Amazon makes even temporary warehouse workers sign 18-month non-competes

Amazon is the country’s largest and most sophisticated online retailer, but it still runs largely on manual labor. Scattered around the country are massive warehouses staffed by workers who spend their days picking objects off shelves and putting them in boxes. During the holiday season, the company calls on a huge reserve army of temporary laborers.

The work is repetitive and physically demanding and can pay several dollars above minimum wage, yet Amazon is requiring these workers — even seasonal ones — to sign strict and far-reaching noncompete agreements. The Amazon contract, obtained by The Verge, requires employees to promise that they will not work at any company where they "directly or indirectly" support any good or service that competes with those they helped support at Amazon, for a year and a half after their brief stints at Amazon end. Of course, the company’s warehouses are the beating heart of Amazon’s online shopping empire, the extraordinary breadth of which has earned it the title of "the Everything Store," so Amazon appears to be requiring temp workers to foreswear a sizable portion of the global economy in exchange for a several-months-long hourly warehouse gig.

Ted Cruz Plan Could Weaken The Enforcement Of Iran Sanctions

WASHINGTON -- Just days after announcing his presidential bid, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) is pushing legislation that would wildly escalate the Republican Party's deregulatory fervor. On Wednesday, Cruz filed a simple but sweeping budget amendment that would "eliminate all criminal penalties for offenses established by agency regulations" -- a clause that covers everything from environmental rules to sanctions against Iran.

Indiana Governor Signs Anti-Gay 'Religious Freedom' Bill At Private Ceremony

WASHINGTON -- Indiana Gov. Mike Pence (R) quietly signed legislation Thursday that could legalize discrimination against lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender individuals.

The Religious Freedom Restoration Act would allow any individual or corporation to cite its religious beliefs as a defense when sued by a private party. But many opponents of the bill, which included business leaders, argued that it could open the door to widespread discrimination. Business owners who don't want to serve same-sex couples, for example, could now have legal protections to discriminate.

A California Lawyer Wants to Put Gays to Death. Why Isn't the Attorney General Ignoring Him?

It’s been exactly one month since the office of Kamala Harris, the California attorney general, received the $200 filing fee and proposed text for a citizen initiative—the so-called Sodomite Suppression Act—that says "any person who willingly touches another person of the same gender for purposes of sexual gratification be put to death by bullets to the head." The measure probably would have died a natural—and quieter—death had Harris, who is running for the U.S. Senate in 2016, not inserted herself in the controversy.

House Republicans approve budget plan to cut $5tn in spending

House Republicans passed a boldly conservative budget on Wednesday night that relies on nearly $5tn (£3.36tn) in cuts to eliminate deficits over the next decade, calls for repealing the health care law, and envisions transformations of the tax code and social programs.

The budget’s final passage, by 228 votes to 199, came shortly after Republicans bumped up recommended defense spending to levels proposed by president Barack Obama.

Ted Cruz’s Foreign Policy Advisor: End Nuclear Negotiations, Start War With Iran

John Bolton, the former U.N. ambassador and informal foreign policy advisor to presidential candidate Ted Cruz, is advocating for the bombing of Iran.

In an op-ed published in Thursday’s New York Times, Bolton slams the Obama administration’s ongoing negotiations to contain Iran’s nuclear program as unrealistic, and argues that “only military action like Israel’s 1981 attack on Saddam Hussein’s Osirak reactor in Iraq or its 2007 destruction of a Syrian reactor, designed and built by North Korea, can accomplish what is required.”

The Real Reason to Worry About GMOs

In a recent column, the New York Times' Mark Bittman makes an important point about the controversy around genetically modified foods. "[T]o date there's little credible evidence that any food grown with genetic engineering techniques is dangerous to human health," he writes. Yet the way the technology has been used—mainly, to engineer crops that can withstand herbicides—is deeply problematic, he argues.

Walmart, Lowe's, Safeway, and Nordstrom Are Bankrolling a Nationwide Campaign to Gut Workers' Comp

Nearly two dozen major corporations, including Walmart, Nordstrom, and Safeway, are bankrolling a quiet, multistate lobbying effort to make it harder for workers hurt on the job to access lost wages and medical care—the benefits collectively known as workers' compensation.

The companies have financed a lobbying group, the Association for Responsible Alternatives to Workers' Compensation (ARAWC), that has already helped write legislation in one state, Tennessee. Richard Evans, the group's executive director, told an insurance journal in November that the corporations ultimately want to change workers' comp laws in all 50 states. Lowe's, Macy's, Kohl's, Sysco Food Services, and several insurance companies are also part of the year-old effort.

Bill C-51 A Threat To Safety Of Internet Users, Firefox Maker Mozilla Says

The Harper government’s anti-terrorism bill has a new opponent: The Firefox web browser.

The Mozilla project, the open-source software community behind the Firefox browser, has issued a statement urging the federal government not to go ahead with Bill C-51.

The bill’s move to broadly expand information sharing between governments and give new powers to Canada’s intel agencies will “undermine user trust, threaten the openness of the Web, and reduce the security of the Internet and its users,” Mozilla internet policy director Jochai Ben-Avie said in a statement published on the Mozilla blog.

Parliamentary Budget Officer says defence costs ‘unsustainable’ over next decade

OTTAWA - The Harper government has built a military that it cannot afford and will be forced to make tough choices in the future, if it sticks with the current funding envelope, the country's budget watchdog said Thursday.

The new assessment by the parliamentary budget office came as debate kicked off in the House of Commons about an expanded and extended war against the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant, a conflict that opposition MPs were warned this week will last more than a year.

Jean-Denis Frechette, the parliamentary budget officer, says the federal government will need to either pour more money into its defence budget, scale back its ambitions, or do a mixture of both in order to put Canada's military on a sustainable footing.