Peace & Justice News is a collection of news items collected by Bloomington Alternative contributor Linda Greene. Today's edition includes:

• Policing U.S. Schools and Criminalizing Childhood
• Thai workers in near-slavery supplying Walmart with food
• Women’s benefits from the Affordable Care Act
• Abuse of youth in for-profit prisons
• National Nurses United wins Florida contract
• Female immigrant farm workers facing sexual violence and harassment
• Support grows for Wilmington 10 pardons
• Traveler forced to miss her flight because of her t-shirt
• Secret Services attempts to hide prostitution-related expenses
• Attack on women’s health organization in New Orleans

The pernicious impact of toxic chemicals in the body, from suspected roles in autism to human response to everyday stress, can manifest themselves in future generations, according to a new study from researchers at the University of Texas (UT) and Washington State University (WSU).

Published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the animal study found DNA changes wrought by a common fungicide are passed down from parents to offspring, according to a May 22, 2012, UT news release. The researchers studied how the animals respond to stress.

“The ancestral exposure of your great-grandmother alters your brain development to then respond to stress differently,” said WSU professor Michael Skinner.

On an unremarkable day in July 2009 the residents of Scottsburg and surrounding Scott County, in southern Indiana, read an unusual notice in the Scott County Journal.

The notice announced a public hearing, only 10 days away, on a request for a zoning exception and development-plan approval for Liberty Green Renewables, LLC (LGR), which wanted to construct and operate a 32-megawatt incinerator in Scottsburg to convert biomass to electricity.

Lewis Powell Jr. identified by name only a handful of "Communists, New Leftists and other revolutionaries" as enemies of American business in his now-infamous 1971 memo "Attack on the American Free Enterprise System." Foremost among them was consumer advocate Ralph Nader, who, in the soon-to-become Supreme Court Justice's view, was the single most effective antagonist of American business. Nader was a "legend in his own time and an idol of millions of Americans," Powell wrote. He quoted a May 1971 Fortune magazine piece that cast the leader of Nader's Raiders in abject terms:

"The passion that rules in him -- and he is a passionate man -- is aimed at smashing utterly the target of his hatred, which is corporate power. He thinks, and says quite bluntly, that a great many corporate executives belong in prison -- for defrauding the consumer with shoddy merchandise, poisoning the food supply with chemical additives and willfully manufacturing unsafe products that will maim or kill the buyer. … He emphasizes that he is not talking just about 'fly-by-night hucksters' but the top management of blue-chip business."