By Michael Beckel
Center for Public Integrity
President Barack Obama has named two more of his top campaign fundraisers for plumb diplomatic posts, nominating Boca Raton’s Mark Gilbert to be U.S. ambassador to New Zealand and Rob Barber to the same position in Iceland.
By Nicholas Kusnetz
Center for Public Integrity
The Arizona Commerce Authority is housed in an office in downtown Phoenix. The authority, which oversees state corporate tax incentives and grants worth hundreds of millions of dollars, is not quite a public agency. It’s led by a board of directors run by the governor and Jerry Colangelo, who, after four decades as an Arizona sports and real estate mogul, is a local icon.
By Cora Currier
ProPublica
The United States is loosening controls over military exports, in a shift that former U.S. officials and human rights advocates say could increase the flow of American-made military parts to the world’s conflicts and make it harder to enforce arms sanctions.
By Marian Wang
ProPublica
The chancellor of Oregon’s higher-education system currently oversees all seven of the state’s public colleges and universities. But as of July next year, she’ll be chancellor of four. The schools aren’t closing. Rather, Oregon’s three largest state schools are in the process of breaking away from the rest of the public system.
By Rebecca LaFlure
Center for Public Integrity
Efforts by the government to fix a notable problem sometimes create a new mess that turns out to be as insidious and troublesome as the first, or even worse. This is what happened when Washington attempted to improve the way its security agencies vetted hundreds of thousands of workers needed suddenly after the 9/11 attacks to pursue counterterror tasks and oversee heightened secrecy requirements.
By Nina Martin
ProPublica
When the U.S. Supreme Court issued its 5-4 decision in Wal-Mart v. Dukes in June 2011, no one needed a Richter scale to know it was a Big One. In throwing out a mammoth lawsuit by women employees who claimed that they’d been systematically underpaid and underpromoted by the world’s biggest corporation, the ruling upended decades of employment discrimination law and raised serious barriers to future large-scale discrimination cases of every kind.
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