Washington – After a narrow vote in the Senate, the so-called “blacklisting” rule that sought to force federal contractors to disclose previous labor-law violations is all but eliminated.

Washington – Mandatory guidelines for drug testing of federal employees have been updated to include testing for four semi-synthetic opioids, the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration recently announced.

Washington — The White House Office of Management and Budget has launched an initiative designed to enhance workplace safety and health – and, in turn, reduce injuries – among federal employees.

Washington — Federal employees need more comprehensive guidance from the Office of Personnel Management before they return to the workplace amid the COVID-19 pandemic, House Democrats contended during a June 25 virtual hearing convened by the House Government Operations Subcommittee.

Washington — OSHA will conduct a free, three-day training event for federal employees who are responsible for their agencies’ workplace safety and health.

Washington — To address a sharp increase in assaults against public transit workers, the Federal Transit Administration has published a proposed directive tasking public transit agencies with monitoring safety risks more closely.

Washington — New bipartisan legislation is intended to better protect workers and visitors in federal buildings.

Washington – The Advocates for Highway and Auto Safety has announced its opposition to any increases in federal truck size and weight limits due to concerns about alleged flaws in an upcoming government study on the increases.

Washington — Federal action aimed at easing restrictions on marijuana under the Controlled Substances Act “may have considerable negative consequences for highway safety and safety-sensitive industries,” the American Trucking Associations claims.

Washington — Federal action aimed at easing restrictions on marijuana under the Controlled Substances Act could jeopardize federally required drug testing for workers in safety-sensitive jobs, the National Transportation Safety Board warns.

Grass Fed Foods is dedicated to providing healthy, nutritious foods made with clean ingredients, ensuring that consumers have access to food that supports a healthy lifestyle. 

Tantos is breaking pasta out of the confines of a dish and putting it at the intersection of where pasta meets snacking. What makes Tantos interesting is that it's like eating pasta but with a form & texture like a puffed snack.

The product line pairs hearty portions of classic flavors with various doughs, from flaky pastry to buttermilk biscuits, which offers home-style taste and on-the-go convenience.

As the Federal Reserve's rate cut impacts the flooring sector, industry veterans demonstrate adaptability. Dan Frierson's 60-year journey at The Dixie Group showcases innovative leadership, while Starnet's long-standing members highlight stability. Our October issue also explores retail innovations, installation techniques, and pricing strategies, reflecting the industry's multifaceted nature and ability to navigate economic shifts.

The post Record Federal Grants to States Keep Federal Share of State Budgets High was curated by information for practice.

Disaster SNAP (D-SNAP) and other federal nutrition programs play a critical role in mitigating spikes in food insecurity during such challenging times. This is due to their ability to expedite and strengthen the response to disasters of various types.

The post Leveraging Federal Nutrition Resources for Disaster Recovery was curated by information for practice.

Singer R. Kelly, already facing sexual abuse charges brought by Illinois prosecutors, was arrested in Chicago Thursday on a federal grand jury indictment listing 13 counts including sex crimes and obstruction of justice.

The new Louisiana requirement that the Ten Commandments be displayed in every public classroom by Jan. 1 was temporarily blocked Tuesday. The judge said the law is "unconstitutional on its face."

Putin's Annual Address to the Federal Assembly is scheduled for September 30. Kremlin sources say it will become even more historic and globally important than the 2014 address for the return of Crimea. Mass media and experts make their own suggestions about the content of Putin's speech that he is going to deliver to the Federal Assembly on September 30. There are a number of versions:

On Thursday, February 29, Russian President Vladimir Putin delivered his annual Address to the Federal Assembly. In the beginning of the speech, he touched on the topics of the special military operation in Ukraine, relations with the West, strategic stability, and later proceeded to announce a number of new national projects, changes in economic and social sphere. About special military operation Putin recalled that 2024 marks the tenth anniversary of the "legendary Russian Spring.” "The love that the people living in Crimea and new regions share for their homeland evokes pride," Vladimir Putin said.

