An anonymous reader writes: Today Staples announced plans to buy Office Depot in a deal worth $6.3 billion. This is a huge consolidation within the office supply industry. Office Depot and OfficeMax were the second- and third-biggest suppliers when they merged in 2013. Adding those to the enormity of Staples would effectively bring the U.S. under a single office supply chain. “The move is expected to draw scrutiny from the Federal Trade Commission, though regulators have been increasingly willing to approve retail mergers in light of burgeoning e-commerce competition. … This isn’t the first time Staples has tried to buy Office Depot. In 1997, the FTC derailed Staples’ acquisition of its rival as anticompetitive. By 2013, though, the agency’s view had shifted. When the FTC allowed Office Depot to buy OfficeMax, it said the advent of online retailing ensured competition in the market for office supplies. Consumers today also rely more heavily on big-box chains such as Wal-Mart Stores Inc. for office products, the commission said.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Staples To Buy Office Depot For $6.3 Billion
We’ve known for a long time that federal authorities have a lot of license plate readers at their disposal, some of which they surely use for nefarious purposes. However, new details have emerged that show exactly how nefarious those purposes are. Does secretly spying on millions of Americans and seizing property sound nefarious enough to care? Read more… 
lightbox32 writes Dish Network has been found guilty of violating the Do Not Call list on 57 million separate occasions. They were also found liable for abandoning or causing telemarketers to abandon nearly 50 million outbound telephone calls, in violation of the abandoned-call provision of the Federal Trade Commission’s Telemarketing Sales Rule. Penalties for infringing on the Do Not Call list can be up to a whopping $16, 000 for each outbound call. Read more of this story at Slashdot. 
HughPickens.com writes After rising rapidly for decades, the number of people behind bars peaked at 1.62 Million in 2009, has been mostly falling ever since down, and many justice experts believe the incarceration rate will continue on a downward trajectory for many years. New York, for example, saw an 8.8% decline in federal and state inmates, and California, saw a 20.6% drop. Now the WSJ reports on an awkward byproduct of the declining U.S. inmate population: empty or under-utilized prisons and jails that must be cared for but can’t be easily sold or repurposed. New York state has closed 17 prisons and juvenile-justice facilities since 2011, following the rollback of the 1970s-era Rockefeller drug laws, which mandated lengthy sentences for low-level offenders. So far, the state has found buyers for 10 of them, at prices that range from less than $250, 000 to about $8 million for a facility in Staten Island, often a fraction of what they cost to build. “There’s a prisoner shortage, ” says Mike Arismendez, city manager for Littlefield, Texas, home of an empty five-building complex that sleeps 383 inmates and comes with a gym, maintenence shed, armory, and parking lot . “Everybody finds it hard to believe.” The incarceration rate is declining largely because crime has fallen significantly in the past generation. In addition, many states have relaxed harsh sentencing laws passed during the tough-on-crime 1980s and 1990s, and have backed rehabilitation programs, resulting in fewer low-level offenders being locked up. States from Michigan to New Jersey have changed parole processes, leading more prisoners to leave earlier. On a federal level, the Justice Department under Attorney General Eric Holder has pushed to reduce sentences for nonviolent drug offenders. Before 2010, the U.S. prison population increased every year for 30 years, from 307, 276 in 1978 to a high of 1, 615, 487 in 2009. “This is the beginning of the end of mass incarceration, ” says Natasha Frost. “People don’t care so much about crime, and it’s less of a political focus.” Read more of this story at Slashdot. 
itwbennett writes: “In June 2012, Ricky Joe Mitchell of Charleston, West Virginia, found out he was going to be fired from oil and gas company EnerVest and in response he decided to reset the company’s servers to their original factory settings. He also disabled cooling equipment for EnerVest’s systems and disabled a data-replication process. After pleading guilty in January, Mitchell has been sentenced to four years in federal prison.” Read more of this story at Slashdot. 
wiredmikey writes “A Ukrainian national, Roman Vega, who pleaded guilty in 2009 to creating a popular online marketplace for selling stolen financial account data has been sentenced to 18 years in prison. Called one of the world’s ‘most prolific cybercriminals’ by the Department of Justice, Vega, 49, will serve significant time in prison for his role in co-founding the notorious website CarderPlanet. In the early 2000s, Vega co-founded and became a high-ranking administrator of the notorious website, which became one of the first and busiest online marketplaces for the sale of stolen financial information, computer hacking services and money laundering. At its height, CarderPlanet had more than 6, 000 members and had a hierarchical leadership structure that borrowed its leadership titles from La Cosa Nostra, US authorities said.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.