Reading Time: 4 minutes Walmart’s recent decision to raise its workers’ wages got plenty of applause. But it looks like the deep-discount retailer gave itself a huge public-relations bargain, instead of making real changes that could help some of its employees get off welfare. Curt Hopkins investigates.
Reading Time: 1 minute The city of Portland, Oregon will fully rejoin the FBI-led Joint Counterterrorism Task Force, after being the lone holdout nationwide. In doing so, Portland rejoins a network of 104 such multi-agency units which have proliferated the federal government’s national security mandate to the local level in force since the 9/11 attacks.
Reading Time: 2 minutes The latest campaign cash tally demonstrates a disturbing trend—the 2014 vote drew the biggest haul in history. Yet the number of donors fell, meaning a smaller, richer group of people is giving the most. Curt Hopkins looks at the numbers.
Reading Time: 3 minutes Portland, Oregon, may seem like an unlikely site for a stand against the FBI-led counterterrorism task forces that have spread to more than 100 cities since 9/11. Yet the city, which prides itself on odd-man-out independence, is now voting on whether it will rejoin the feds. The question they’re considering is an important one: whether cities or states get any protection from the federally-funded operations, or are just losing their independence to a national mandate.
Reading Time: 3 minutes The news that hackers stole 80 million people’s data from health insurer Anthem quickly led to the blame game, with favorite villain China making an early appearance. Just as swiftly, the government sprang into action to exploit the headlines and rally support for a bigger, more powerful security-industrial complex.
Reading Time: 6 minutes Be it murder or suicide, the suspicious death of the prosecutor investigating Argentina’s deadliest terrorist attack has unearthed a web of deep politics stretching from Buenos Aires to Tehran. Curt Hopkins investigates.
Reading Time: 2 minutes There’s a tantalizing new clue that the U.S. and its “Five Eyes” allies built a sophisticated cyber-espionage system used to hack enemies and allies alike. The discovery comes from a harmless-sounding program called QWERTY, found in NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden’s files.