As AI regulations in the US have evolved to be more supportive of commercial use, retailers and malls are increasingly adopting technologies that were once the domain of law enforcement and federal agencies. This shift is driven by the need for enhanced security and operational efficiency, with many turning to advanced video analytics and facial intelligence.

[International] :
The U.S. Federal Reserve has cut its key interest rate by a quarter of a percentage point, the second reduction this year.  After a two-day meeting of the Federal Open Market Committee, the Fed said in a statement Thursday that it has decided to lower the target for its key lending rate to the range of ...

[more...]

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has...

Attorney General Merrick Garland ordered a pause on federal executions Thursday while the Justice Department reviews policies and procedures on capital punishment.; Credit: Win McNamee/Getty Images

Attorney General Merrick Garland has imposed a moratorium on scheduling federal executions, the Department of Justice announced on Thursday. The department will review its policies and procedures on capital punishment, following a wave of federal executions carried out under the Trump administration.

In a memo to the Justice Department, Garland justified his decision to halt the deeply controversial practice, citing factors including its capricious application and outsized impact on people of color.

"The Department of Justice must ensure that everyone in the federal criminal justice system is not only afforded the rights guaranteed by the Constitution and laws of the United States, but is also treated fairly and humanely. That obligation has special force in capital cases," Garland said in the memo.

"Serious concerns have been raised about the continued use of the death penalty across the country, including arbitrariness in its application, disparate impact on people of color, and the troubling number of exonerations in capital and other serious cases," he added. "Those weighty concerns deserve careful study and evaluation by lawmakers."

Under former President Donald Trump, the federal government carried out its first executions in a generation last year, with 13 inmates put to death in Trump's final year in office. That included an unprecedented number of federal killings carried out in the last days of his single-term presidency, bucking a nearly century-and-a-half practice of pausing capital punishments during the presidential exchange of power.

Then-Attorney General William Barr said the executions were being carried out in cases of "staggeringly brutal murders." Civil rights activists had rallied to spare the lives of those on death row. Concerns of how humanely the sentences could be carried out, as well as the recent exonerations of a number of death row inmates, were major factors in the demonstrations to cease state-sanctioned killings.

"The Department must take care to scrupulously maintain our commitment to fairness and humane treatment in the administration of existing federal laws governing capital sentences," Garland said in his memo on Thursday.

President Biden, who nominated Garland to the top law enforcement post, opposes capital punishment. During his campaign, Biden pledged to pass legislation to end the federal death penalty.

Some congressional Democrats have been working on such legislation, but no action has been taken. Some progressives and activists opposed to capital punishment had been expressing frustration that they have not seen more movement on the issue from Biden.

"A moratorium on federal executions is one step in the right direction, but it is not enough," said Ruth Friedman, director of the Federal Capital Habeas Project. "We know the federal death penalty system is marred by racial bias, arbitrariness, over-reaching, and grievous mistakes by defense lawyers and prosecutors that make it broken beyond repair."

Friedman said Biden should commute all federal death sentences, warning that a pause alone "will just leave these intractable issues unremedied and pave the way for another unconscionable bloodbath like we saw last year."

This content is from Southern California Public Radio. View the original story at SCPR.org.

Although the federal program that sets fuel economy standards for cars and light-duty trucks has helped reduce U.S. dependence on imported oil and lower emissions of greenhouse gases, changes to the program could further cut the nations petroleum dependence and provide more flexibility to carmakers.

The analysis used by federal agencies to set standards for fuel economy and greenhouse gas emissions for new U.S. light-duty vehicles -- passenger cars and light trucks -- from 2017 to 2025 was thorough and of high caliber overall, says a new report from the National Research Council.

The increase in the number of children from low-income families who are receiving federal disability benefits for speech and language disorders over the past decade parallels the rise in the prevalence of these disorders among all U.S. children, says a new report by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.

Efforts to convert civilian research reactors from weapon-grade highly enriched uranium (HEU) to low enriched uranium (LEU) fuels are taking significantly longer than anticipated, says a congressionally mandated report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.

A profusion of biotechnology products is expected over the next five to 10 years, and the number and diversity of new products has the potential to overwhelm the U.S. regulatory system, says a new report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.

