By Nandita Bose/Reuters

Wal-Mart Stores Inc.’s chief executive officer received a 13 percent increase in total compensation to $22.4 million in the fiscal year ended Jan. 31, according to a regulatory filing on Thursday, as sales growth at the world’s largest retailer remained robust.
CEO Doug McMillon’s compensation, which included cash and stock, compared with $19.8 million the previous year, according to the filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.
McMillon took over the top job at Wal-Mart in February 2014.

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Posted on April 21, 2017

By James Martin and Stephen Bright/The Conversation

The announcement earlier this month of the largest seizure of methamphetamine in Australian history has been accompanied by a familiar chorus of uncritical and often sensationalized media reporting.
The “street value” of the 903 kilograms of the seized drug was estimated at nearly A$900 million.
But are the claims government authorities make about drug seizures accurate?

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Posted on April 18, 2017

By The Electronic Frontier Foundation

School children are being spied on by tech companies through devices and software used in classrooms that often collect and store kids’ names, birth dates, browsing histories, location data, and much more – often without adequate privacy protections or the awareness and consent of parents.
“Spying on Students: School-Issued Devices and Student Privacy” shows that state and federal law, as well as industry self-regulation, has failed to keep up with a growing educational technology industry.
At the same time, schools are eager to incorporate technology in the classroom to engage students and assist teachers, but may unwittingly help tech companies surveil and track students.
Ultimately, students and their data are caught in the middle without sufficient privacy protections.

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Posted on April 14, 2017

By The Illinois PIRG Education Fund

Medical debt collectors often employ aggressive tactics and attempts to collect debt from the wrong customers – putting consumers’ credit records at risk. Medical debt accounts for more than half of all collection items that appear on consumer credit reports. Recognizing medical debt is both often mistaken and not a good indicator of future creditworthiness, leading credit score companies have begun to remove it from credit scores, but it still appears in credit reports.
Those are the findings of the ninth in a series of reports by the Illinois PIRG Education Fund reviewing complaints to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. The latest report explores consumer complaints about medical debt, a major source of problems for consumers, since medical debt items on credit reports are often wrong or about the wrong consumer.

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Posted on April 12, 2017

By Andre Perry/The Hechinger Report

Poor and working-class whites have been getting more attention than resources lately – just like black folk have for generations.
The time couldn’t be better to push an equity agenda.
“My fellow chiefs and I are making equity a priority of our work,” said South Dakota Secretary of Education Melody Schopp in her address last month to a national convening of the CCSSO. The Council of Chief State School Officers is a membership organization comprised of the top education leaders of each state.
The think tank Aspen Institute and CCSSO published “Leading for Equity: Opportunities for State Education Chiefs,” a paper that outlines 10 commitments by state education officials to improve equity. And states have the ability to act. As school superintendents implement the complex new federal education law, the Every Student Succeeds Act, they have the freedom that ESSA provides to promote equity in their state.

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Posted on April 11, 2017

By ProPublica

Earlier this week, we published an investigation with Consumer Reports in which we found that many minority neighborhoods pay higher car insurance premiums than white areas with the same risk.
Our findings were based on analysis of insurance premiums and payouts in California, Illinois, Texas and Missouri.
We found insurers such as Allstate, Geico and Liberty Mutual were charging premiums that were as much as 30 percent higher in zip codes where most residents are minorities than in whiter neighborhoods with similar accident costs. (Here are details on how we did the analysis.)
An industry trade group, the Insurance Information Institute, responded in the Insurance Journal.
The piece, by James Lynch, vice president of research and information services, calls our article “inaccurate, unfair, and irresponsible.”
We disagree. As we typically do with our reporting, we contacted the industry well ahead of publication and gave it an opportunity to review our data and methodology and respond to our findings.
Here is the response we and Consumer Reports sent to the Insurance Journal:

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Posted on April 10, 2017

By The U.S. Department of Labor

The U.S. Department of Labor’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration has ordered Wells Fargo Bank N.A. to compensate and immediately reinstate a former bank manager who lost his job after reporting suspected fraudulent behavior to superiors and a bank ethics hotline.
The manager, who had previously received positive job performance appraisals, was abruptly dismissed from his position at a Wells Fargo branch in the Los Angeles area after he reported separate incidents of suspected bank, mail and wire fraud by two bankers under his supervision. He was told he had 90 days to find a new position at Wells Fargo, and when he was unsuccessful, he was terminated. He has been unable to find work in banking since his termination in 2010.

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Posted on April 4, 2017