Amazon lowering prices at Whole Foods, Alabama prisons violating constitutional rights, increasing Chinese influence in Latin America, and concerns over recent outbreaks of the measles.

These are just a few of the top newsworthy items from this past week as first shared on our Facebook page.

• Amazon is planning to cut prices on hundreds of items at Whole Foods stores this week, as the e-commerce giant seeks to change the chain’s high-cost image amid intense competition among grocers.
  
  The price cuts affect more than 500 products and include a focus on produce and meat.
  
  From The Wall Street Journal

• Advertisers are starting to shift spending on search ads from Google toward Amazon. It’s a sign of how Amazon is capitalizing on becoming the top destination for consumers’ product searches.
  
  From The Wall Street Journal

• Americans are feeding more fresh food to their pets. U.S. sales of fresh pet food in groceries and pet stores jumped 70% between 2015 and 2018, to more than $546 million, according to Nielsen.
  
  From AP

• Pervasive partisanship and rapid-fire social media echo chambers have exacerbated our tendency to jump to conclusions.
  
  Research shows the social media ecosystem can lead to snap judgments, even based on incomplete information, to reinforce emotional identities and ideological positions.
  
  From Axios

• Tech and health-care companies are competing over ways for consumers to corral their digital health data, prompting questions about privacy and control. Companies such as Apple, UnitedHealth and others are rolling out online tools to bring together information from the systems of hospitals, doctors and insurers.
  
  From The Wall Street Journal

• Alabama’s 13 men’s prisons routinely violate inmates’ constitutional rights by failing to protect them from violence and sexual abuse, the Justice Department said, after an investigation revealed brutal conditions in the state’s overcrowded and understaffed facilities.
  
  The department threatened to sue the state’s prison system if it doesn’t quickly address the problems investigators uncovered, including an abundance of illegal weapons and drugs, excessive use of solitary confinement and a high level of violence.
  
  From The Wall Street Journal

• Chinese construction in Latin America, especially the Panama Canal, is stirring alarm in Washington over Beijing’s ambitions in a region that American leaders since the 19th century have seen as off-limits to other powers.
  
  From AP

• President Trump announced that he would suspend foreign assistance for what’s known as the Northern Triangle of Central American countries—Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala—because he believes they are complicit in allowing immigrants to move toward the American border.
  
  Mr. Trump also said he might shut down the border with Mexico for a long time, a move that was roundly considered implausible by analysts and his critics on Capitol Hill.
  
  From The Wall Street Journal

• A series of fierce, sometimes connected measles outbreaks — in places as diverse as Indonesia, the Philippines, Madagascar and Venezuela — have shaken global health officials.
  
  The outbreaks reveal persistent shortcomings in the world’s vaccination efforts, and threaten to tarnish what had been a signature public health achievement.
  
  From The New York Times

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