The New York Times reports: Sheri Farley walks with a limp. The only job she could hold would be one where she does not have to stand or sit longer than 20 minutes, otherwise pain screams down her spine and up her legs.

“Damaged goods,” Ms. Farley describes herself, recalling how she recently overheard a child whispering to her mother about whether the “crippled lady” was a meth addict.

For about five years, Ms. Farley, 45, stood alongside about a dozen other workers, spray gun in hand, gluing together foam cushions for chairs and couches sold under brand names like Broyhill, Ralph Lauren and Thomasville. Fumes from the glue formed a yellowish fog inside the plant, and Ms. Farley’s doctors say that breathing them in eventually ate away at her nerve endings, resulting in what she and her co-workers call “dead foot.”

A chemical she handled — known as n-propyl bromide, or nPB — is also used by tens of thousands of workers in auto body shops, dry cleaners and high-tech electronics manufacturing plants across the nation. Medical researchers, government officials and even chemical companies that once manufactured nPB have warned for over a decade that it causes neurological damage and infertility when inhaled at low levels over long periods, but its use has grown 15-fold in the past six years.

Such hazards demonstrate the difficulty, despite decades of effort, of ensuring that Americans can breathe clean air on the job. Even as worker after worker fell ill, records from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration show that managers at Royale Comfort Seating, where Ms. Farley was employed, repeatedly exposed gluers to nPB levels that exceeded levels federal officials considered safe, failed to provide respirators and turned off fans meant to vent fumes.

But the story of the rise of nPB and the decline of Ms. Farley’s health is much more than the tale of one company, or another chapter in the national debate over the need for more, or fewer, government regulations. Instead, it is a parable about the law of unintended consequences.

It shows how an Environmental Protection Agency program meant to prevent the use of harmful chemicals fostered the proliferation of one, and how a hard-fought victory by OSHA in controlling one source of deadly fumes led workers to be exposed to something worse — a phenomenon familiar enough to be lamented in government parlance as “regrettable substitution.”

It demonstrates how businesses at once both suffer from and exploit the fitful and disjointed way that the government tries to protect workers, and why occupational illnesses have proved so hard to prevent.

And it highlights a startling fact: OSHA, the watchdog agency that many Americans love to hate and industry often faults as overzealous, has largely ignored long-term threats. Partly out of pragmatism, the agency created by President Richard M. Nixon to give greater attention to health issues has largely done the opposite.

OSHA devotes most of its budget and attention to responding to here-and-now dangers rather than preventing the silent, slow killers that, in the end, take far more lives. Over the past four decades, the agency has written new standards with exposure limits for 16 of the most deadly workplace hazards, including lead, asbestos and arsenic. But for the tens of thousands of other dangerous substances American workers handle each day, employers are largely left to decide what exposure level is safe. [Continue reading…]

Over a decade of war, a massively bloated defense budget, the creation of the Department of Homeland Security along with cancerous growth of the intelligence community — all have been justified on the basis of a miniscule threat to American lives posed by a handful of terrorists.

At the same time, the deaths of tens of thousands of American workers, along with the incapacitation of hundreds of thousands more, is all regarded as part of the price of doing business.

When it comes to national security, no expense is spared, but when it comes to commerce, all is subservient to the pursuit of profit.

Chronic ailments caused by toxic workplace air — black lung, stonecutter’s disease, asbestosis, grinder’s rot, pneumoconiosis — incapacitate more than 200,000 workers in the United States annually. More than 40,000 Americans die prematurely each year from exposure to toxic substances at work — 10 times as many as those who die from the refinery explosions, mine collapses and other accidents that grab most of the news media attention.

Occupational illnesses and injuries like Ms. Farley’s cost the American economy roughly $250 billion per year because of medical expenses and lost productivity, according to government data analyzed by J. Paul Leigh, an economist at the University of California, Davis, more than the cost of diabetes or chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. Roughly 40 percent of medical expenses from workplace hazards, or about $27 billion a year, is paid by public programs like Medicare and Medicaid.

Covington & Burling lawyers Lanny Breuer and Eric Holder on federal sabbatical.

The New York Times reports: Coming off a grueling four-year stint at the Justice Department, Lanny A. Breuer is poised to make a soft landing in the private sector.

Covington & Burling, a prominent law firm, plans to announce on Thursday that Mr. Breuer will be its vice chairman. The firm created the role especially for Mr. Breuer, a Washington insider who most recently led the Justice Department’s investigation into the financial crisis.

For Mr. Breuer, who will now shift to defending large corporations, Covington is familiar turf. He previously spent nearly two decades there.

“There’s a strong emotional pull to the firm,” Mr. Breuer, who departed as the Justice Department’s criminal division chief on March 1, said in an interview. “It’s my professional home.”

Mr. Breuer is expected to earn about $4 million in his first year at Covington. In addition to representing clients, he will serve as an ambassador of sorts for the firm as it seeks to grow overseas.

The move is his latest turn through Washington’s revolving door, the symbolic portal connecting government service and private practice. Mr. Breuer, who began his career as an assistant district attorney in Manhattan and later represented President Bill Clinton during his impeachment hearings, is joining Covington for the third time.

