McDonald's Budget Plan Leaves Out A Critical Line: Corporate Welfare

The helpful guide that McDonald's just published offering practical tips on how its workers can subsist on poverty wages is full of ingenious ideas: Get a second job! Don't squander money on trifles like heat and health care! Yet, it is missing one key suggestion: Apply for food stamps and other government assistance immediately so McDonald's can keep the corporate welfare flowing.

Detroit Bankrupt: Kevyn Orr Asks Federal Judge To Place City Under Chapter 9 Bankruptcy Protection

DETROIT — Once the very symbol of American industrial might, Detroit became the biggest U.S. city to file for bankruptcy Thursday, its finances ravaged and its neighborhoods hollowed out by a long, slow decline in population and auto manufacturing.

The filing, which had been feared for months, put the city on an uncertain course that could mean laying off municipal employees, selling off assets, raising fees and scaling back basic services such as trash collection and snow plowing, which have already been slashed.

A Murder in Deep Summer

Although she was in the thick of her novel “Losing Battles,” Eudora Welty paused from that long work to write a short story. “I don’t write out of anger,” Welty later said, but rage was distracting her. “There was one story that anger certainly lit the fuse of.”

Welty’s fuse was lit early one morning in June, 1963, when the civil-rights activist Medgar Evers was shot and killed in Jackson, Mississippi, the town where she lived for nearly her entire life. “I wrote a story that same night about the murderer,” Welty described in her autobiography “One Writer’s Beginnings.”

“Where Is the Voice Coming From?” was published in The New Yorker less than a month later. Welty drafted the story before Evers’s murderer, Byron De La Beckwith, had been identified or arrested. Two trials of De La Beckwith ended with hung juries, but he was finally convicted of first-degree murder thirty years later.

With Navalny’s Sentence, Putin Chooses the Hard Way

Alexey Navalny was registered as a candidate for the Moscow mayoral race on Wednesday; in a recent poll, he ranked second, with eight per cent of decided voters. On Thursday, he was found guilty of embezzlement, sentenced to five years, and handcuffed and taken into custody right in the courtroom. With that, the Putin government had chosen the hard way to eliminate a man who had evolved into a political challenge.

There is no doubt that the charges against Navalny—which he denies, saying that the evidence is fabricated—are politically motivated. Navalny is a highly popular blogger, an anti-corruption crusader. He dared to challenge the most powerful people in Russia, and now is paying for it. There’s nothing new about the Kremlin using its law enforcement and the judiciary machine to further political goals. Nor is there anything new about unlawful trials and hard verdicts. What is new is that, this time around, the political motive is impossible to disguise.

The Student Victims of Washington’s Deficit Obsession

When, a couple of weeks ago, the interest rate on subsidized Stafford loans (the loans that the federal government offers to college students) doubled, going from 3.4 per cent to 6.8 per cent, the expectation was that Congress would reach a quick deal to reverse—or at least reduce—the increase. After all, making college more affordable is one of the rare issues on which the differences between Democrats and Republicans seem bridgeable. Members of Congress on both sides of the aisle promised an immediate fix, and last week it appeared that a deal was about to be reached. Then Washington’s obsession with deficits got in the way. And that same obsession explains why, even if Congress does finally agree to a deal, college students are guaranteed to be paying more for loans, come the fall.

$10.20 Per Hour Needed To Survive Even In America's Cheapest County

Nowhere in America does a dollar go farther than in Hanson County, South Dakota. But even there, a worker still needs to earn nearly $3 more than the minimum wage to get by.

Dawn Holmberg, a 43-year-old single mom living just west of Hanson County, knows all too well how to make a dollar stretch as far as it can. She works as a cashier earning $10.50 an hour. That's more than the minimum wage, but nearly $7 less than what it takes for a worker with one kid to afford basic expenses in the region, according to an analysis produced for The Huffington Post by Wider Opportunities for Women, a non-profit advocacy organization aimed at boosting low-income women and families.

U.S. reviewing 27 death penalty convictions for FBI forensic testimony errors

An unprecedented federal review of old criminal cases has uncovered as many as 27 death penalty convictions in which FBI forensic experts may have mistakenly linked defendants to crimes with exaggerated scientific testimony, U.S. officials said.

The review led to an 11th-hour stay of execution in Mississippi in May.

It is not known how many of the cases involve errors, how many led to wrongful convictions or how many mistakes may now jeopardize valid convictions. Those questions will be explored as the review continues.

Aaron Osmond, Utah State Senator, Calls For End To Mandatory Education

A Republican state senator in Utah is calling for the end of mandatory education in the state.

State Sen. Aaron Osmond (R-South Jordan) wrote on the state Senate blog Friday that mandatory education in the state has forced teachers and schools to take on parenting responsibilities. Prior to the mandate taking effect in 1890, he wrote, education was "an opportunity" and parents were more engaged. He also wrote that teachers were more respected. The Deseret News first reported Osmond's blog post on Tuesday.

The Drone That Killed My Grandson

SANA, Yemen — I LEARNED that my 16-year-old grandson, Abdulrahman — a United States citizen — had been killed by an American drone strike from news reports the morning after he died.

The missile killed him, his teenage cousin and at least five other civilians on Oct. 14, 2011, while the boys were eating dinner at an open-air restaurant in southern Yemen.

Samantha Power's Testimony Confirms Foreign Policy Orthodoxy

During a confirmation hearing today that was largely a test of her willingness to submit to foreign policy dogma, Samantha Power repeatedly asserted her commitment to “stand up for Israel and work tirelessly to defend it” against the “disproportionate” criticism she said it receives at the United Nations.

“I commit to you wholeheartedly to go on offense as well as playing defense on the legitimation of Israel and we’ll make every effort to secure greater integration of Israeli public servants in the UN system,” said Power, President Obama’s nominee for Ambassador to the United Nations, implying that she would support Israel’s bid for a permanent seat on the Security Council. Power said she would oppose Palestinian bids for recognition as a state before the completion of a two-state peace process.