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Senate confirmation validated their argument that Obama has acted against the law when he has taken matters into his own hands.
• The court's decision comes while Obama is determined to use all his executive powers to get around the gridlock of a divided Congress. In the process, he has left his imprint on policies ranging from immigration to the environment, from gay rights to worker pay.
• "This administration has a tendency to abide by laws that it likes and to disregard those it doesn't," Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell said. "Whether it's recess appointments or Obamacare, this troubling approach does serious damage to the rule of law, and the court's decision is a clear rebuke of the administration's behavior."
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• NEW YORK (AP) -- In one case, a mentally ill New York City inmate hanged himself from a shower pipe on his third try in three days. During that stretch, orders to put him on 24-hour watch were apparently ignored, along with a screening form that said he was "thinking about killing himself."
• Another inmate hanged himself with a bedsheet from an air vent in a solitary-confinement cell after repeatedly telling guards he was suicidal. The last time he said so, one of them replied, "If you have the balls, go ahead and do it."
• In yet another case, an inmate hanged himself from a metal bed that he stood on end to create a scaffold, despite a year-old jailhouse directive to weld all beds to the floor. The directive was issued after another mentally ill man committed suicide in exactly the same way.
• Investigative documents obtained by The Associated Press on the 11 suicides in New York City jails over the past five years show that in at least nine cases, safeguards designed to prevent inmates from harming themselves weren't followed.
• "Is there a procedure? Yes. Did they follow it? Absolutely not," said a tearful John Giannotta, whose 41-year-old son Gregory used a jail jumpsuit to hang himself from an improperly exposed bathroom pipe last year even though he, too, was supposed to be on suicide watch. The psychiatrist's order wasn't entered into the computer system until hours after his death.
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