Cultivated Compendium

Supporters of an Oregon measure that would require labels on genetically modified food lost their effort to prevent the state from certifying the results of a recount, The Oregonian's Laura Gunderson reports. The measure failed by 812 votes out of 1.5 million cast. A Multnomah County judge denied the request for a temporary restraining order, which leaves the Secretary of State's Office likely to certify the results from a recount next week.

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled Tuesday that federal evidentiary rules bar the use of statements made during jury deliberations, so a South Dakota man can't get a new personal injury trial over his motorcycle accident because of comments made by the jury forewoman during deliberations, the Washington Post's Robert Barnes reports. The forewoman allegedly said that her daughter had been at fault in a fatal accident and would have had her life ruined if she had been sued. The plaintiff alleged that the juror lied about her impartiality.

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled Tuesday that an Amazon contractor does not have to compensate warehouse workers for the time they spend going through security checks at the end of their shifts, the Associated Press' Sam Hananel reports. The justices held that the security checks are not related to workers' primary job duties. Under the federal Portal-to-Portal Act, employers are exempted from paying for "pre- and post-work activities such as waiting to pick up protective gear or waiting in line to punch the clock," Hananel further reports.

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled Tuesday that Amazon does not have to compensate warehouse workers for the time they spend going through security checks at the end of their shifts, the Associated Press' Sam Hananel reports. The justices held that the security checks are not related to workers' primary job duties. Under the federal Portal-to-Portal Act, employers are exempted from paying for " pre- and post-work activities such as waiting to pick up protective gear or waiting in line to punch the clock," Hananel further reports.

After U.S. Sen. Jay Rockefeller dropped a hold on a bill to reform the Freedom of Information Act, the Senate passed a bill that would create a presumption of openness among government agencies, Politico's Burgess Everett reports. The House passed a similar bill earlier this year. The question is if the House finds time to consider the Senate bill during the current lame-duck session.

Parents of children killed in the Sandy Hook school shooting two years ago have filed wrongful death claim notices on the behalf of their children, the Hartford Courant's Dave Altimari reports. Filing the notice does not mean that the parents will definitely proceed with lawsuits, and no defendants are filed in the notice. But Altimari indicates that "sources said several families met over the weekend with lawyers from Koskoff, Koskoff & Bieder, a Bridgeport law firm, to discuss a potential lawsuit against Bushmaster, the North Carolina-based manufacturer of the Bushmaster AR 15 that Adam Lanza used to kill 20 first-graders and six adults on Dec. 14, 2012." Other lawyers are considering a lawsuit against the town of Newtown or its school board regarding the secuirty at the school or suing the estate of Nancy Lanza, the mother of Adam Lanza.

Less than half of law school graduates who took the July 2014 bar exam in California passed, the Los Angeles Times' Jason Song reports: "The 48.6% pass rate in California is a drop of nearly 7 percentage points from the previous year; nearly 8,500 people took the test in July. The last time the passage rate dipped below half was in 2005." Brian Z. Tamanaha, a critic of legal education and a law professor at the Washington University School of Law in St. Louis, said that the decrease in successful bar-exam test-takers could because the number of applicants to law school have decreased and schools are accepting a higher percentage of applicants. Passage rates have fallen in other states too, Song further reports.

The House Transportation is going to be holding a hearing Wednesday about the status of the Federal Aviation Administration's regulations for commercial drones, The Hill's Tim Devaney and Lydia Wheeler report: "Pressure is mounting from the GOP and the business community for the FAA to approve the use of commercial drones, though, Republicans acknowledge the need to address certain safety and privacy issues."

In a separate development, Amazon has told the FAA  that it may move testing of the use of drones in package delivery outside the United States if regulators don't approve domestic testing, Bloomberg's Spencer Soper and Alan Levin report.

The American Red Cross has been claiming that 91 percent of charitable dollars are spent on services, ProPublica and NPR reports. But overhead expenses are more than charitable officials have been claiming, with fundraising expenses alone taking up 26 cents of every donated dollar, the two journalism outlets report. While the Red Cross changed the wording on its web site to now explain that 91 cents of every dollar goes to humanitarian service, "that too is misleading to donors ... Most of what the Red Cross does is take donated blood and sell it to health care providers. Of the more than $3 billion that the Red Cross spent last year, two-thirds was spent not on disaster relief but rather on the group's blood business," ProPublica and NPR further reported.

SCOTUSBlog's Amy Howe reports that there was bipartistan backing for the introduction of cameras in the Supreme Court at a House Judiciary Committee subcommittee hearing Wednesday. The bill under consideration would authorize, but not mandate, the Supreme Court to allow televised proceedings. Mickey Osterreicher, the GC for the National Press Photographers Association, "noted that interest in the Supreme Court is high when, as now, the Court has a wide variety of landmark cases on its docket, but public seats at the Court are very limited. By contrast, he emphasized, the many state supreme courts that have allowed their proceedings to be televised have not experienced problems." The Supreme Court justices, however, continue to generally oppose cameras in the highest courtroom in the United States, Howe notes.