At a meeting in April 2011, more than a dozen retailers including Wal-Mart, Gap, Target and JC Penney met in Dhaka to discuss safety at their supplier Bangladeshi garment factories. Bloomberg News revealed minutes from this meeting Wednesday, which show that Wal-Mart nixed a plan that would require retailers to pay their suppliers enough to cover safety improvements.

Last month, a fire in a factory used by Wal-Mart killed 112 workers. There were no fire exits. …

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The lawyer for accused WikiLeaks collaborator Bradley Manning suggested Monday that President Barack Obama’s position on protecting government whistleblowers is hypocritical.

Obama put his signature on a new law designed to stiffen protections for whistleblowers on Nov. 27. “As President Obama was signing this bill into law, Brad and I were in a courtroom,” Manning’s defense attorney, David E. Coombs, said Monday at the All Souls Church Unitarian in Washington, D.C., in his first public appearance …

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A vote to ratify the U.N. Convention on the Rights of Persons With Disabilities fell short in the Senate Tuesday, with the measure receiving 61 votes, short of the 67 votes needed for ratification. Thirty-eight Republicans voted no.

The treaty promotes equal rights for disabled people around the world, including those with physical disabilities such as blindness. If the Senate had voted for ratification, the United States would have joined 126 other countries that are party …

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Millions of Saudis live in poverty, struggling on the fringes of one of the world’s most powerful economies, where job-growth and welfare programs have failed to keep pace with a booming population that has soared from 6 million in 1970 to 28 million today.

Under King Abdullah, the government has spent billions to help the growing numbers of poor people, estimated to be as much as a quarter of the native Saudi population.

But critics complain that …

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Everyone loves to hate a thief. And quite right, too. Google, Amazon and Starbucks – and many more like them – are certainly stealing from the UK and other countries by playing tax systems so aggressively.

But there’s a more important story here that the British MPs and world media are largely missing. In fact, the only ones who haven’t missed it are Google themselves. Matt Brittin, Google’s UK Chief, hit a very important nail on …

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The Los Angeles Unified School District and its teachers union have reached what is being called a “historic” tentative agreement to incorporate student test scores into teacher evaluations for the first time ever, joining Chicago and a growing number of other cities.

KPCC reports that under the agreement, teachers’ final evaluations will include student results on the California Standards Test from the previous year or years, as well as the Academic Growth over Time measure. They …

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Rich countries spend five times more on fossil-fuel subsidies than on aid to help developing nations cut their emissions and protect against the effects of climate change, the Oil Change International campaign group said.

In 2011, 22 industrialized nations paid $58.7 billion in subsidies to the oil, coal and gas industries and to consumers of the fuels, compared with climate-aid flows of $11.2 billion, according to calculations by the Washington-based group.

The data underline the steps developed …

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Financial giant Barclays is considering an end to food speculation, a controversial practice linked to sudden, dangerous spikes in global food prices.

Rich Ricci, head of Barclays’ corporate and investment banking arm, told British lawmakers on Nov. 28 that public disapproval of food speculation may push his bank, the world’s third-largest, to stop altogether.

“Market speculation is playing a role in global hunger. Now that science has made this clear, speculation should be unacceptable,” said Yaneer Bar-Yam, …

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A Washington state public elementary school is under fire over its use of a “isolation room”–a small padded box that, to many, appears similar to solitary confinement boxes used inside prisons.

The school district has explained that the room is designed to be a calming space for children with severe behavioral disabilities, and that no student placed in the “isolation room” without written permission from his or her parents.

However, a handful of parents and grandparents …

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Susan Rice, thought by many to be Obama’s No. 1 pick for secretary of state, holds millions of dollars in investments in Canadian oil companies and banks with stakes in the $7 billion Keystone XL Pipeline, according to a piece out today from OnEarth, a magazine published by the environmental advocacy group Natural Resources Defense Council. As head of the State Department, Rice would have ultimate authority in determining the fate of the pipeline, …

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