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The question was a simple one: Had Nike, the athletic apparel brand dogged by sweatshop allegations more than two decades ago, truly become a beacon of environmental stewardship and fair labor practices, as it claimed?

Davis zeroed in on one specific claim from Nike. The company has said that the factories for which it has data pay their workers, on average, 1.9 times the local minimum wage. It provided no breakdown of factories included in the calculation, and it wasn’t clear how widely pay might vary from the average. So Davis started requesting paystubs for workers across the globe. We hoped that even scattered data would help us test Nike’s math.

Davis received an Excel spreadsheet in English and Khmer, the language most widely spoken in Cambodia. It was a payroll ledger for Y&W Garment, which made baby clothing for Nike from 2022 to 2023. Davis could see every employee’s job title, age, hiring date, gender and pay amounts.

While Nike says contract factory workers for whom it has data earn 1.9 times their local minimum wage, a Y&W Garment factory payroll ledger shows many workers earning a base pay of $204 a month, Cambodia’s minimum wage last year. Even including bonuses and incentives, more than three-quarters of the factory’s employees earned close to the minimum wage (***working 6 days per week).

In a half-empty committee room in late April, one of Texas’ most powerful Republican state senators pitched legislation that would make it harder for immigrants in the country illegally to get jobs.

Her bill would require all employers in the state to use a free federal computer system, known as E-Verify, that quickly confirms whether someone has authorization to work in the United States. Sen. Lois Kolkhorst of Brenham ticked off a handful of Republican-led states that mandate the program for all private companies and listed others that require it for most over a certain size. Yet Texas, which prides itself on being the nation’s toughest on illegal immigration, instructs only state agencies and sexually oriented businesses to use it.

But then, like dozens of E-Verify bills over the last decade, the legislation died.

The resistance to E-Verify isn’t just about Texas Republicans’ reluctance to regulate business, Melmed said. It’s about how such a system could impact the state’s labor supply and economy.

Roughly 73 square miles (189 square kilometers) of homelands have been returned to the Yurok, more than doubling the tribe’s land holdings, according to a deal announced Thursday. Completion of the land-back conservation deal along the lower Klamath River — a partnership with Western Rivers Conservancy and other environmental groups — is being called the largest in California history.

The Yurok Tribe had 90% of its territory taken during the California Gold Rush in the mid-1800s, suffering massacres and disease from settlers.

“To go from when I was a kid and 20 years ago even, from being afraid to go out there to having it be back in tribal hands … is incredible,” said McCovey, director of the Yurok Tribal Fisheries Department.

The setback threatens to divert billions of dollars in revenue away from Apple while it tried to overturn the order reining in its commissions from e-commerce within iPhone apps.

Apple sought to put the order on hold after it was issued by U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez-Rogers in a stinging rebuke that also held the Cupertino, California, company in civil contempt of court and recommended opening a criminal investigation into whether one of its executives had committed perjury while testifying in her Oakland, California, courtroom.

It marked another twist of the screw in a legal battle initiated nearly five years ago by video game maker Epic Games, which alleged Apple had turned the iPhone’s app store had been turned into a price-gouging monopoly. The antitrust case focused largely on the 15% to 30% commissions that Apple rakes in from a portion of the commerce conducted within iPhone apps under a system that prohibited app makers from offering alternative payment methods.

The job cuts, announced at the Deutsche Bank Consumer Conference in Paris on Thursday, make up approximately 6% of the company’s global workforce, or about 15% of its nonmanufacturing positions, said Chief Financial Officer Andre Schulten.

“This restructuring program is an important step toward ensuring our ability to deliver our long-term algorithm over the coming two to three years,” Schulten said. “It does not, however, remove the near-term challenges that we currently face.”

Procter & Gamble, based in Cincinnati, had approximately 108,000 employees worldwide in June 2024.

Adely Vanessa De La Cruz-Alvarez, 21, was arrested last month near the West Texas town of Tornillo after she entered the U.S. from Mexico by walking across the riverbed of the Rio Grande, court documents show.

In addition to being charged with entering the country illegally, she was charged with accessing a military zone. She is among several other immigrants who have been charged under the law since President Donald Trump’s administration transferred oversight of a strip of land along the border to the military. It is as part of a new approach the Department of Justice is taking to crack down on illegal immigration.

“Hopefully, this sets the tone for the federal government,” Lerma (De La Cruz-Alvarez’s attorney) said, “so they know what the El Paso community will do with these charges.”

Marcelo Gomes da Silva, 18, who came to the U.S. from Brazil at age 7, was detained by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents Saturday. Authorities have said the agents were looking for the Milford High School teenager’s father, who owns the car Gomes da Silva was driving at the time and had parked in a friend’s driveway.

Speaking with members of the media outside the detention center shortly after his release on $2,000 bond, Gomes da Silva described “humiliating” conditions and said his faith helped him through his six days of detention.

On his wrist, he wore a bracelet made from the thin sheet of metallic blanket he was given to sleep on the cement floor.

President Donald Trump threatened to cut Elon Musk’s government contracts as their fractured alliance escalated into a public feud Thursday. The world’s richest man responded in kind, saying he’d decommission a space capsule used to take astronauts and supplies to the International Space Station.

Shares of Musk’s electric vehicle maker Tesla fell 14%, knocking about $150 billion off the company’s market valuation.

Alberta's politics are not without their complexity. Here's one striking new example.

While this is a province where many people are newly interested in separating from Canada because the Liberals won — again — and nearly all ridings went Conservative — again — Albertans appear as likely to express admiration for Mark Carney as for Pierre Poilievre.

A new Janet Brown Opinion Research poll conducted after the federal election for CBC News asked respondents for their impression of the federal Liberal and Conservative leaders, on a 10-point scale, where 0 means deeply unimpressed and 10 means utterly dazzled.

The House of Commons unanimously voted in favour of the Liberals' promised income tax cut on Thursday.

The Liberals promised to bring in a one percentage point reduction in the lowest marginal tax rate — taking it from 15 per cent to 14 per cent — during this spring's election campaign.

The government introduced a "ways and means" motion to make the tax changes last week and all MPs voted in favour of the motion on Thursday.

A ways and means motion allows the government to start making changes to the tax code before such changes are passed in legislation — but a bill will still need to be passed.

Ontario's Ministry of Health has announced the first recorded death of a measles patient from the current outbreak that started in October.

Dr. Kieran Moore, chief medical officer of health, issued a statement Thursday saying a southwestern Ontario infant has died after being born prematurely and infected with the highly contagious virus through the mother.

Moore offered few other details.

Southwestern Public Health, which covers Oxford and Elgin counties, confirmed the child was from a community in their coverage area.

Donald Trump has said it may be better to let Ukraine and Russia “fight for a while” rather than pursue peace immediately, as the German chancellor, Friedrich Merz, urged him to increase pressure on Russia.

During the Oval Office meeting, Trump voiced doubts about the potential success of peace talks, saying “sometimes you’re better off letting them fight for a while and then pulling them apart”.

The US president said he had told Vladimir Putin that the two countries were like “two young children fighting like crazy in a park” when the two spoke by phone on Wednesday.