springfield News-Leader .

* In April 2010, Burlison's son was a freshman when two sheriff's deputies and a school police officer ordered students out of a science classroom. All backpacks and belongings were left in the room. The student alleged his backpack was completely zipped when he left it unattended. Nothing was found during the drug search.

* The student felt his backpack had been unzipped and searched, which is against the policy of the drug searches. Drug dogs only sniff around for drugs. Surveillance footage showed the search lasted around five minutes. Possessions are only to be searched if a dog makes two hits on the same personal property on school grounds.

* Burlison sued the district, superintendent and the Greene County sheriff. A lower court determined those people could not be held liable because none of those individuals actually performed the search. The courts determined policies already in place for drug searches are constitutional.

* School district attorney Ransom Ellis III told the News-Leader, "Certainly the district is extremely happy."

* Burlison countered to the media outlet, "I'm still of the opinion that what happened at the school is not constitutional and I'm not backing off that." The city councilman, who has divorced since the original lawsuit was filed, doesn't know what the next step is but he is consulting with the Rutherford Institute as to how to proceed.

* KYTV reveals the school district felt the federal appeals court "complimented the district's policies and procedures governing use of drug-detection dogs in its schools and methods used during the drug dog walk-through at Central High School."

* Burlison was first elected to the Springfield City Council as an at-large member in April 2007. He was re-elected four years later. He was married in 2004 and has eight children. Burlison is an assistant manager for a local business. He was honorably discharged from the U.S. Army after attaining the rank of sergeant.

William Browning, a lifelong Missouri resident, writes about local and state issues for the Yahoo! Contributor Network. Born in St. Louis, Browning earned his bachelor's degree in English from the University of Missouri. He currently resides in Branson.

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