Dirty linen: sheets scandal roils cotton industry

London

HUDDLED inside Target Corp's headquarters in downtown Minneapolis, a team of investigators spent the summer trying to answer what should have been a simple question: What were hundreds of thousands of the retailer's sheets actually made of?

What they discovered has undermined trust in a global luxury product and set off a salvo of class-action lawsuits that have created a king-sized public relations challenge for the Indian textiles industry and the US companies it supplies.

Turns out that major American retailers, inc…