Restaurant workers and others seeking relief through OSHA and Congress

The Kansas magistrate judge who authorized a police raid of the Marion County Record newsroom over its probe into a local restaurateur’s drunken-driving record has her own hidden history of driving under the influence. Judge Laura Viar, who was appointed on Jan. 1 to fill a vacant 8th Judicial District magistrate seat, was arrested at least twice for DUI in two different Kansas counties in 2012, a Wichita Eagle investigation found. She was the lead prosecutor for Morris County at the time. Viar’s DUI history could face scrutiny because the warrant she approved for the controversial raid came in response to the Marion County Record digging into the DUI history of restaurant owner Kari Newell. The Viar-authorized raid came after Newell complained about the newspaper’s investigation into her criminal background. Marion County Attorney Joel Ensey said Wednesday that the warrant was ordered with “insufficient evidence” to establish a connection between the materials seized and the alleged crime. It’s unclear whether a judicial nominating commission that selected Viar for the magistrate position knew about her arrests and diversion. Members of the commission did not return calls from Eagle and Kansas City Star reporters. She would have been required to disclose both arrests in her application.

The only woman on the Republican debate stage debates how to run as a woman.

Bolts invited three organizers in Arkansas, Idaho, and Ohio for a roundtable to discuss the attacks on ballot initiatives they are each fighting in their states, and lessons they’ve learned.

The conclusion dashes hopes that LK-99 — a compound of copper, lead, phosphorus and oxygen — marked the discovery of the first superconductor that works at room temperature and ambient pressure. Instead, studies have shown that impurities in the material — in particular, copper sulfide — were responsible for the sharp drops in electrical resistivity and partial levitation over a magnet, which looked similar to properties exhibited by superconductors.

Francesca Gino, a prominent professor at Harvard Business School known for researching dishonesty and unethical behavior, has been accused of submitting work that contained falsified results. Gino has authored dozens of captivating studies in the field of behavioral science — consulting for some of the world's biggest companies like Goldman Sachs and Google, as well as dispensing advice on news outlets, like The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and even NPR. But over the past two weeks, several people, including a colleague, came forward with claims that Gino tampered with data in at least four papers. Gino is currently on administrative leave. Harvard Business School declined to comment on when that decision was made as well as the allegations in general.

Rents in New York City are among the highest in the country and rising. According to a report from brokerage firm Douglas Elliman, median rents in Manhattan reached a record high in May of $4,395 per month. Meanwhile, only a handful of residential units in the city are rent-controlled, subject to tight limits on increases in rent. Roughly a third of New York’s housing stock qualifies for a decades-old regulatory regime known as rent stabilization, however, which comes with more modest limits on rent increases and a host of other tenant protections. This week, we highlight cert petitions that ask the court to consider, among other things, whether New York’s recently amended rent-stabilization law is, in effect, a “taking” of landlords’ property without “just compensation” in violation of the Fifth Amendment.

New questions have emerged about the fatal police shooting of 27-year-old Eddie Irizarry in North Philadelphia this week after the Police Department changed its narrative of the events leading up to his death. At the scene of the shooting Monday, police first said Irizarry emerged from his car after a traffic stop with a knife in his hand and “lunged” at police, before an officer shot him multiple times, killing him. But on Tuesday night, the department offered a new and different account of the shooting, saying Irizarry did not flee the traffic stop, never lunged at officers with a weapon, and was seated in his car when they shot him.

The health-insurance claims company founded by lawyer John H. Ruiz, a top financial booster of University of Miami athletics, faces another legal challenge after a Miami healthcare provider filed a lawsuit last week saying that Ruiz’s company, LifeWallet, owes it nearly $67 million. The civil action comes after LifeWallet acknowledged earlier this month that the publicly traded company is under investigation by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and has been subpoenaed by a grand jury convened in the Southern District of Florida. A Miami Herald investigation last month first reported the parallel probes and issues with the company’s financial filings with the SEC. Cano Health is simultaneously being sued by LifeWallet. Cano is itself struggling. The primary healthcare provider, which caters to seniors covered by Medicare and private insurers, said in its quarterly filing with the SEC that it might not be able to continue operating and that it would be firing nearly 700 employees to cut costs. In its suit filed last Thursday, Cano alleges LifeWallet “is a sham and effectively a Ponzi scheme” that has made “misrepresentations” in contract agreements between the two companies. Cano argues that the company, which was founded under the name MSP Recovery, has used the value of health insurance claims it obtained from Cano and other companies to “prop up an absurdly over-inflated valuation.”

A man from Somerset accused of harassing women in a gimp suit has been banned from wriggling on the floor and from wearing BDSM gear ahead of a trial in October.

“Rent stabilization is essential to ensure that tenants… can continue calling Montgomery County their homes. Families and children cannot thrive if they are concerned about being pushed out.”

West Virginia University is being gutted, and it’s a preview for what’s in store for higher education.

After nearly two years of litigation, UChicago settled claims it conspired with top colleges including Brown and Yale to limit financial aid packages.

For the last year, reporter Rob Perez has been investigating Native land dispossession in Hawaii. His story starts long before in Guam, where his family had its own brush with land takings.

It's been six years. Time to get a new hobby.

More than 8 in 10 people charged by state troopers since they began helping Austin police have been people of color. In Southeast Austin, a neighborhood president calls it “outright racial profiling.”

When a north-central Wisconsin news site reported that a businessman had uttered a homophobic slur, he sued, claiming defamation. The legal bills are piling up.

The Guardian has identified a trainee nurse and reported US air force reservist called Bailey Ross as the proprietor of a white nationalist publisher in South Dakota. Ross was also a paid-up member of a white nationalist organization that marched at Charlottesville while enlisted in the United States Coast Guard. Ross’s company, Agartha Publishing, is part of a wave of extremist publishers using mainstream e-commerce platforms such as Amazon to sell lavishly repackaged fascist and anti-communist books. The Guardian contacted Bailey Ross via email and a person who lives at the same address via text message to ask for comment, but received no immediate response. After the request was sent, however, Agartha’s account on the X platform, formerly Twitter, blocked this reporter’s account and was set to private, meaning only existing followers could see its tweets.

Democrats are touting economic recovery heading into the 2024 elections, and liberal pundits are claiming that “Bidenomics” is working and those who disagree are disillusioned or ruthlessly partisan. But the country’s impressive economic growth betrays the reality on the ground: Millions of Americans are being left behind. Yes, those White House press releases and Treasury Department fact sheets are right: Broad economic indicators like gross domestic product and unemployment have markedly improved. Inflation is generally coming down, too. “‘Bidenomics’ is working,” Biden said earlier this summer. “When I took office, the pandemic was raging and our economy was reeling, supply chains were broken, millions of people unemployed, hundreds of thousands of small businesses on the verge of closing after so many had already closed. Today, the U.S. has had the highest economic growth rate, leading the world economies since the pandemic.” But data released late last month show food insecurity at its highest level since Biden took office, and average financial hardship in 2023 is worse than it was over the last three years. In other words, “Bidenomics,” the president’s economic plan to grow the economy “from the middle out and the bottom up,” has been accompanied by a humanitarian crisis. This is a disaster of Democrats’ own making. Aid measures had previously softened the blow of the COVID-19 pandemic, and Democrats vowed to make much of that aid permanent by enacting a robust social agenda. That agenda never materialized, and the government instead cut off the temporary aid programs — leaving many millions of Americans struggling to stay afloat.

Nichole Maks, the woman suspected of killing her 79-year-old roommate, allegedly tried to pour diet Mountain Dew soda all over her body in attempt to erase DNA evidence, according to an arrest affidavit.