Support for the death penalty among Americans is hovering around a 40-year low. Nevertheless, enthusiastic legislators from Bumfuck all the way to Hickville are taking it upon themselves to help their states execute death row inmates with greater dispatch.

The deadly collapse of a garment factory in Bangladesh has sparked calls for better worker treatment. The revelation that Apple manages to avoid almost all taxes has drawn vague calls for tax reform. A more direct path to fairness: let's just have a reasonable international minimum wage.

If you have a keen memory, you may recall that U.S. president and Hellfire missile proponent Barack Obama once promised to close down our prison at Guantanamo Bay, where hope and civil rights go to die. That never happened, of course. But now, Obama has a golden opportunity to shut that motherfucker down.

The ten worst prisons in America include a familiar one.

While waiting for bomber facts, Sen. Lindsey Graham has one hand in his pants, dreaming of domestic drones and Gitmo.

Kim Millbrook, a federal prisoner, claims he was sodomized and beaten by prison guards in 2010. He sued the federal government, acting as his own attorney, under the Federal Tort Claims Act. After losing in lower courts—the federal government, they held, can only be liable for the acts of law enforcement officers when those acts are carried out in the course of performing arrests or executing searches, as opposed to just arbitrarily sodomizing inmates—Millbrook wrote out a handwritten petition to the Supreme Court demanding that it hear his case (a copy is here; the image above is from his initial complaint). It did. This morning, with the help of a court-appointed attorney, he won.

A high school student thought he was so smart when he took to his Twitter account to slam his teacher for allegedly pulling the ol' switcheroo on test day.

A temporary payroll tax cut was allowed to expire recently, meaning that payroll taxes are now removing an extra 2% from everyone's paychecks. Every corporation in the business of selling things to non-rich Americans is freaking out, because they expect their customers to cut back on spending now. The working class has just seen its take-home pay reduced by 2%; working class people will now have 2% less to spend on food, and clothes, and toilet paper, and everything else. It may be true that letting the payroll tax rise was foolish in the short term. It is definitely true that payroll taxes in general are, as constructed, a bad idea.

A shocking profile of mentally ill Texas death row inmates like Andre Thomas, who gouged his own eyes out.

Everybody talks about the "Too Big to Fail" problem: financial institutions that are so huge and interconnected that, when they run into a crisis, the public will always bail them out, because the consequences of not doing so would be catastrophic for everyone. Nobody does anything about it. Maybe that's because banks have powerful lobbyists; maybe it's a human psychological flaw that causes us to stop worrying about inevitable future crises as soon as the last crisis seems to have passed.

As part of an ongoing project, we've written letters to U.S. death row inmates who are scheduled for execution this year. We asked them about their lives and about their thoughts on various issues. Today, we received a reply from Britt Ripkowski, who is awaiting execution in Texas for multiple murders.

According to a new study by the U.S. Sentencing Commission, prison sentences handed out to black men in the past seven years have been almost 20% longer than sentences given to white men for the same crimes. From the WSJ:

Jonah Lehrer, promising young golden boy of Gladwellian think-journalism, has had a bad eight months. Caught plagiarizing himself last June; soon after, caught fabricating quotes, and forced to resign from his plum gig at the New Yorker, and rapidly cast out of the chosen fold to wander the wilderness as a sort of fallen angel. Even the Knight Foundation, which just this week paid Lehrer $20K for his big mea culpa speech, is already saying that it regrets doing so. Some are urging him to donate the money to charity. All in all, his no doubt meticulously-planned return to the spotlight has fallen flat.

The lies in Chris Brown's community service progress reports are so egregious, so bald-faced, so flabbergastingly, blatantly untrue, that it's shocking to think anyone ever intended to pass them off as factual.

I'm reporting for my first jury duty summons at 500 Indiana Avenue. Though I have lived and worked in Washington, D.C. for over a decade, I have never been called to court for my civic duty to "serve."

Earlier this year, we published several letters from American death row inmates who were scheduled for execution in 2012. Two of those letters were from Brett Hartmann, Ohio inmate 357-869. Yesterday, he was executed by lethal injection.

Randy Duke, a 20-year law enforcement vet, only has a few weeks to spend with his family before heading back to Afghanistan to train police officers, and he definitely didn't plan on spending most of it outside his son's school holding a sign saying "Bullying Victims are Punished Here."

Today, a Moscow appeals court released Yekaterina "Katya" Samutsevich, the eldest of the three imprisoned collaborators from the Russian feminist art-punk collective Pussy Riot, while upholding the two-year prison-colony sentence for her counterparts, Maria "Masha" Alyokhina and Nadezhda "Nadya" Tolokonnikova.

When they're not busy cold rapin' ladies, members of the New York City Police Department often like to run over black people with their cars, as two of them allegedly did to Tamon Robinson earlier this year in Queens, killing him. Robinson ran after the cops tried to stop him for removing paving stones from the street, so they drove up onto the sidewalk and ran him over, with their car. Anyway he died but there was a pretty big dent in the cop car so last month they sent a repair bill to his grieving family. Freedom isn't free, people.

The white shirt Philadelphia officer who was caught on camera sucker-punching a Puerto Rican Parade attendee after she sprayed him with silly string will be suspended for 30 days, after which he will most likely be dismissed.