A new study says little is being done to meet the growing demand for modern contraception methods in poor countries. The Guttmacher Institute says there’s an increasing desire for smaller families.

Guttmacher says between 2003 and 2012 the number of women wanting to avoid pregnancy – and in need of modern contraception – rose from 716 million to 867 million. The sharpest increase was seen, it says, in the 69 poorest countries “where modern method use was already very low.”

Senior fellow Jacqueline Darroch co-authored the study with Susheela Singh and published their findings in a special edition of The Lancet medical journal. Darroch said that the figures are based on household surveys.

“The Guttmacher Institute for a long time has focused on issues of reproductive health and especially the high rates of unplanned child bearing and unplanned pregnancies across the world – the United States, as well as other countries. And part of the answer to both why we have such high rates of unintended pregnancy – and part of the solution – has to do with contraceptive use.”

A tornado with 320 kilometer per hour winds has killed at least 51 people and caused massive destruction in the central U.S. state of Oklahoma, destroying two schools and entire neighborhoods.

The Oklahoma Medical Examiner's Office said the death toll was expected to rise as rescue workers move deeper into the hardest-hit areas.

The 1.6 kilometer-wide tornado hit Monday afternoon and destroyed large swaths of Moore, an Oklahoma City suburb, injuring dozens of people, sending debris flying and setting buildings on fire. Rescue workers have pulled several children alive out of the rubble of the schools.  

Oklahoma Governor Mary Fallin deployed 80 National Guard members to assist with search-and-rescue operations. Fallin also spoke with President Barack Obama, who asked the Federal Emergency Management Agency to provide any assistance she needs.

Algeria is competing to be the next Arab nation to witness a popular revolt. That is assuming soccer is a barometer of rising discontent in a region experiencing a wave of mass protests that have already toppled the leaders of Egypt, Tunisia, Libya and Yemen and sparked civil war in Syria.

In fact, there is increasingly little doubt that soccer, a historic nucleus of protest in Algeria, is signaling that popular discontent could again spill into the streets of Algiers and other major cities. Two years ago, protesters inspired by events in Egypt and Tunisia ultimately pulled back from the brink despite the toppling of Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak and Tunisia's Zine El Abidine Ben Ali.

Now, in circumstances similar to Saudi Arabia, protests are mounting amid uncertainty about the future as Algeria's aging leadership struggles with a series of natural deaths and the effects of health problems among its remaining key members.

Earthquakes, tsunamis, and other natural disasters often showcase the worst in human suffering – especially when those disasters strike populations who live in rapidly growing communities in the developing world with poorly enforced or non-existent building codes.

This week in Cancun, a researcher from Yale-National University of Singapore (NUS) College in Singapore is presenting a comparison between large-scale earthquakes and tsunamis in different parts of the world, illustrating how nearly identical natural disasters can play out very differently depending on where they strike.

The aim of the talk at the 2013 Meeting of the Americas, which is sponsored by the American Geophysical Union (AGU), is to focus on the specific role geoscientists can play in disaster risk reduction and how their work should fit in with the roles played by other experts for any given community.

Solar photovoltaic wafer production is forecast to grow 19 percent in 2013, passing 30 GW and recovering to the 2011 level, according to the latest NPD Solarbuzz Polysilicon and Wafer Supply Chain Quarterly.  The market fell 15 percent in 2012.

Industry utilization is expected to remain below 60 percent, and while prices have stopped falling, no significant increases are expected, so profitability for wafer makers will remain challenging.

Multicrystalline silicon (multi c-Si) technology is forecast to continue its dominance of the wafer market in the short to mid-term. However, the higher efficiency solar cells that can be produced using monocrystalline silicon (mono c-Si) wafers continue to be in demand for applications where space is restricted. The higher efficiencies enable pricing at a premium over standard multi c-Si modules. In particular, rapid growth in the Japanese market is creating demand for premium efficiency modules that use mono c-Si wafers.

The late Venezuelan president, Hugo Chavez was known for having started and spread what is called the Bolivarian revolution, a kind of anti-American, dictatorial type of socialism. His success in spreading his revolution and his influence in the region would not have been so successful without the support of the moderate-left countries of Latin America as well as the ALBA block made up of Cuba, Nicaragua, Ecuador and Bolivia. In my last article I pointed out the role that countries in the region have played and continue to play in the perpetuation of the Bolivarian revolution in Venezuela.

