On the heels of a public apology in June by Whole Foods CEOs over allegations that the store overcharges customers for seafood, produce, and other goods weighed by the pound, the grocery chain is now receiving a fresh round of criticism for its use of cheap prison labor to produce some of those goods.

SPIEGEL: Did any of the men you accompanied have doubts about their mission?

Abu Abdullah: No, then they would have failed to carry them out. They were prepared for their assignments for a long time. When they came to me, they were calm, sometimes even joyful. When they put on the belt they would say, for example, “Fits well!” Abu Mohsen Qasimi, a young Syrian, was still making jokes two minutes before his deployment, and then, when he drove off by himself, he bid a friendly farewell. With one young Saudi Arabian, I was wondering how we could inconspicuously change spots, because I was sitting behind the wheel at first. We pretended to have car trouble, both got out and then pushed the vehicle for a bit. Nobody noticed anything. We both laughed.

Yes, they had a $3.3 billion loss, but the details are the interesting bit:

Windows license revenue from OEM preinstalls was down 22 percent, and consumer sales of Office were down 42 percent. Windows Phone revenue was down an even sharper 68 percent, due to a decrease in royalty payments, though sales of Lumia hardware were up more than 10 percent to 8.4 million, compared to 7.5 million in the same quarter a year ago. […]

On the commercial, volume licensed side, Windows revenue was down 8 percent and Office revenue was down 18 percent.

Yes, Surface and Cloud and Xbone were up — but they all started from zero fairly recently, so their increases aren’t going to make up for Microsoft’s traditional profit centers dropping 20% in a quarter. And Xbone is still trailing far behind PS4, which has sold nearly twice as many units.

A Chicago investigator who determined that several civilian shootings by police officers were unjustified was fired after resisting orders to reverse those findings, according to internal records of his agency obtained by WBEZ. […]

Davis’s termination came less than two weeks after top IPRA officials, evaluating Davis’s job performance, accused him of “a clear bias against the police” and called him “the only supervisor at IPRA who resists making requested changes as directed by management in order to reflect the correct finding with respect to OIS,” as officer-involved shootings are known in the agency.

Emphasis mine. Amazing how they openly state that they’re firing a supposedly independent investigator because he resists making changes he’s directed to make in order to reach the “correct” conclusion.

Waller County officials said Ms. Bland had been found in a “semi-standing position,” hanged with a plastic trash-can liner affixed to a U-shaped metal hook. Jail officials and emergency medical personnel placed her on the floor and unsuccessfully administered cardiopulmonary resuscitation before she was pronounced dead at 9:16 a.m.

The liner had been taken from the trash container in her cell, said Brian Cantrell, a criminal investigator for the sheriff’s office.

Nice of Waller County to place a convenient metal hook and plastic trash bag in their jail cells.