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Sunday, November 2, 2014

Health specialist: Christie Ebola quarantine 'inappropriate'

Today's post is shared from hill.com

An Emory University health specialist slammed New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie's 21-day quarantine policy of health workers returning from West Africa who were exposed to Ebola.

“To infringe on their civil liberties for the sake of fighting a shadow or the bogeyman is absolutely inappropriate,” Sean Kaufman told radio host John Catsimatidis in an interview to air Sunday on "The Cats Roundtable” – AM 970 in New York.

Christie has faced backlash from a nurse in Maine who was quarantined outside a New Jersey airport after recently treating Ebola patients in Sierra Leone.

Kaci Hickox, the first person quarantined under New Jersey's strict anti-Ebola protocols, called her treatment "inhumane" and has since won court reprieve from the order.

"Any individual who is not showing signs or symptoms -- they are not contagious and they are not a risk," said Kaufman, a bio-security expert who oversaw infection control at Emory University Hospital when it treated the first two U.S. Ebola victims.

Kaufman said he was a "huge fan of Christie's leadership, but questioned his actions that stoke new fears about Ebola's possible spread in the United States.

“I wonder what Governor Christie would have said if nobody showed up to New Jersey after Hurricane [Sandy] because if you returned to New Jersey you'd be in quarantine for three weeks ... It’s not a leadership decision. It’s a management of fear,...

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Silver Buildings: New Buildings for Older People


Today's post is shared from nytimes.com/
SAN FRANCISCO — I HEARD about the new building for months before I saw it. Part of a leading medical center, its green architecture and design were getting a lot of attention, as was its integration of top-notch modern medicine with health and wellness spaces inspired by cultures from around the world. My father’s doctor had moved there, and driving to his appointment we looked forward to experiencing the cutting-edge new building firsthand.
Outside, I unloaded the walker and led my 82-year-old father through the sliding glass doors. Inside, there was a single bench made of recycled materials. I noticed it didn’t have the arm supports that a frail elderly person requires to safely sit down and get back up. It was a long trek to the right clinic and I was double-parked outside. Helping my father onto the bench, I said, “Wait here,” and hoped he would remember to do so long enough for me to park and return.
He nodded. We were used to this. It happened almost everywhere we went: at restaurants, the bank, the airport, department stores. Many of these places — our historic city hall, with its wide steps and renovated dome, the futuristic movie theater and the new clinic — were gorgeous.
The problem was that not one of them was set up to facilitate access by someone like my father.
That may have been intentional. A few years earlier, I’d heard about a new community center where the older...
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For Man in Ebola Virus Cleanup, a History of Fraud



Today's post is shared from nytimes.com/
The chief safety officer of the hazardous-materials company that cleaned the apartment of New York City’s first Ebola patient was, in a past career as a mortgage negotiator, accused of fraud in 2009 by the attorney general at the time, Andrew M. Cuomo.
In recent days, the safety officer, Sal Pane, has been the public face of the company, Bio-Recovery Corporation, which cleaned both the apartment of the patient, Dr. Craig Spencer, as well as a bowling alley that he had visited the night before he was taken to the hospital.
An investigation in 2009 by Mr. Cuomo’s office found that two mortgage companies run by Mr. Pane had deceived property owners and violated New York’s consumer protection laws. As a result of the investigation, a State Supreme Court judge in Manhattan in 2010 issued a permanent injunction against the illegal operations of Mr. Pane and his mortgage companies. He was also fined. The office of the current attorney general, Eric T. Schneiderman, discovered Mr. Pane’s past legal problems on Monday and alerted city officials.
City officials have said that they followed the standard vetting protocol for the cleanup contract given to Bio-Recovery Corporation, and that health officials had reviewed the company’s work and determined that it was successfully completed.
Mr. Pane, who acknowledged his past legal problems, said on Saturday that they had no bearing on his work as an employee for Bio-Recovery. The revelations were first...
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Shareholders, Disarmed by a Delaware Court

Today's post was shared by Take Justice Back and comes from www.nytimes.com

Who will hold corporate executives and directors accountable for wrongdoing?
Normally, regulators and prosecutors would be leading the charge. And while they have extracted big-dollar settlements from banks in the aftermath of the financial crisis, these supposed enforcers have been remarkably reluctant when it comes to pursuing high-level miscreants.
Hoping to achieve greater accountability wronged investors have filed many cases against top corporate officials, accusing them of breaching fiduciary duties and of other misdeeds. But even this enforcement mechanism is under attack, thanks to a recent decision by the Delaware Supreme Court.
In a proceeding last May, the court ruled that a company can adopt, without shareholder approval, bylaws requiring investors who file lawsuits against it to pay the company’s legal fees if the suit is unsuccessful. The court went so far as to say that a company’s “intent to deter litigation” might be a proper purpose for shifting legal fees to a plaintiff.
Because most companies are incorporated in Delaware, the state Supreme Court’s blessing of fee-shifting will result in fewer shareholder actions and less accountability, legal experts say.
“This is a nuclear weapon against shareholders,” said Jay Brown, a law professor at the University of Denver. “Delaware has already made it extraordinarily difficult to file successful lawsuits for breach of fiduciary duty. Now, in addition to a high...
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Chipotle workers say they work extra hours for no pay

