I am writing today to announce the closure of the Michigan Messenger. After four years of operation in Michigan, the board of the American Independent News Network, has decided to shift publication of its news into a single site, The American Independent at Americanindependent.com. This is part of a shift in strategy, towards new forms [...]
An abstinence-only presentation provided to numerous school districts in Calhoun and Eaton Counties in October of this year provided false and misleading information to students about HIV, experts allege.
Two county registers of deeds filed a class action lawsuit Monday on behalf of Michigan’s 83 counties alleging that the Mortgage Electronic Registration Services owes millions of dollars in property title transfer taxes.
Despite evidence of the impact of mercury on children and public health, Michigan Attorney General Bill Schuette last month joined with 24 other state attorneys general in filing a lawsuit to scuttle new EPA regulations that would reduce mercury emissions from power plants.
The U.S. Dept. of Justice is considering whether to charge BP managers with manslaughter for their role in the Gulf of Mexico oil rig explosion that killed 11 and caused the biggest oil spill in U.S. history.
The Justice Dept. is looking at whether cost-cutting decisions by these managers warrant involuntary manslaughter or seaman’s manslaughter, which carries a penalty of up to ten years, Bloomberg reports.
Charging individuals would be significant to environmental safety cases because it might change behavior, said Jane Barrett, a law professor at the University of Maryland.
“They typically don’t prosecute employees of large corporations,” said Barrett, who spent 20 years prosecuting environmental crimes at the federal and state levels. “You’ve got to prosecute the individuals in order to maximize, and not lose, the deterrent effect.”
Federal officials are also said to be looking at whether BP CEO Tony Hayward and others were truthful in sworn testimony to Congress about the spill.
In a forthcoming article about the Gulf oil spill, former DOJ environmental crimes section chief David Uhlmann writes that it is important for the DOJ to pursue criminal charges against BP because criminal prosecution is a more powerful expression of societal condemnation of the negligence that caused the spill.
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