Grocers including Walmart Inc., Jumbo Group Ltd. and Whole Foods Market Inc. fared poorly in ratings looking at the treatment of the women, farmers and food-sector workers who supply supermarket shelves in the U.S. and European Union.

Animal welfare in fashion has had a huge boost last week. Asos — the second biggest clothing site in the U.K., with 64.4 million visitors in the six months to May 2018 — has pledged to ban silk, mohair, cashmere and feathers from its site from January 2019. In addition, products using down, teeth and bone — including mother-of-pearl, which is taken from the shell of some molluscs — also fall under the planned ban.

With a dragnet closing in, engineers at a Taiwanese chip maker holding American secrets did their best to conceal a daring case of corporate espionage.

Challenge: Growth driven by acquisitions left a global manufacturer with a mixed bag of ERP systems — resulting in an unconsolidated view of spend and an inability to quickly analyze data. The manual reporting system, combined with data extraction and trust issues, was costly and left the manufacturer with a poor understanding of true supplier expenses.

Price squeezes by some of the U.K.’s biggest supermarkets, including Tesco, Sainsbury’s and Asda, are hurting workers and small-scale farmers in some of the poorest parts of the world, Oxfam has said.

The new avocados rolling out to Costco stores in the Midwest this week don't look like the future of fresh produce. But they're quietly testing technology that could more than double the shelf life of vegetables and fruits.

The merchandise has never been more plentiful or easier to find. Tote bags that say “United” from H&M. T-shirts emblazoned with “I Am Proud” from Levi Strauss & Co. An inflatable, rainbow-colored whale from Target — a “Pride Narwhal.”