Massachusetts Daily Collegian: March 30, 2016

Page 1

PAGE 5

PAGE 4

THE MASSACHUSETTS

A free and responsible press

DAILY COLLEGIAN

Wednesday, March 30, 2016

DailyCollegian.com

Serving the UMass community since 1890

News@DailyCollegian.com

UM workers get $61K restitution UM astronomers find ‘outrageously’ luminous galaxies By lia GiPs Collegian Staff

AK Electric, Inc. has paid $61,000 in restitution and penalties to six workers who were underpaid for their work on the the University of Massachusetts campus. An investigation by the Attorney General’s office found that the company had been violating Massachusetts prevailing wage law. “Companies can’t cheat their workers and not pay wages to gain an unfair advantage over their competitors,” Massachusetts

Attorney General Maura Healey said in a press release earlier this month. “The enforcement of these laws is essential to making sure workers are receiving their hard-earned wages and that businesses are operating on a level playing field.” Because UMass’ construction projects are public and fall under Massachusetts Prevailing Wage Law, contractors and subcontractors must pay their employees a special minimum wage, determined by how they are classified as workers, according to the release.

The investigation showed that the company improperly classified workers as apprentices who were not registered with the Massachusetts Department of Labor & Workforce Development, Division of Apprentice Standards. Due to their unregistered status, the workers should have been paid a higher prevailing wage rate, according to the release. “These kinds of cases are very common,” said Fiore Grassetti, president of the Pioneer Valley Central Labor Council. “If one

worker’s getting cheated, you know the rest are. When these kinds of cases do come up, the workers always win them.” Grassetti said the main roadblock to addressing misclassification is workers’ concerns about employment. “They don’t want to speak up in case their jobs are threatened, so they take the lower pay,” Grassetti said. There is very little enforcement for classification according to Grassetti.

see

SETTLEMENT on page 2

A NIGHT OF OLD AND NEW

DANIEL MALDONADO/COLLEGIAN

Weigang Li (left) and Yi-Wen Jiang (right) of the Shanghai Quartet play violin side by side at the Fine Arts Center on Tuesday.

Obama announces new measures against drug overdose epidemic Student conducted research in Mexico By Jeremy reDmon The Atlanta Journal-Constitution ATLANTA — President Barack Obama said more must be done to combat prescription painkiller addictions and the stigma surrounding them, using a summit in Atlanta on Tuesday to announce new measures against a drug overdose epidemic raging across Georgia and the nation. Speaking at a panel discussion with Dr. Sanjay Gupta of CNN and two people recovering from drug problems, Obama said more people now die every day from drug overdoses than from traffic crashes. “When you look at the staggering statistics in terms of lives lost, productivity impacted, the cost to communities _ but most importantly the cost to families _ from this epidemic of opioids abuse, it has to be something that is right up there at the top of our radar screen,” Obama said. Politics followed the

president into Atlanta. Aboard Air Force One on the way from Washington to Georgia, reporters asked White House press secretary Josh Earnest about the “religious liberty” legislation Gov. Nathan Deal vetoed this week, as well as a new North Carolina statute that eliminates anti-discrimination protections for gays. “It’s the president’s strong view that we can take all the necessary steps to protect religious freedom without giving people the approval to discriminate against people because of who they love,” Earnest told reporters. Obama himself dipped into politics Tuesday when he gently scolded an unnamed governor for not expanding Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act. On Monday, the Obama administration released 2014 statistics showing there were 159,000 uninsured Georgians who had mental illnesses or substance abuse disorders, and whose incomes would qualify them for Medicaid if the program

were expanded in the Peach State. Although the federal government would cover most of the cost of expansion, Deal has rejected it, saying Medicaid is already overtaxed and the state can’t afford to make it even bigger. “If you get a situation in which somebody is in pain initially because of a disc problem, they may not have health insurance because maybe the governor didn’t expand Medicaid like they should have under the ACA,” Obama said to cheers. “They go to a doctor one time when the pain gets too bad. The doctor is prescribing painkillers. They run out and it turns out it is cheaper to get heroin on the street than it is to try to figure out how to refill that prescription _ you have a problem.” Obama spoke to about 2,000 people gathered at the National Rx Drug Abuse & Heroin Summit, which is focused on fighting a prescription painkiller and heroin overdose epidemic that killed more than 28,000 peo-

