The lawsuit filed recently in U.S. District Court in Albuquerque says Michael Faziani, 57, was thrown in a Sierra County solitary confinement jail cell for days after getting arrested on misdemeanor charges for a minor accident in a McDonald’s parking pot.

Guards ignored his request for a shower and his cell got so squalid another inmate had to clean it, according to court papers filed last month.

“Due to the toxic effects of solitary confinement (Faziani) lost the ability to care of his own hygiene,” the lawsuit said.

Documents also said the Columbia, Tennessee man lost 22 pounds in 18 days and often begged for help. He was also denied medication for his chronic back pain, court papers said.

Sierra County officials did not immediately return emails from The Associated Press.

Faziani is seeking an unspecified amount for punitive and compensatory damages.

Matthew Coyte, Faziani’s lawyer and an Albuquerque attorney involved in the New Mexico cases, said the state’s county jails continue to be where most egregious solitary confinement cases are found.

“The practice of placing someone in solitary is done so professionally in the prisons they got it down to a science or an art,” said Coyte….

Forty-six people were infected last year with the virus that can cause serious liver damage and even death. All but one of them had spent time at the ManorCare Health Services nursing home, according to KXMC-TV in Minot (http://bit.ly/1maQZ4r ).

The lawsuit, which ManorCare filed in federal court last week, alleges that one Trinity Health employee is responsible for the spread of the disease that was first reported in August 2013. It says Trinity, which handles some services for ManorCare, should have been aware of “serious longstanding problems” with the employee’s phlebotomy, or blood service, practices.

Hepatitis C, caused by a virus that results in an infection of the liver, is primarily transmitted by blood-to-blood contact. Some people who get it recover, but most carry the virus in their blood for the course of their lifetime and can develop chronic infection.

The worker, who’s listed in court documents only as “Employee A,” allegedly performed the majority of Trinity’s phlebotomy services at ManorCare. ManorCare says it had no duty to supervisor control the employee in question.

The lawsuit also alleges that when investigators from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the North Dakota Department of Health came to…

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court ruled Monday that some corporations can hold religious objections that allow them to opt out of the new health law requirement that they cover contraceptives for women.

The justices’ 5-4 decision is the first time that the high court has ruled that profit-seeking businesses can hold religious views under federal law. And it means the Obama administration must search for a different way of providing free contraception to women who are covered under objecting companies’ health insurance plans.

Contraception is among a range of preventive services that must be provided at no extra charge under the health care law that President Barack Obama signed in 2010 and the Supreme Court upheld two years later.

Two years ago, Chief Justice John Roberts cast the pivotal vote that saved the health care law in the midst of Obama’s campaign for re-election. On Monday, dealing with a small sliver of the law, Roberts sided with the four justices who would have struck down the law in its entirety.

Justice Samuel Alito wrote the majority opinion. The court’s four liberal justices dissented.

The court stressed that its ruling applies only to corporations…

The two laws, passed in 2013 by Colorado’s Democratic-controlled legislature with scant Republican support, banned ammunition magazines that hold more than 15 rounds and required background checks for all private gun sales and transfers.

The bills were introduced in response to a shooting spree in 2012 that killed 12 people at a suburban Denver movie theater, and the slaying later that same year of 20 children and six adults at an elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut.

But they immediately met resistance from critics, including most of Colorado’s elected sheriffs, who said they severely restricted citizens’ constitutional right to own and bear arms.

Last year, voters recalled two key Democratic members of the legislature that approved the controversial measures.

After a two-week civil trial, U.S. District Chief Judge Marcia Krieger ruled the lawsuit lacked standing and said no evidence had been produced which showed limiting magazines to 15 rounds seriously diminished the ability to defend oneself.

“Of the many law enforcement officials called to testify, none were able to identify a single instance in which they were involved where a single civilian fired more than 15 shots in self defense,” she said in her ruling.

Responding to…