(Reuters) – The United Nations on Tuesday named a team of three human rights investigators who will look into allegations of torture and labor camps in North Korea that are believed to hold at least 200,000 people.

Pyongyang denies the existence of such camps and is not expected to cooperate with the investigation, having denounced it during a U.N. Human Rights Council debate, activists said.

But the one-year inquiry, launched by the Council on March 21, …

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For months now, we’ve been following the rapid expansion of license plate readers across America. The growth is fueled by federal law enforcement grants that allow for such data to be instantly shared with federal authorities.

We’ve published stories showing how people crossing the US-Mexico border are routinely subject to license plate scans, which is in turn, shared with insurance companies. An intrepid data scientist claimed to have found the location of Minneapolis’ stationary LPRs based …

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Police said they have now recovered 705 dead bodies from the ruins of Rana Plaza, the factory building where several thousand workers made cheap fashion garments for Western high street stores like Primark, Matalan, Bonmarche and Monsoon.

The incident is now the worst disaster in the history of the garment industry.

Survivors from Rana Plaza’s five factories on Tuesday blocked a nearby road in protest at the failure of their employers to pay their wages or …

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Since the financial crash, jobs have held a top spot in public discussion. But among all the employment talk, one sector of the workforce has consistently received relatively little attention: interns.

In the past few decades, the number of internships in the United States has ballooned. One recent study found that just over half of graduating college seniors had held some sort of internship. That’s more than double the rate another study found two decades ago.

But …

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In mid-April, Kansas passed a law asserting that federal gun regulations do not apply to guns made and owned in Kansas. Under the law, Kansans could manufacture and sell semi-automatic weapons in-state without a federal license or any federal oversight.

Kansas’ “Second Amendment Protection Act” backs up its states’ rights claims with a penalty aimed at federal agents: when dealing with “Made in Kansas” guns, any attempt to enforce federal law is now a felony. Bills …

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Days after she became the first woman to appear on the FBI’s Most Wanted Terrorist List, Assata Shakur issued an open letter to her supporters. The letter, published on May 3, came amid renewed efforts by the FBI and the New Jersey State Police to capture Shakur for the 1973 murder of a New Jersey state police officer. Shakur has long maintained her innocence, and has lived in Cuba as a political refugee for over …

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The scheme that Apple cooked up this week to finance a $55 billion stock buyback for its shareholders was orchestrated to avoid paying $9.2 billion in taxes, Bloomberg reported Friday.

That $9.2 billion tax bill that Apple dodged would have been enough to make unnecessary all of the major budget cuts we’ve been writing about this week as part of our “Repeal the Sequester” campaign. With $9.2 billion, the federal government could have (based on lists …

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We have hardly attained a post-racist society, Angela Y. Davis argued in a 2008 speech in which she denounced the legacy of structural racism. It is part of her latest book, in which she fully explores “The Meaning of Freedom.”

Davis offer profound insights into how the appearance of democracy and equality are undermined by the racist bias of many institutions, perhaps most profoundly by the prison-industrial complex. Her insights are both troubling and liberating, because …

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Face flushed in the near-100 degree heat, body limp, white rings of dried sweat and scabs circling his scalp, 3-month-old Ezekiel lay in the arms of his 29-year-old mother, two among an estimated 1,000 Filipino workers now living in a vacant lot next to their country’s consulate in the Red Sea port city of Jeddah.

“All of us us here, we want to go back home to the Philippines. As soon as possible,” said the mother, …

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In China, procreation and childbirth are, like every facet of human life, deeply political. Since the Communist party came to power in 1949, it has viewed the country’s population as a faceless number that it can increase or decrease as it chooses, not a society of individuals with unique desires and inviolable rights. At first, Mao Zedong encouraged large families and outlawed abortion and the use of contraception, urging women to produce offspring who would …

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