ple in 2014, more than any year on record. At least half of those deaths involved prescription drugs. Obama highlighted a proposed rule that would allow doctors prescribing buprenorphine for drug addictions to increase the number of patients they see from 100 to 200. He pointed out $94 million in new federal funding to expand medication-assisted treatment at 271 community health centers across the country. Further, he signed a new memorandum Tuesday, directing the creation of an interagency task force for expanding access to mental health and substance abuse treatment. And he announced $11 million in funding for states to buy a drug overdose prevention medication called naloxone and to train emergency workers how to use it. Also on Tuesday, 60 medical schools _ including Mercer University in Macon and the Suwanee campus of the Philadelphia College of Osteopathic Medicine _ see

OVERDOSE on page 2

in the early universe Student conducted axies formed so many stars in a short amount of research in Mexico such time,” Harrington said.

By TrisTan Tay

Collegian Correspondent

A s t ro n o m e r s at the University of Massachusetts have discovered “outrageously” luminous galaxies so bright that previouslyused descriptors such as “hyper-luminous” and “extremely luminous” are an inadequate description of them, according to a UMass press release. Kevin Harrington, lead author of the study and a senior astronomy and neuroscience double major, who works in the lab of astronomy professor Min Yun, said that the existence of these luminous galaxies means that theorists in astrophysics need to rethink how matter accumulates in the early universe. Such luminous, massive objects weren’t believed to be possible prior to this discovery, Harrington said. “(The luminosity) gives you an indication of how efficiently the galaxy is turning gas into stars. It’s largely unknown how gal-

The Milky Way creates a new star or two every year, while these galaxies create a new star every hour, he said. These discoveries were made primarily using the Large Millimeter Telescope (LMT) located on the 15,000-foot extinct volcano Sierra Negra in the central state of Puebla, Mexico and is jointly operated by UMass and the Instituto Nacional de Astrofísica, Óptica y Electrónica. The LMT is the largest and most sensitive instrument in the world for studying star formation. Harrington traveled to the telescope twice to perform his research with the William Bannick Student Travel Grant, according to the release. The unusual luminosities of the newly-discovered galaxies may be due in part to gravitational lensing, a phenomenon where a large cosmic mass acts as a lens that focuses and magnifies the light, instead of acting as a wall

see

GALAXIES on page 2

FBI unlocks San Bernardino, CA shooter’s iPhone Legal fight against Apple, Inc. dropped

By Joel ruBin, Paresh Dave anD James Queally Los Angeles Times

LOS ANGELES — Federal officials on Monday dropped their legal fight against Apple after unlocking the iPhone used by an assailant in last year’s San Bernardino terror attack, leaving unsettled a vexing debate over privacy and security amid rapid advances in technology. The move comes a week after the Department of Justice officials put a sudden halt to their demands that Apple assist the FBI with an announcement that an outside group had offered a method for hacking into the iPhone. Aided by the unidentified group, FBI technology experts had been at work since, testing the technique to confirm it could open the iPhone without jeopardizing its contents. The breakthrough came over the weekend, when the information stored on the phone was extracted, said a federal law enforcement official, speaking on condition of anonymity. He declined to say anything about the contents of the phone, other than that FBI agents currently were

reviewing the material. The official also remained tightlipped about the method that was used to beat the iPhone’s security barriers, as well as the identity of the group that delivered it to FBI agents. Any speculation about the impact of the breakthrough on other cases involving locked phones would be “premature,” he added. “Our decision to conclude the litigation was based solely on the fact that, with the recent assistance of a third party, we are now able to unlock that iPhone without compromising any information on the phone,” U.S. Attorney Eileen Decker said in a statement after prosecutors asked U.S. Magistrate Judge Sheri Pym to vacate an order compelling Apple’s cooperation. The government’s move appeared to bring an end to a historic legal showdown that pitted the demands of law enforcement investigating crimes against the rights of companies to protect their customers’ privacy. In legal briefs and public statements aimed at winning both in court and opinion polls, Apple executives and their attorneys forcefully opposed Pym’s order, which would have compelled the technology giant see

IPHONE on page 2


Turn static files into dynamic content formats.

Create a flipbook
Issuu converts static files into: digital portfolios, online yearbooks, online catalogs, digital photo albums and more. Sign up and create your flipbook.