Efforts to control brucellosis in the Greater Yellowstone Area (GYA) should focus on reducing the risk of transmission from elk, which are now viewed as the primary source of the infection in new cases occurring in cattle and domestic bison, says a new report by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.

A new report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine offers detailed recommendations to guide federal statistical agencies in creating a new entity that would enable them to combine data from multiple sources in order to provide more relevant, timely, and detailed statistics – for example, on the unemployment rate or the rate of violent crime.

Despite progress in recent decades, more than 10,000 alcohol-impaired driving fatalities occur each year in the U.S. To address this persistent problem, stakeholders -- from transportation systems to alcohol retailers to law enforcement -- should work together to implement policies and systems to eliminate these preventable deaths, says a new report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.

Current federal safety regulations for small distribution systems used for propane and other liquefied petroleum gases (LPGs) should be improved for clarity, efficiency, enforceability, and applicability to risk, says a new report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.

The nation’s highways and roads connect almost 330 million Americans and are important to both commerce and national security. Two-thirds of total passenger travel in the country moves along this vast network of roads, as does 60 percent of the weight and almost three-quarters of the value of total U.S. freight transported.

To more accurately quantify disaster-related deaths, injuries, and illnesses, the Federal Emergency Management Agency and other agencies supporting disaster response should adopt a uniform national framework of data collection approaches and methods for distinguishing direct from indirect disaster deaths, says a new congressionally mandated report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.

Sexually transmitted infections (STIs) impose billions of dollars in medical costs in the U.S., but STI prevention and control is chronically underfunded, stigmatized, and siloed from efforts to promote overall health and well-being, says a new report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.

A new report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine offers principles and practices for federal statistical agencies to support their invaluable role of providing widely available, trustworthy, relevant, accurate, and timely government statistics.

To address enduring and evolving nuclear threats, the U.S. needs a higher prioritized and more integrated program for monitoring, detecting, and verifying nuclear test explosions, nuclear weapon stockpiles, and the production of fissile material, says a new report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.

Ensuring access to high-quality primary care for all people in the United States will require reforming payment models, expanding telehealth services, and supporting integrated, team-based care, says a new report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.

Scientific thinking and knowledge are essential to democracy and the workforce, but science education is not the national priority it needs to be. The White House, with leadership from OSTP, should encourage federal agencies, state and local governments, and others to focus resources on increasing the quality and accessibility of science education.

Congress should consider requiring all projects that are candidates for federal funding undergo resilience assessments to account for natural hazards and the changing risks stemming from climate change.

A new report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine makes recommendations for how federal agencies can improve the transparency and reproducibility of federal statistics — such as education, labor, health, income, and justice statistics.

A range of organizations across the tech ecosystem — tech companies, colleges and universities, professional societies, and government agencies — should take steps to improve the representation of women of color in tech fields and careers.

To maintain U.S. global leadership and meet societal challenges — including generating medical advances, furthering the energy transition, and making food and water safer and more sustainable — new investments, collaborations, and educational practices in the chemical engineering field are needed.

As U.S. life expectancy falls and the nation struggles to achieve health outcomes on par with other high-income countries, the VA and HHS should collaborate to create a national Center for Whole Health Innovation to support, scale, and spread whole health care nationally across health systems.

In an interview with ETCIO, Shalini Warrier, Executive Director, Federal Bank shares how their Digital CoE fosters a multi-disciplinary approach to banking, how it works together with the business to identify new opportunities, tenets of a bank-fintech partnership and how technology is at the fulcrum of every banking innovation.

Puffed and extruded snacks can range from cheese snacks, to corn chips and pork rinds, to puffs, to veggie chips.

Dunkin' recently released its Dunkfetti Donut and Stuffed Bagel Minis, in December 2020, and its Southwest Veggie Power Breakfast Sandwich, in January 2021.

Puffed and extruded snacks have been a staple in pantries for many years. Recently, however, manufacturers have been upping their game, using clean-label ingredients and a variety of different flavors to attract new consumers to the category.

Puffed and extruded snacks never go out of style. Top brands like Cheetos and Fritos will probably always will be staples in many Americans' homes.