Biscayne Park, Florida police and police chief Raimundo Atesiano

Even in 2018, it’s a shock to actually hear cops admit to straight-up framing black suspects as a matter of policy. That’s exactly what’s happened in Biscayne Park. In June, federal prosecutors unsealed an indictment alleging that Raimundo Atesiano, the former police chief of the tiny Miami-Dade town, had intentionally framed one black teenager for a series of burglaries in order to close out every unsolved robbery in Biscayne Park. His cops were told to frame random black people for crimes, according to three other officers — Charlie Dayoub, Raul Fernandez, and Guillermo Ravelo — who have already pleaded guilty to various crimes.

Now the teen who was framed in that case, known as “T.D.” in most court records, has filed a federal lawsuit against Atesiano, the three cops, and the Village of Biscayne Park alleging that the group violated his civil rights and maliciously prosecuted him.

“The defendants were part of a conspiracy to satisfy the Village that crime was being eliminated,” the suit […]

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Credit: illustration by Thomas Paterson

Seven years ago, when Heather Hall was informed by her oncologist that her kidney cancer had spread to the liver, she initially assumed she had just months to live. “I’d been on chemotherapy for a while, but they’d done a CT scan and found three new tumours,” she says. “But they then said that, because the tumours were relatively small, they could try to lengthen my prognosis by removing them with ablation.”

Hall underwent a course of microwave ablation, a minimally invasive treatment where specialists known as interventional radiologists use hollow needles to deliver intense, focused doses of radiation to heat each tumour until it is destroyed. While ablation technologies – they also commonly include radiofrequency ablation and cryoablation, which destroys tumours using intense cold – are not tackling the underlying cause of the disease, their impact can be enormous as they relieve pain and often prolong survival for many years, all at a low cost.

Polystyrene foam contains potentially harmful chemicals that can leach into food and drinks.
Credit: Planet Takeout / Flickr

The next time you use a plastic container or bottle, you might want to look at the little number inside the triangle recycling symbol.

In a report issued last month, the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) said that plastics with the recycling codes 3 (phthalates), 6 (styrene) and 7 (bisphenols) should be avoided unless they are labeled as “biobased” or “greenware,” which do not contain these chemicals.

Chief Judge Beryl Howell
Credit: Law.com

A widely used loophole for funneling secret “dark money” into political ads closed quietly last weekend, as a federal judge concluded it thwarted Congress’ intent to have broad disclosure of political money.

Chief Judge Beryl Howell, of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, threw out a regulation adopted by the Federal Election Commission in 1980. The rule said that “non-political” groups, such as 501(c) nonprofit organizations, could ignore a disclosure law if donors’ contributions were earmarked for specific advertisements — an exception that wasn’t in the law passed by Congress.

Howell’s decision was issued Friday evening.

She listed ways in which the regulation undercut the transparency principles of campaign finance law: “including informing the electorate, deterring corruption, and enforcing bans on foreign contributions being used to buy access and influence to American political officials.”

At Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, the plaintiff in the lawsuit, Executive Director Noah Bookbinder, said, “This case closes one of the loopholes that has allowed the system to get out of control, and […]

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The E.P.A. and Mr. Wright’s team at Dow reached an agreement to clean waterways near Midland, Mich., in 2010. River decontamination is progressing, and officials cannot yet say when it will be complete. Credit: Sammy Jo Hester/Mlive

The lawyer nominated to run the Superfund toxic cleanup program is steeped in the complexities of restoring polluted rivers and chemical dumps. He spent more than a decade on one of the nation’s most extensive cleanups, one involving Dow Chemical’s sprawling headquarters in Midland, Mich.

But while he led Dow’s legal strategy there, the chemical giant was accused by regulators, and in one case a Dow engineer, of submitting disputed data, misrepresenting scientific evidence and delaying cleanup, according to internal documents and court records as well as interviews with more than a dozen people involved in the project.

The lawyer, Peter C. Wright, was nominated in March by President Trump to be assistant administrator at the Environmental Protection Agency overseeing the Superfund program, which was created decades ago to […]

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