Warning Wire

Government scientists who found evidence of a link between cellphone radiation and cancer in rats have endorsed simple safety precautions to reduce possible risks, such as reducing the time spent on cellphones or using the speaker mode or a headset to limit exposure.

Utilities have donated generously to local chapters of the NAACP, and then persuaded the groups to push back against proposed energy-efficiency legislation or slow the spread of solar power. In some cases, utilities convinced civil rights groups that if affluent homeowners installed solar panels and reduced their reliance on the electric grid, lower-income residents would bear the brunt of higher rates to maintain power lines, a fact energy experts dispute. In reality, critics say, many of the policies industry groups were advocating would actually hurt low-income communities of color the most in the long run.

Unsavory billing practices that are common in the health care industry may be legal, a medical writer notes, but must be curtailed if we are to rein in soaring health care costs.

A construction worker tried to warn managers at a New Orleans construction firm about dangerous conditions at a hotel under construction before the building partially collapsed in October, killing three, The worker, a Honduran citizen, suffered serious injuries; a few days after the accident, he was arrested by immigration officials and faces deportation. Advocates for the man describe the timing as “highly suspicious.”

In the Marshall Islands, a containment structure that holds more than 3.1 million cubic feet of radioactive waste left over from U.S. nuclear weapons tests is threatened by rising seas, but the U.S. government is denying responsibility. “I’m like, how can it be ours?” said Hilda Heine, the president of the Republic of the Marshall Islands. “We don’t want it. We didn’t build it. The garbage inside is not ours. It’s theirs.”