Corruption

Jean Kennedy has a BS in biology and a master’s in special education. Now, she’s trying to decide what to do with her third degree: a certificate of achievement from Oaksterdam University, the Harvard Business School of marijuana.

“I’m Italian,” said Kennedy, 56, a retired high school biology teacher with graying hair and a heavy New York accent. “You know Italians, we grow tomatoes. Maybe I’ll grow some plants.”

The retirement assets of CEOs at our largest corporations have exploded while the rest of us wonder when or if we’ll be able to retire.
A Tale of Two Retirements, released this morning, found that the 100 largest CEO retirement accounts are worth a combined $4.9 billion.
That’s equal to the combined retirement accounts of 41 percent of American families.

At a time when the information world becomes increasingly shallow, journalists ought to join forces with experts. The alliance would bring deeper knowledge to journos and sharper story-telling to eggheads.

House Republicans are pushing legislation to block predatory lending protections for American soldiers, under pressure from the banking lobby.

Michael E. Porter has announced the launch of the Social Progress Imperative, a new rigorous index rating the social performance of more than 50 countries. Developed with the AVINA, Rockefeller, and Skoll foundations, this is the first index to fully separate social indicators from economic ones. In examining data on basic needs, well-being, and opportunity it creates a global agenda for country level policy.

ORANGE lights flash in the setting sun as Chinese workers lay train tracks on the dry edge of Tsavo national park in Kenya, lowering a 25-metre steel rail into place as gingerly as a dental filling. The men fret, with good reason: safety rules may protect them against falling sleepers but the African bush adheres to no regulations. Few workers dare to venture out of their sheet-metal camps at night for fear of big cats on the prowl: in January a watchman was mauled by a cheetah.

The CIA tortured suspected terrorists on Polish soil.
The European Court of Human Rights is making Poland pay the damages

How the American opiate epidemic was started by one pharmaceutical company.

The state of Kentucky may finally get its deliverance. After more than seven years of battling the evasive legal tactics of Purdue Pharma, 2015 may be the year that Kentucky and its attorney general, Jack Conway, are able to move forward with a civil lawsuit alleging that the drugmaker misled doctors and patients about their blockbuster pain pill OxyContin, leading to a vicious addiction epidemic across large swaths of the state.

Last September, FIFA investigated a gift of expensive watches giving to its top officials. Here is what it found:

[The Confederação Brasileira de Futebol] distributed 65 gift bags, each containing a Parmigiani watch, to a group comprising the 28 officials on the FIFA Executive Committee, a representative from each of the 32 Member Associations competing in the 2014 FIFA World Cup Brazil, and a representative from each of the 10 Member Associations in Conmebol.