Veterans Affairs Has 346 Workers Who Do Only Union Work Washington Examiner A report by the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office found that an estimated 346 employees in the Department of Veterans Affairs spend all of their time "doing work on behalf of their union while drawing a federal salary," a practice known as "official time." Search for Biological Father Leads to an Execution in Arkansas The Intercept Gina Grimm always wondered about her biological parents. Then she found out that her father was Jack Jones Jr., a man on death row in Arkansas. "It truly opened a can of worms," she said. She traveled to Arkansas for his execution this week in a series of controversial lethal injections. What Bullets Do to Bodies Huffington Post A reporter shadowed Dr. Amy Goldberg of Temple University Hospital to report on the horrors that trauma surgeons confront every day while treating gunshot victims. America's Other Drug Problem ProPublica Every year nursing homes nationwide flush, burn or throw out tons of valuable prescription drugs. It's estimated that U.S. taxpayers, through Medicare, "spend hundreds of millions of dollars each year on drugs for nursing home patients — much of which literally go down the tubes." Audit Slams Janet Napolitano's University of California Administration Los Angeles Times A state audit faulted the administration of University of California President Janet Napolitano for overpaying top workers and failing to disclose that it had $175 million in budget reserve funds while it was seeking to raise tuition. Why Poverty Is Like a Disease Nautilus Poverty drove the writer of this article to success, and to investigate why. New evidence suggests the stresses associated with poverty affect how our bodies assemble themselves and maybe even how our genetic code is expressed. If this science holds up, it means that poverty is a collection of symptoms that are preventable, treatable—and even inheritable. The effects of poverty begin to look very much like the symptoms of a disease. People Are Smuggling Illicit, Delicious Butter Into Wisconsin Daily Beast Whenever Jean Smith leaves her home in Waukesha, Wisconsin, to visit relatives out of state, she'll stop in Nebraska to load up on blocks of Kerrygold butter, which is banned in "America's Dairyland." She's one of several suing over the state's restrictive, some say protectionist, butter law. "I just think it's a little goofy." |