By: Ari Phillips, Source: Think Progress. Duke Energy plead guilty to nine federal misdemeanors related to illegally discharging pollution from coal ash ponds in North Carolina on Thursday afternoon, and agreed to pay $102 million in fines and restitution. Federal prosecutors charged Duke with the nine violations of the Clean Water Act in February,asserting that

White officer followed African American Ernest Satterwhite, 68, home last year and ensuing shooting was caught on dashcam By: Associated Press in SC, Source: The Guardian. When a white police officer in South Carolina chased a black man nine miles by car, then shot him to death in his driveway last year, the shooting apparently

Source. Man-made activities like fracking have triggered a sharp increase in earthquakes since 2009 in the central and eastern U.S., according to a new report from the United States Geological Survey. “The increase has been linked to industrial operations that dispose of wastewater by injecting it into deep wells,” the USGS said. Scientists have identified

By: Binyamin Appelbaum, Source: The New York Times. WASHINGTON — As the players here remake the nation’s vast regulatory system, they have been grappling with a subject that is more the province of poets and philosophers than bureaucrats: what is the value of a human life? The answer determines how much spending the government should

Children with disabilities suffer abuse by teachers at a much higher rate than typical kids. And when they’re non-verbal, parents are left wondering what happened. By: Elizabeth Picciuto, Source: The Daily Beast. In June, Texas became the first state in the U.S. to require cameras in certain classrooms—specifically those that serve primarily students with special

This term, the Supreme Court will consider an outrageous case of prosecutorial misconduct. But will it do anything about it? A curious thing happened at the trial of Timothy Tyrone Foster, a young black man accused of killing an elderly white woman: Every black prospective juror was dismissed. Foster was convicted, and sentenced to death,