Former Russian President Mikhail Gorbachev, who pushed for nuclear disarmament in meetings with President Ronald Reagan, told Der Spiegel that the US as an “insurmountable obstacle on the road to a nuclear-free world,” and suggested, “That’s why we have to put demilitarization back on the agenda of international politics.”

You’d be forgiven for having trouble telling the major presidential candidates apart in the latest presidential horse race, especially given a recent story from The Intercept’s Lee Fang. Fang reports that Bush, Clinton, Kasich and Rubio all make use of Akin Gump, an infamous lobbying firm, for fundraising in the next election.

The chancellor of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), who was involved in firing Professor Steven Salaita over tweets he sent about Israel’s 2014 assault on Gaza, has announced her resignation yesterday. The announcement comes as a federal judge refused to dismiss Salaita’s lawsuit against the university for violating his free speech.

A new report by In The Public Interest (ITPI) illustrates how private companies that operate prisons or services within prisons use correctional associations to gain intimate access to decision makers in government — almost entirely off the books. Private companies pay millions of dollars each year to attend their conferences, lead trainings and workshops, give speeches, and advertise their products and services to law enforcement officials in attendance.

The scramble to secure a controversial trade deal known as the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) is leading to some serious ethical conflicts for the Obama Administration. While many initial objections to TPP were due to concerns about a lack of transparency from the White House as to the contents of the agreement and how it was negotiated, a recent decision by the State Department to change a country’s ranking in a human trafficking report has human rights groups crying foul and citing TPP as the real reason for the change.

Kevin Gosztola interviews Duncan Campbell, recently published in The Intercept, about his 4 decades as a journalist dedicated to uncovering the surveillance state and the international ECHELON program. Campbell says less has changed for today’s journalists than you might think.

The Wet’suwet’en, a band of about 140 indigenous members, maintain the Unist’ot’en Camp, a checkpoint blocking the only bridge entering their land. It’s a direct challenge to the Canadian status quo because the Wet’suwet’en say they won’t let pipeline crews, oil company developers, or even Canadian police onto their land.

Inmate deaths in local jails and state prisons are on the rise for the third year in a row, according to a new study by the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics. The report, released on August 4, found that the number of jailhouse deaths increased between 2012 and 2013 even though jail populations declined by 4% during that time.

On Monday, the ACLU asked an attorney general to “back off” and stop invading the privacy of Internet users to infringe on free speech or serve the agenda of big corporations and their lawyers. Google already sued Attorney General Jim Hood over the massive, invasive subpoena.