For conscious shoppers at Whole Foods, it was a nightmare to learn that the company had US prison labor in its supply chain. After more than a year of negative publicity culminating in protests outside of its stores in Houston, Texas, Whole Foods announced last week that it will stop sourcing foods that are made with prison labor. Happy ending? Not so fast.Corporations like Whole Foods need to be...Read More

If the Defense Department, the CIA, and our largest corporations can be hacked, certainly 50 states and over 3,000 separate county systems are no match for individuals or nation states that might want to influence the outcome of elections. This is particularly true because nowadays things in the world of electronics and elections are as complex as ever. Even if we are casting our ballots on the In...Read More

Four in 10 Americans say they have "a great deal" or "a fair amount" of trust and confidence in the mass media to report the news fully, accurately and fairly. This ties the historical lows on this measure set in 2014 and 2012. Prior to 2004, slight majorities of Americans said they trusted the mass media, such as newspapers, TV and radio.Americans' confidence in the media...Read More

At least 10 people were killed and nine others were wounded when a gunman who demanded to know his victims' religions opened fire Thursday on a campus in southwest Oregon, witnesses and authorities said.The gunman was killed in a firefight with Douglas County sheriff's deputies at Umpqua Community College, Sheriff John Hanlin said. Multiple law enforcement sources identified him to NBC New...Read More

Scores of U.S. Secret Service employees improperly accessed the decade-old, unsuccessful job application of a congressman who was investigating scandals inside the agency, a new government report said Wednesday. An assistant director suggested leaking embarrassing information to retaliate against Rep. Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, chairman of the House oversight committee.The actions by the employees co...Read More

Two top Army generals recently discussed trying to kill an article in The New York Times on concussions at West Point by withholding information so the Army could encourage competing news organizations to publish a more favorable story, according to an Army document.The generals' conversation involved a Freedom of Information Act request that The Times made in June for data on concussions resu...Read More

Last week's announcement that Saudi Arabia — easily one of the world's most brutally repressive regimes — was chosen to head a U.N. Human Rights Council panel provoked indignation around the world. That reaction was triggered for obvious reasons. Not only has Saudi Arabia executed more than 100 people already this year, mostly by beheading (a rate of 1 execution every two days)...Read More

Criminal justice reform is a contentious political issue, but there's one point on which pretty much everyone agrees: America's prison population is way too high. It's possible that a decline has already begun, with the number of state and federal inmates dropping for three years straight starting in 2010, from an all-time high of 1.62 million in 2009 to about 1.57 million in 2012. But...Read More

Rampant sexual abuse of children has long been a problem in Afghanistan, particularly among armed commanders who dominate much of the rural landscape and can bully the population. The practice is called bacha bazi, literally "boy play," and American soldiers and Marines have been instructed not to intervene — in some cases, not even when their Afghan allies have abused boys on mili...Read More

Volkswagen's scheme to cheat on emissions tests could have been found out earlier if the automaker—and indeed all automakers—hadn't been able to block car-owners from digging into the software that runs their vehicles, digital rights advocates say.The Electronic Frontier Foundation says that the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DCMA)—the controversial US law governing di...Read More

Pope Francis, a son of immigrants making history's first papal address to the U.S. Congress, implored America's leaders on Thursday to accept immigrants as their own children, putting aside political differences to embrace those who "travel north in search of a better life."In a speech that gently but firmly urged Americans to move beyond the partisan paralysis that year after ye...Read More

Virtual money is officially a commodity, just like crude oil or wheat.So says the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), which on Thursday announced it had filed and settled charges against a Bitcoin exchange for facilitating the trading of option contracts on its platform."In this order, the CFTC for the first time finds that Bitcoin and other virtual currencies are properly defined as...Read More

Despite repeatedly denouncing the CIA's drone campaign, top officials in Pakistan's government have for years secretly endorsed the program and routinely received classified briefings on strikes and casualty counts, according to top-secret CIA documents and Pakistani diplomatic memos obtained by The Washington Post.The files describe dozens of drone attacks in Pakistan's tribal region...Read More

It's Corporate Governance 101: Company directors are supposed to respect the wishes of the shareholders they are duty bound to serve. And if the directors defy them, those shareholders are supposed to hold the directors accountable.That principle of board accountability will face an unusually stark test on Sept. 22, when Bank of America shareholders gather at company headquarters in Charlotte,...Read More

Earlier this week, school resource officers at MacArthur High School were notified by the Irving ISD officials about a student in possession of a suspicious device. The student showed the device to a teacher, who was concerned that it was possibly the infrastructure for a bomb. School resource officers questioned the student about his intentions and the reasons why he brought the device to school....Read More

In an investigation involving guns and drugs, the Justice Department obtained a court order this summer demanding that Apple turn over, in real time, text messages between suspects using iPhones.Apple's response: Its iMessage system was encrypted and the company could not comply.Government officials had warned for months that this type of standoff was inevitable as technology companies like Ap...Read More

Could [another 9/11] attack happen tomorrow? Of course. But once every 13 years would still be an anomalous event, not a systemic threat. Remember the talk as the rubble smoldered of hundreds, maybe thousands, of "sleeper cells" lurking out there, waiting to strike? Well, we now know there were none at the time, and apparently none were formed even after we have fought two wars and kille...Read More

The New York Police Department released surveillance video of the [James Blake] arrest on Friday, offering a minute-long glimpse of the manhandling of a biracial sports star by a white plainclothes officer that compelled officials to swiftly strip the officer of his gun and badge.Mr. Blake, 35, was leaning against a mirrored beam outside a hotel in Midtown Manhattan, his hands clasped as he waited...Read More

Asher Abid Khan sat in Istanbul's Ataturk Airport and considered his next move — forward to Syria and enlistment in the Islamic State, the militant group that had drawn him to the possibility of dying for Allah, or home to Texas and his bewildered family whose imploring messages were filling his voice mail.The 19-year-old pulled out his phone and dialed."I want to come home," K...Read More

Two fatal developments are converging during this election in the United States. The decoupling of the super-rich from the rest of society is an accelerating trend in recent years. And also the consequences of a series of rulings by the Supreme Court in 2010 that enable politicians and support groups to accept unlimited donations. This confluence of events is undermining the development of the wor...Read More