Like Mr. Breuer, Covington operates at the nexus of Washington and Wall Street. It has represented several financial clients facing federal scrutiny, including the New York Stock Exchange, JPMorgan Chase and the former chief executive of IndyMac.

And perhaps when Breuer’s former boss Attorney General Eric Holder steps down, he too will return to his former employer, Covington, and there, along with servicing the interests of Wall Street, they can assist the law firm’s other famous clients like Xe Services (Blackwater), Phillip Morris, and Halliburton.

If you’re not familiar with Breuer, watch The Untouchables to learn about his role in letting Wall Street off the hook following the 2008 financial crisis.

When a company’s brand becomes so successful that their brand name turns into a generic term — like Xerox or Aspirin — I would have thought that such companies would welcome this measure of brand dominance.

Apparently not.

Google, like many companies before, has its legal jackboots marching around the world trying to police where and how people use the word google and its variants. In the latest instance, it wants to dictate how Swedes define “ogooglebar”.

Wall Street Journal: The global war over trademarks has pitted two heavyweights – Sweden and Google – against each other in a language-related spat. And, it appears the search engine has the upper hand.

Google, the increasingly pervasive search engine and Web service provider, has apparently weighed in on Sweden’s right to formalize the word “ogooglebar,” or “ungoogleable.” According to the Swedish Language Council, the government agency was pressured by Google to remove it from a list of new words because of copyright concerns.

The issue stems back to the council’s decision last year to include “ogooglebar” on the list alongside other Swedish neologisms, including “emoji” (an animated symbol used to express emotions in electronic text); “grexit” (Greece’s potential exit from the euro zone); and “kopimism” (a religious and political ideology focused on freedom of information.)

“Ogooglebar” refers to something “impossible to find on the Internet using a search engine,” according to the agency. Google sought to have the definition clarified so that it directly relates to the Google search tool, not just any search engine.

Rather than haggle over the definition, the council decided this week to remove the word from the list. But the word isn’t dying a quiet death.

“We neither have the time nor the will to pursue the outdrawn process that Google is trying to start,” the council’s president Ann Cederberg said in a harshly worded article posted on the council’s web site, under the headline “Google doesn’t own the language!”

In a statement, Google said: While Google, like many businesses, takes routine steps to protect our trademark, we are pleased that users connect the Google name with great search results.”

So who does own the language? According to the Swedes, its users.

“If we want ‘ogooglebar’ in the language, we should use it, and it is our usage which determines the meaning, not a multinational company with its means of pressure,” Ms. Cederberg said.

It turns out the Merriam-Webster is much more willing to kowtow to corporate dictates. It defines the verb “google”: “to use the Google search engine to obtain information about (as a person) on the World Wide Web.”

I guess whenever googling falls short, it’s always worth trying a bing.

Medical Express: Humans don’t “own” their own genes, the cellular chemicals that define who they are and what diseases they might be at risk for. Through more than 40,000 patents on DNA molecules, companies have essentially claimed the entire human genome for profit, report two researchers who analyzed the patents on human DNA. Their study, published March 25 in the journal Genome Medicine, raises an alarm about the loss of individual “genomic liberty.”

In their new analysis, the research team examined two types of patented DNA sequences: long and short fragments. They discovered that 41 percent of the human genome is covered by longer DNA patents that often cover whole genes. They also found that, because many genes share similar sequences within their genetic structure, if all of the “short sequence” patents were allowed in aggregate, they could account for 100 percent of the genome.

Furthermore, the study’s lead author, Dr. Christopher E. Mason of Weill Cornell Medical College, and the study’s co-author, Dr. Jeffrey Rosenfeld, an assistant professor of medicine at the University of Medicine & Dentistry of New Jersey and a member of the High Performance and Research Computing Group, found that short sequences from patents also cover virtually the entire genome — even outside of genes.

“If these patents are enforced, our genomic liberty is lost,” says Dr. Mason, an assistant professor of physiology and biophysics and computational genomics in computational biomedicine at the Institute for Computational Biomedicine at Weill Cornell. “Just as we enter the era of personalized medicine, we are ironically living in the most restrictive age of genomics. You have to ask, how is it possible that my doctor cannot look at my DNA without being concerned about patent infringement?”

The U.S. Supreme Court will review genomic patent rights in an upcoming hearing on April 15. At issue is the right of a molecular diagnostic company to claim patents not only on two key breast and ovarian cancer genes—BRCA1 and BRCA2—but also on any small sequence of code within BRCA1, including a striking patent for only 15 nucleotides.

In its study, the research team matched small sequences within BRCA1 to other genes and found that just this one molecular diagnostic company’s patents also covered at least 689 other human genes—most of which have nothing to do with breast or ovarian cancer; rather, its patents cover 19 other cancers as well as genes involved in brain development and heart functioning.

“This means if the Supreme Court upholds the current scope of the patents, no physician or researcher can study the DNA of these genes from their patients, and no diagnostic test or drug can be developed based on any of these genes without infringing a patent,” says Dr. Mason. [Continue reading…]