
Trump has paralyzed agency that safeguards worker rights, labor experts and advocates say
CBSN
President Trump's firing of a member at the National Labor Relations Board leaves the federal agency unable to perform its duties protecting the rights of U.S. workers and monitoring union elections, according to labor experts.
The agency is now down to two members, one below the minimum required to fully function, labor attorneys said, even as one of the country's largest companies, Amazon, presses the NLRB to void the results of a recent union election due to the board's downsizing.
"Right now the NLRB is not operational because there are only two out of five board members and the Supreme Court has ruled that they cannot operate with less than three members," Cathy Creighton, director of Cornell University's Industrial and Labor Relations Buffalo Co-Lab. and a former field attorney for the NLRB, told CBS MoneyWatch.

The threat of tornadoes moved east into the Mississippi Valley and Deep South on Saturday, a day after a massive storm system moving across the country unleashed winds that damaged buildings, whipped up dust storms that caused deadly crashes and fanned more than 100 wildfires in several central states. Fatalities were reported in Missouri and Texas.

A Canadian woman who had appeared in an "American Pie" movie was detained for several days by U.S. immigration officials while attempting to cross the border from Mexico to the U.S. to renew her work visa, according to her mother. The woman's father expects his daughter to be able to return to Canada as early as Friday.

When the Environmental Protection Agency was formed in 1970, its mission was to protect the environment and human health. Since then, scientists, health experts and advocates have worked to implement regulations aimed at protecting and cleaning the air we breathe and the water we drink. Many of these regulations, which were aimed at cleaning up the air, also helped reduce carbon emissions, which can contribute to climate change – so it was a win for our bodies and the planet.