Former Arkansas State Senator Johnathan Woods has been sentenced to 220 months in prison for a fraud scheme that involved another Republican legislator and the president of a conservative Christian college. Beginning in January of 2013, Woods and State Rep. Micah Neal gave $600,000 in taxpayer money to two non-profits in the state in exchange for bribes. One of those groups was Ecclesia College in the northwest part of the state. The small Bible school received the bulk of that money… but only because they agreed to give the politicians a healthy kickback.

Rather than actually fixing potentially serious F-35 design flaws, documents show, program officials are simply altering paperwork to make it appear as though the development process has been completed. By Dan Grazier.

Ten years after the American economy nearly pitched itself into the abyss, financial elites are again banking on ignorance and incompetence. By Chris Lehmann.

A pair of high-profile convictions implicate Donald Trump—but also serve as a reminder that only some people pay the consequences for systemic corruption in America. By Adam Serwer.

Do “financial services” include banking? Not according to the Trump administration… By David Sirota.

Fatal accidents, off-the-books workers, a union once run by a mobster. The rogue world of one of New York’s major trash haulers. By Kiera Feldman.

The buzz is that “we” have to “take back” the House and Senate in the November midterm elections. By Roger Harris.

F-35 versus A-10 fly-off designed to mislead? We take a look. By Dan Grazier.

A former minister who served under Zimbabwe's ex president Robert Mugabe was found guilty of corruption and sentenced to four years in jail on Friday, his lawyer said, the first conviction of a Mugabe-era official since he stepped down.

Ten years after Wall Street’s doomsday, how the financial meltdown broke the modern world and left us living in this one.

Federal authorities halted work on the massive Mountain Valley Pipeline this month after an appeals court ruled that federal agencies neglected to follow environmental protections. By Kate Mishkin, Beena Raghavendran, Ken Ward Jr.

A new documentary looks at Montana's fight against dark money in politics. By Bob Garfield with director Kimberly Reed.

The kinds of antics Manafort and Cohen have been prosecuted for went unnoticed when Donald Trump was a donor to the Democratic and Republican parties, and if he had stayed in his Tower doling out campaign contributions, they still would be. By Jim Kavanagh.

A lightning strike to the F-35B Lightning II could fry the onboard systems — or, assuming some of the concerns over non-inert fuel tanks have yet to be addressed, start a fire or cause the aircraft to explode. By Ryan Pickrell.

Italy's poorest region, Sicily, is the country's problem child. Now it has elected a new government. To fix the island, it will have to overcome corruption and widespread Mafia control - and figure out how to convince its population not to leave. By Walter Mayr.

Thousands of Israelis protested in Tel Aviv on Saturday for the second consecutive week against government corruption and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who is under criminal investigation over allegations of abuse of office. Police estimated the number of demonstrators at about 10,000 and they followed last Saturday’s demonstration, by far the largest of ongoing weekly anti-corruption protests when an estimated 20,000 people participated.

Denying a modern candidate this database is a hamstringing move, virtually guaranteeing their failure. By Cory Doctorow.

This is a looting by telecom monopolists and an FCC commissioner who has shown no interest in engaging with the American people. By Jason Koebler. (Dec 13, 2017)

The president ran against debt predators, drug makers and big banks – once elected, he immediately got in bed with all of them. By Matt Taibbi.

Over the past three decades this increasingly prosperous nation has become the fattest country in Asia, with nearly half the adult population now overweight or obese. Several years ago, Dr. Tee E Siong, Malaysia’s leading nutrition expert, decided to act, organizing a far-reaching study of local diets and lifestyle habits. The research, conducted by scientists from the Nutrition Society of Malaysia, which Dr. Tee heads, has produced several articles for peer-reviewed academic journals.

Pope Francis strongly condemned corruption in Latin America as a "social virus" infecting all aspects of life in stern remarks Friday to Peru's president and high-ranking political leaders, several of whom are embroiled in the region's biggest graft scandal. Hours after decrying the destruction of Peru's Amazon, the pontiff warned President Pedro Pablo Kuczynski and other leaders gathered that another, more subtle form of environmental degradation is also pervading society: corruption.

Big Four consulting firm Ernst & Young (E&Y) has been accused of "unlawful, unprofessional, and unethical" behaviour relating to its audit of a Dubai gold company accused of money laundering and buying gold from conflict zones. The allegations were made in documents, seen by the Guardian, filed in the high court by lawyers acting for Amjad Rihan, a former E&Y partner who blew the whistle on the alleged scandal in 2014.

In October 2003, Billy Wayne Woods and his family packed into a luxury $181,000 motorhome for a fun getaway to Florida. Call it a textbook American vacation: their destination was Disney World, and with his wife, Shirley, his son and daughter-in law and two grandchildren in tow, the trip would surely be one to remember. But on the return home for the Alabama family, the vacation took an abrupt turn for disaster.

Miners are contracting the disease with striking frequency and at younger ages than ever before. By Marissa Fessenden.

Third-grade reading proficiency has plunged in the lead-poisoned city, setting off a debate about the possible causes. By Emily Atkin.

Latvia’s top banking official, a key member of the European Central Bank, was detained Sunday after being questioned for hours by anti-corruption authorities amid accusations of bribery and money laundering in the European nation’s financial system. Latvian state TV showed Ilmars Rimsevics arriving at the offices of the country’s anti-corruption agency Saturday night and leaving early Sunday, following what the broadcaster said was a raid on his office and property.

Africa is poor, but we can try to help its people. It's a simple statement, repeated through a thousand images, newspaper stories and charity appeals each year, so that it takes on the weight of truth. When we read it, we reinforce assumptions and stories about Africa that we've heard throughout our lives. We reconfirm our image of Africa.

Thanks to years of organizing, we in the United States saved ourselves from the corporate-dominated Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) by ensuring that the controversial deal was universally reviled across party lines and could never gain a majority in Congress. But... By Melinda St. Louis.

A sheriff in Alabama took home as personal profit more than $750,000 that was budgeted to feed jail inmates — and then purchased a $740,000 beach house, a reporter at The Birmingham News found. And it's perfectly legal in Alabama, according to state law and local officials. Alabama has a Depression-era law that allows sheriffs to "keep and retain" unspent money from jail food-provision accounts.

Look Out For i360 And Data Trust. By Greg Palast.

Iowa, Ohio, Oklahoma,Wyoming, Minnesota and Louisiana have introduced or passed legislation to criminalize environmental dissent. There is evidence that bill mill organizations such as ALEC and the bipartisan group Council of State Governments (CSG) had their hand in shaping these bills says investigative journalist Steve Horne. By Sharmini Peries.

President Trump's incoming national security adviser, John Bolton, ran a political action committee that paid Cambridge Analytica, the firm at the center of the Facebook controversy, $811,000 for data.

The Ghost of Hillary Clinton still haunts the minds of many Americans. She is paraded around America like a fallen angel. By Nick Pemberton.

A constant drip of corruption. And this is just what we know so far… By Joy Crane, Nick Tabor. Introduction by David Cay Johnston.

The NIH is already investigating the matter as more unseemly details emerge. By Beth Mole.