Who Moved My Teachers?

The school of education at the University of Wisconsin-Madison never used to have trouble attracting applicants with dreams of becoming teachers. Its graduate program is ranked fourth in the country by U.S. News & World Report, and until recently, its undergraduate program in elementary education typically received between 300 and 400 applications for its 125 spots. Now, says Michael Apple, a professor in the program, it only gets about one applicant per opening.

What happened? Scott Walker became Wisconsin’s governor in 2011 and promptly enacted a wide-scale rollback of unionization rights for state employees. That law, Act 10, effectively wiped out the ability of teachers and other public-sector workers to bargain collectively over salary and benefits.

6 Trends Track Rise in Deadly Police Encounters Across America—Including Using Police Cars to Kill, Report Finds

Police killings are on the increase across America, including the first months of 2017, according to a new study of thousands of police reports in recent years.

“From the fatal shooting of an unarmed black man having car trouble to the death of a convicted felon who injured three Chicago officers, the data show that fatal law enforcement encounters are rising year-over-year – despite the fact that crime has been on the general decline since 1996,” concluded FederalCharges.com, a legal news service, in its report, Deadly Law Enforcement Encounters.

Larry Summers Had the Power to Punish Wall Street. Now He’s Slamming Obama’s Gentle Treatment.

As head of Barack Obama’s National Economic Council during 2009 and 2010 at the height of the foreclosure crisis, Larry Summers broke many promises to help homeowners while simultaneously dismissing Wall Street’s criminality. Now, after the Obama administration has left power and Summers has no ability to influence anything, he finds himself “disturbed” that settlements for mortgage misconduct are full of lies. Those of us who screamed exactly this for years, when Summers might have been able to do something about it, are less than amused.

Are the Irvings Canada's biggest corporate welfare bums?

“Do you see, it’s over there,” said Gerry Lowe, pointing out across the cove as we stood on the shores of the Bay of Fundy on the outskirts of Saint John, New Brunswick, gazing into the distance towards the Canaport LNG terminal – its three enormous grey concrete storage tanks and jetty just visible in the midday gloom. It was a bitterly-cold overcast day in January of last year and Lowe, a garrulous 73-year-old Saint John city councilor, was giving me a guided tour of New Brunswick’s largest city in his black Ford sedan. I’d come to this hardscrabble burgh to research the Irvings – Canada’s seventh-richest family.

Should Airbnb be regulated in Toronto?

Taking a page from Vancouver, the first of a series of public consultations on regulating short-term rentals were held at the North York Civic Centre yesterday.

The unprecedented surge in housing prices have led to calls for the city to step in with solutions to remedy the growing unaffordability of housing. One way city council hopes to ease the pressure on the housing market is by curbing sharing economy apps like Airbnb.

Calgary think tank says environmentalists need to "end the charade" against oil sands

At an energy conference deep in American oil country earlier this month, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau received an award for his global energy and environmental leadership.

“No country would find 173 billion barrels of oil in the ground and just leave them there,” he told oil and gas execs. “Our job is to ensure that this is done responsibly, safely and sustainably.”

Arkansas law will force doctors to investigate abortion patients

A new law in Arkansas will force doctors to investigate their patients’ medical records before providing them with a legal abortion — and represents the first provision of its kind across the country.

Signed into law by Gov. Asa Hutchinson (R) on Wednesday, HB 1434 is broadly focused on policing the reasons that people may seek abortion care.

Iowa lawmaker embraces forcing women to carry dead fetuses to term

Iowa House Republicans advanced an unconstitutional ban on abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy on Wednesday, sending it from the Human Resources Committee to the full House on a 11 to 8 vote. All seven Democrats and one Republican voted no. This legislation replaced their original attempt to ban abortions after just six weeks.

But a question by a Democrat on the committee revealed just how little the measure’s manager understood about the possible ramifications of her legislation — and how little concern she has for the women who face tough choices about whether to terminate a pregnancy even in the most difficult situations.

The Republicans Have Primed Our Government for Failure

In the wake of Trumpcare’s spectacular demise last week, Republicans are having a difficult time sticking to a coherent story about what went wrong, what comes next, and why they’ll succeed.

President Donald Trump appeared determined on Friday to shift the GOP’s attention away from health care, saying, “[W]e will probably start going very, very strongly for the big tax cuts and tax reform. That will be next.” The same day, House Speaker Paul Ryan said that “Obamacare is the law of the land ... for the foreseeable future.” But earlier this week, the White House and Republican leaders reportedly decided to give American Health Care Act the old college try again. “We are going to keep getting at this thing,” Ryan assured donors on Monday. “We’re not going to just all of a sudden abandon health care and move on to the rest.”

Meet the Midwestern Contractor That Appears Hundreds of Times in the CIA WikiLeaks Dump

In a suburb of Cincinnati about 30 minutes north of the Ohio River, right down the street from the local Hooters, a little known subsidiary of defense giant Northrop Grumman works on contracts for the Central Intelligence Agency.

Xetron Corporation, whose products range from military sensors to communications systems to information security software, shows up in nearly 400 documents published earlier this month by WikiLeaks. Those documents describe some of the tools the CIA uses to hack phones, smart TVs, and other digital products to conduct espionage overseas — and some of the partners that help them do it, like Xetron.