A blaze swept through the Aswad Composite Mills factory in Bangladesh, Tuesday, killing 9 workers and injuring at least 50 others. The factory made merchandise for the Hudson’s Bay Company and WalMart. This is the latest in a series of deadly industrial accidents in the garment sector in Bangladesh. Most garment workers die in fires. These deaths could easily be prevented by improving the wiring and fire evacuation systems in clothing factories. 

The 2013 Hillman Award for Broadcast Journalism went to Brian Ross and his investigative team at ABC News for reporting on garment industry deaths in Bangladesh. That same year, a special Hillman Officers’ Award was presented posthumously to Aminul Islam, a Bangladeshi labor leader who was probably murdered for his activism on behalf of garment workers. 

[Photo credit: Iconic Hudson’s Bay Blanket, by Whimsie Dots, Creative Commons.]

• In honor of the landmark 2011 Dukes ruling against WalMart, ProPublica aggregates classic reads on gender and sex discrimination.

• The Supreme Court is set to hear two big labor law cases this term, and everybody’s nervous.

• But relax, Obamacare is not going to take your house.

• Turns out, when everything is for sale, everything is for sale. The founder of the online marketplace/libertarian paradise known as the Silk Road is alleged not only to have trafficked tens of millions of dollars worth of drugs, but also to have solicited murder for hire.

[Photo credit: Wander Mule, Creative Commons.]

Hillman Prize-winner Alison Young exposes another dodgy dietary supplement for USA Today:

GUADALAJARA, Mexico — A Mexican dietary supplement called Reumofan has gained a loyal following in the United States as a “100% natural” treatment for arthritis and joint pain. It’s supposedly made by a company called Riger Natural from ingredients such as shark cartilage, white willow and glucosamine, or so the labels say.

But consumers who buy Reumofan products are risking dangerous side effects and trusting their lives to a company that uses fake addresses, lies about the ingredients in its products and may not even exist, a USA TODAY investigation has found.

The newspaper set out to find Riger Natural and the people responsible for producing and selling the supplement, searching corporation records and visiting addresses in Mexico where it had been listed on the Web as having a lab. Those addresses are fake and there’s no evidence the company ever had facilities in the locations. Some Mexican retailers who once distributed the product say their contacts have simply disappeared. Even Mexican health authorities have been unable to track down the company.

Riger Natural? As in Riger Mortis? Reumofan is marketed as a dietary supplement but some of these pills contain potentially toxic prescription drugs and the FDA has received reports linking the pills to bleeding, strokes, and death. 

[Photo credit: U.S. FDA.] 

 Of the thirty-three Colorado prisoners who committed murder on parole, half had spent time in solitary confinement, the Denver Post reports:

The Colorado prison system is struggling to manage prisoners like Bassett — a fact laid bare when police say a parolee released directly from his solitary cell to the streets rang the doorbell at former Department of Corrections chief Tom Clements’ home in March and assassinated him.

Clements, ironically, had been pushing Colorado to reduce the number of prisoners in solitary as well as the number released straight to parole. The percentage of the prison population in solitary has dropped from 7 percent to 4 percent since 2011 — though that’s still double the national average — and the share of those in segregation who went straight to parole decreased from 48 percent to 23 percent. But it remains a problem many in the public are unaware of, and one with dangerous consequences.

Is solitary making prisoners more violent, or are the most violent prisoners most likely to find themselves in administrative segregation? Probably both. Worryingly, the Post found that there are no safeguards in place to make sure that prisoners who are released directly from solitary into the community receive extra supervision. 

[Photo credit: Bohemian Dolls, Creative Commons.]