Last year the Supreme Court took the extraordinary step of ordering California to reduce the dangerous overcrowding in its prisons. The state had challenged an earlier ruling requiring it to meet a specific limit on the number of state prisoners. The court firmly rejected that challenge.      

Without such a limit, Justice Anthony Kennedy said for the majority, there would be “a certain and unacceptable risk of continuing violations” of prisoners’ rights caused by horrible conditions, amounting to cruel and unusual punishment.      

Give the tobacco industry credit for ingenuity. Just when it looked as if federal regulators could block their ability to addict children and young adults, several companies that make cigars and pipe tobacco have sidestepped the barriers by taking advantage of loopholes in federal law.      

One loophole involves a law enacted in 2009 that raised the federal tax on cigarettes, small cigars and roll-your-own tobacco, partly to deter smoking among young people and partly to help pay for a children’s health insurance program. Larger cigars and pipe tobacco, however, were taxed at a much lower rate.      

It has been six months since the big banks settled with state and federal officials over evidence of widespread foreclosure fraud, promising to provide $25 billion in mortgage relief in exchange for not being sued over past foreclosure abuses.      

At the time, it looked like a sweet deal for the banks. The fines were paltry compared with the damage done to homeowners and the economy. And much of the relief the banks were obliged to provide could be met by continuing more or less with business as usual.      

The training of Afghan Local Police and special operations forces has been put on hold while their American trainers conduct stricter vetting to try to root out any infiltrators or new recruits who could pose risks to the coalition troops working with them, American officials say.      

The move does not affect the vast majority of Afghan forces — more than 350,000 Afghan National Army soldiers and Afghan National Police members — who are still being trained and are still working in the field with American and NATO counterparts, military officials said. The action was first reported online by The Washington Post.      

The New York attorney general is investigating whether some of the nation’s biggest private equity firms have abused a tax strategy in order to slice hundreds of millions of dollars from their tax bills, according to executives with direct knowledge of the inquiry.      

CNN's failure to question Paul Ryan's falsehoods is emblematic of the idiot wind blowing through American electoral politics.

Wednesday night, the GOP's nominee for vice-president, Paul Ryan, delivered a speech loaded with pure, fundamental deceit on its core claims. The New Republic's Jonathan Cohn has the clearest and most concise explanation of those falsehoods.