An investigation by the Boston Globe found that ICE freed more than 8,500 detainees convicted of murder, rape, and other crimes over the past four years, usually because their home countries refused to take them back. More than 20 nations have turned down U.S. requests to receive deported criminals.   read more

In a notice to industry, the State Department recently solicited bids from companies to help the agency operate its fleet of more than 400 aircraft. Among the duties that a contractor will have to perform are providing pilots and support “for drug interdiction missions such as crop spraying, and the transport of personnel and cargo,” according to the State Department’s announcement.   read more

The U.S. Senate this week took up the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, a United Nations treaty that was inspired by the Americans with Disabilities Act, a landmark law adopted in 1990. But in order to ratify the convention, 67 senators were needed to vote for it. Only 61 did, after a block of Republicans refused to endorse the treaty that they claimed would jeopardize American sovereignty.   read more

The Bureau of Investigative Journalism also reported that 1,168 armed drone strikes, which the Pentagon refers to as “kinetic events,” were launched during the last five years in Afghanistan, Libya and Iraq combined. Meanwhile, the CIA has launched 338 drone attacks in Pakistan. Although the United Kingdom releases the details of non-combatants killed by its drone strikes, the United States does not.   read more

"Iraq accounts for about a third of all terrorist deaths over the last decade, and Iraq, Pakistan and Afghanistan account for over 50 percent of fatalities,” Killelea added. International terrorists have caused fatal attacks in 29 countries. The United States is not included in this total because all of the deadly terrorist attacks committed inside the country since 2001 have been carried out by Americans.   read more

Today, only about 20% of young adults will reach a higher level of education than their parents, a rate that’s among the lowest rates in the developed world, according to the OECD. Schleicher says that a major problem in the U.S. is that the skyrocketing cost of going to college has created a barrier for many young Americans who do not come from wealthy families.   read more

, “militant leaders” of anti-U.S. groups like the Pakistani Taliban, the Afghan Taliban, or al-Qaeda, constituted only about 30% of those killed by drones under the Bush administration, and only 13% under Obama. The rest are local insurgents, as in Pakistan, where for two years most strikes have targeted militants fighting the Pakistani government or American troops in Afghanistan   read more

The report details several structural problems of the Israeli economy, including its lagging labor productivity, which is in the lower rank of OECD countries, just behind crisis-ridden Greece; growing employment gaps between Israel and leading western countries; and high interest payments on its debt, which last year were higher than the country’s entire education budget.   read more

The project is backed by several Arab nations, as well as Turkey, Pakistan, Cyprus, Iran and even Israel. The latter two participants stand out, due to Iran’s vow to wipe Israel off the face of the earth, and Israel’s desire to destroy Iran’s nuclear capabilities.   read more

Suha Arafat refused to permit an autopsy at the time her husband died in a French hospital following a stroke, said to have been caused by a blood disorder, in 2004. She then gave some of Yasser Arafat’s personal items to Al Jazeera television. The network forwarded them to the Institut de Radiophysique, which discovered abnormal levels of polonium-210. The radioactive element is extremely rare, but became widely known after it was used to kill Russian ex-spy Alexander Litvinenko in 2006.   read more

According to the flight manifests, a Syrian transport plane made eight round-trip flights between Moscow’s Vnukovo Airport and Damascus International Airport, with each trip involving 30 tons of bank notes. The logs do not specify the type of currency that was shipped.   read more

“You might park a UAV over a house, waiting for someone to come in or come out, and that’s where the boredom comes in,” explains Mary “Missy” Cummings, associate professor of aeronautics and astronautics and engineering systems at MIT. “It turns out it’s a much bigger problem in any system where a human is effectively babysitting the automation.”   read more

Morsi, who has been in office less than five months, proclaimed that the Supreme Constitutional Court could no longer challenge his rulings, and ordered retrials of several top former officials, including ex-president Hosni Mubarak, who ruled as Egypt’s dictator for more than three decades. The decree shocked many Egyptians, especially those who had hoped the fall of Mubarak would lead to democratic rule.   read more

On October 2, the NML Capital hedge fund, a subsidiary of Elliott Capital, convinced the government of Ghana to detain an Argentine tall ship, the ARA Libertad, as partial payment for the funds owed by the government of Argentina. The ship is used for training by the Argentine navy. The United Nations' maritime court agreed to hold a hearing on this matter on November 29.   read more

During his fifth trip to Cuba, Gross was arrested in December 2009. Finally tried in March 2011, he was convicted of participating in “a subversive project of the U.S. government that aimed to destroy the Revolution through the use of communications systems out of the control of [Cuban] authorities,” and sentenced to 15 years in prison. Gross contends that neither USAID nor Development Alternatives fully explained to him the dangers of the work before he left for Cuba.   read more

The Zetas drug cartel is now selling millions of dollars worth of coal each year in northern Mexico, across the border from Texas. This relatively legitimate business allows the cartel to launder money gained from drug trafficking. In Coahuila state, which produces 95% of Mexico’s coal, the cartel produces or buys 10,000 tons of coal a week and sells it to the Mexican government at inflated prices, earning $22 million to $25 million annually.   read more