The Obama administration continued to shake up the agency that oversees oil and natural gas drilling, announcing a plan Wednesday to create separate offices to promote energy development and enforce safety.
Investigators from the Mine Safety and Health Administration today briefed reporters on what they believe caused the Upper Big Branch mine explosion that killed 29 in West Virginia last April.
Their working theory about the blast confirmed much of what we’ve already reported in our stories this morning and last Friday.
Suicides among soldiers serving on active duty decreased modestly in 2010 for the first time in six years, even as the Army National Guard and Reserve saw a major increase in the number of soldiers taking their own lives.
For those who may have missed it, Justice Antonin Scalia recently expressed his view that neither women nor gays are protected against discrimination under the 14th amendment of the Constitution. The statement was made in an interview this month published in the California Lawyer.
The first great irony in the Teresa Chambers case is that the former and almost certainly future chief of the U.S. Park Police has become one of America’s most successful whistleblowers without ever having intended to blow the whistle in the first place. The second is that although Chambers’s recent victory in a seven-year legal saga is a triumph for truth in government, the battle also highlighted how hard it is to protect officials who dare to speak openly and plainly to the public.
Pilots are increasingly encountering a high-tech hazard: potentially blinding laser beams. The number of incidents nationally in which people pointed lasers at planes and helicopters soared 86 percent last year, from 1,527 in 2009 to 2,836 in 2010, the Federal Aviation Administration announced Wednesday.
In the new executive order, which Rena Steinzor wrote about yesterday, President Obama stated that agencies must “propose or adopt a regulation only upon a reasoned determination that its benefits justify its costs.” This isn’t a revolutionary requirement; public-health agencies are already required to demonstrate cost-effectiveness of proposed regulations.
A new peer-reviewed study from Michigan State University researchers lends rare quantitative support to the idea that green building can lead to greater worker health and productivity. The study has several limitations, however, and the researchers characterized its results as “preliminary.”