Today's post was shared by Take Justice Back and comes from money.cnn.com


The fast food protests are working
The fast food protests are working
Chipotle workers are suing the burrito chain for making them work extra hours without pay.It is the latest example of workers accusing a fast food chain of so-called wage theft.
The class action lawsuits filed in Colorado and Minnesota in the last two months allege that Chipotle (CMG) routinely requires its hourly employees to work "off the clock" without pay.
The workers filed written statements describing how the restaurant's time keeping system would automatically punch them out at 12:30 a.m., even though they had to stay later to finish cleaning up.
Demarkus Hobbs, who worked at a Chipotle in Minnesota for about a year, said in one lawsuit filed earlier this month that he was not paid for "several hours" of work each week.
"If I complained about not being paid for all of the hours that I worked, Chipotle would threaten me with termination or would punish me by cutting my hours," Hobbs said in his statement.
If you work at Chipotle and you are not being paid for all the hours you work, write to us.
Employees claim it was part of an unwritten policy to save money on payroll budgets and that store managers felt pressure to make workers stay late.
Leah Turner, who worked as a manager at a Chipotle in Colorado, said her superiors made it clear that she could be fired if her workers did not punch out at the end of their designated shift.
"It was my understanding that we had to work off the...
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Saturday, November 1, 2014

Pets Allowed



The author takes an alpaca to the drugstore. There’s a lot of confusion about what emotional-support animals can legally do.

The author takes an alpaca to the drugstore. There’s a lot of confusion 
about what emotional-support animals can legally do. 
Credit Photograph by Robin Siegel

The author discusses "Service-Dogs" and "Emotional-Support Animals" [ESA]. Today's interesting post is shared from newyorker.com

 What a wonderful time it is for the scammer, the conniver, and the cheat: the underage drinkers who flash fake I.D.s, the able-bodied adults who drive cars with handicapped license plates, the parents who use a phony address so that their child can attend a more desirable public school, the customers with eleven items who stand in the express lane. The latest group to bend the law is pet owners.
Take a look around. See the St. Bernard slobbering over the shallots at Whole Foods? Isn’t that a Rottweiler sitting third row, mezzanine, at Carnegie Hall? As you will have observed, an increasing number of your neighbors have been keeping company with their pets in human-only establishments, cohabiting with them in animal-unfriendly apartment buildings and dormitories, and taking them (free!) onto airplanes—simply by claiming that the creatures are their licensed companion animals and are necessary to their mental well-being. No government agency keeps track of such figures, but in 2011 the National Service Animal Registry, a commercial enterprise that sells certificates, vests, and badges for helper animals, signed up twenty-four hundred emotional-support animals. Last year, it registered eleven thousand.
What about the mental well-being of everyone else? One person’s emotional support can be...
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Ebola Law: The Newly Emerging Practice Area

The newest legal practice area is Ebola Law. Like the rapidly developing infectious disease the legal ramifications of Ebola are quickly emerging. Issues from medical treatment, lost time payments, medical and product liability and false imprisonment are now being recognized as areas requiring legal expertise. Today's post is share from the abajournal.com
Is an employer liable if a worker gets infected with Ebola on a business trip? Can companies restrict employee travel to Africa, or can they require it? Does a company have to hold a job for an employee who is quarantined? What is the potential liability for a pharmaceutical company developing an Ebola vaccine?
Those are the types of questions that inspired Reed Smith to launch a Global Ebola Task Force consisting of about 20 lawyers from different disciplines to address Ebola legal issues. A press release is here, while the Washington Post, the Washingtonian and NJBiz.com have stories.
The lawyer leading the task force is Patrick Bradley, a commercial litigator with a focus on aviation and products liability. He told NJBiz.com that frequent questions involve companies that want to restrict or require travel to Africa. Companies with corporate jets want to know whether they have to question everyone who boards their aircraft. Airlines are also concerned about the standard of care that must be exercised when questioning passengers, and when passengers can be turned away.
The questions aren’t simple, nor are the answers, Bradley told the Washington Post. “Safety and common sense are paramount, but they’re also guided by World Health Organization directives, and each industry has its own regulatory overlay as well,” he said.
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