A former engineer for BP has been arrested and accused of deleting text messages detailing how much oil was gushing into the Gulf of Mexico as BP tried to staunch the Deepwater Horizon spill in the spring of 2010.

Kurt Mix, of Katy, Texas, is charged with two counts of obstructing justice for deleting from his iPhone hundreds of text messages he exchanged with a co-worker and a contractor, according to a criminal complaint unsealed Tuesday.

The …

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A congressman was removed from the House floor Wednesday after giving a speech about Trayvon Martin while wearing a hoodie.

Rep. Bobby Rush, D-Illinois, told House members, “racial profiling has to stop.”

Rush, a former Black Panther who was active in the civil rights movement in the 1960s, then took off his suit jacket, pulled a gray hoodie on over his head and put on sunglasses.

“Just because someone wears a hoodie does not make them a hoodlum,” …

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Only two people know for sure what happened in a gated community in Sanford, Fla., on the night of Feb. 26: Trayvon Martin, a 17-year-old high schooler, and George Zimmerman, 28, at whose hands Martin died of a gunshot wound to the chest.

But because Zimmerman — at least for now — remains a free man, justice has been called for in the racially charged case, in which an unarmed black teenager was shot by a …

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AFTER years as a civil rights lawyer, I rarely find myself speechless. But some questions a woman I know posed during a phone conversation one recent evening gave me pause: “What would happen if we organized thousands, even hundreds of thousands, of people charged with crimes to refuse to play the game, to refuse to plea out? What if they all insisted on their Sixth Amendment right to trial? Couldn’t we bring the whole system …

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Prospects for an orderly withdrawal of NATO forces from Afghanistan suffered two blows on Thursday as President Hamid Karzai demanded that the United States confine troops to major bases by next year, and the Taliban announced that they were suspending peace talks with the Americans.

Getting talks started with the Taliban has been a major goal of the United States and its NATO allies for the past two years, and only in recent months was …

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by Greg Smith

TODAY is my last day at Goldman Sachs. After almost 12 years at the firm — first as a summer intern while at Stanford, then in New York for 10 years, and now in London — I believe I have worked here long enough to understand the trajectory of its culture, its people and its identity. And I can honestly say that the environment now is as toxic and destructive as I have …

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Amid criticism that it was failing to expose misconduct, the Los Angeles County sheriff’s watchdog presented a secret report to county officials this month detailing several cases of bad behavior by deputies.

A copy of the confidential report was obtained by The Times. In it, the Office of Independent Review takes credit for pushing sheriff’s officials to clamp down on a variety of misconduct — from unreported force on a jail inmate to a deputy who …

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California is having problems with its death penalty. It hasn’t executed anyone since 2006, when a federal court ruled that its method of lethal injection was improper and could cause excessive pain. The state spent five years coming up with a better method — and last month, a judge threw that one out too. One indication of just how bogged down California’s capital-punishment system is: the inmate who brought the latest lethal-injection challenge has been …

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FORT MEADE, Md. — The military hearing against Pfc. Bradley Manning closed on Thursday, with lawyers and onlookers alternately portraying him as a premeditated traitor or an accidental hero with emotional troubles.

Bradley Manning, right, was escorted from a security vehicle to a courthouse in Fort Meade, Md., on Thursday for a hearing to determine whether he will face a court martial in the the leak of military records.
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In their summary arguments, military lawyers accused the …

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AT&T conceded defeat Monday in its dramatic standoff with the federal government over one of the largest telecom mergers ever proposed.

The decision by AT&T to abandon its $39 billion bid for T-Mobile amounted to a decisive win for federal regulators — and a counterpoint to critics who claim that Big Business always gets its way in Washington.

AT&T lost despite a nine-month, multimillion lobbying campaign that ultimately fell on deaf ears at the Justice Department and …

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