However, of all the countries in the region, Brazil is a crucial piece in the support of the Bolivarian revolution. At this point is probably a more effective source of support than Cuba or any other member of ALBA, despite having openly distanced itself from the Venezuelan model. Indeed, Brazil has supported Chavez in the international arena thus helping prolong the agony of the Venezuelan people, the authoritarian practices of its government, and the geo-political threats to the region.

Ever since the death of former Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez back in March, his successors have been flinging insult after insult at the United States. The volley began at the very moment of Chavez’s death, when his anointed heir Nicolas Maduro, pointing an accusatory finger at the U.S., claimed that Chavez had been “assassinated.” Maduro then accused the U.S. of plotting to kill his opposition rival, Henrique Capriles, in order to engineer a coup. Finally, after weeks of blaming the U.S. for everything from food shortages to the violence that followed the disputed April 14 presidential election, Maduro recycled a barb that Chavez had previously deployed against George W. Bush, when he declared that President Obama was the “grand chief of devils.”

Now, however, conciliatory noises are emerging from Caracas. Over the weekend, Maduro’s foreign minister, Elias Jaua, announced that Venezuela wanted to mend diplomatic fences with the United States. “We are going to remain open to normalizing relations with the United States,” Jaua said during a television interview. “The first thing would be to resume diplomatic representation at the highest level.”

I was not among those who believed the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision would open the floodgates of corporate money to influence elections and public policy. While the decision enables corporations to call for the election or defeat of federal candidates, those expenditures have to be reported and few corporations will take the risk of losing customers by getting involved in politics so publicly.

The reality is, the floodgates have been open for years, and the attention focused on Citizens United has actually been helpful to corporations, because it has diverted the public’s attention away from the deceptive yet perfectly legal ways corporations are able to deploy enormous sums of money to advance their political agendas.

The mainstream media, meanwhile, seems to willfully ignore what corporations and other moneyed interests do to get what they want in Washington. That was certainly the case last week after National Journal reporter Chris Frates disclosed how America’s Health Insurance Plans, the insurance industry biggest PR and lobbying group, funneled hundreds of thousands of dollars to a longtime ally with a better reputation to pay for an industry-serving communications campaign. The only media outlets I could find that picked up the story were The Huffington Post, Bloomberg Businessweek and ABC News online.

The Energy Department (DOE) on Friday approved a controversial application allowing liquefied natural-gas exports to nations that lack a free-trade agreement with the United States.

The department gave the green light to Freeport LNG Expansion and FLNG Liquefaction’s proposal to send 1.4 billion cubic feet per day of natural gas overseas from a terminal on Quintana Island, Texas, for 25 years.

The DOE said that project opponents “have not demonstrated that the requested authorization would be inconsistent with the public interest,” which is the standard proposals for exports to nations lacking a free-trade pact with the U.S. must satisfy.

The project is the second to get DOE approval to send natural gas to non-free trade nations. The developers will now take their plan to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC). The decision comes less than 24 hours after the Senate confirmed Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz, whose position on exporting natural gas had been somewhat ambiguous.

he very public trading of graft accusations in Afghanistan's parliament this week has all of Kabul talking. It has turned the country's finance minister into an instant hero but also kindled hopes that the issue of corruption will finally be addressed in a more serious manner.

Finance Minister Omar Zakhilwal became an overnight sensation, when, facing potential impeachment, he turned the tables on lawmakers by publicly naming and shaming deputies allegedly involved in corrupt practices. Zakhilwal's detailed accusations shed a spotlight on the world of graft and influence peddling that has come to be associated with men of power in Afghanistan but is rarely discussed in public.

Each year around this time, millions of would-be immigrants to the United States from around the world hold their breath. Early May is when the U.S. State Department releases its shortlist of applicants to the annual green-card lottery. About half of them -- 55,000 people -- will receive permanent-residence visas, the tickets to eventual citizenship.

This year, like any other, Internet forums on U.S. immigration, such as the Russian-language "Govorim Pro Ameriku" (Talking About America), are abuzz with posts from lottery hopefuls. The program has received well over 10 million applicants from the former Soviet Union since its inception. Some express joy at making the first cut, while others consider trying their luck next year. This time, however, there may not be a next year. The forums are abuzz about that possibility, too.

The carbon-soaking qualities of Australia’s coastal and marine wetlands are the focus of a new international research project.  Experts from 20 countries have this week attended a special seminar in Sydney. 

Researchers at the University of Technology Sydney say that seagrass, mangroves and saltmarsh capture carbon up to 40 times faster than forests on land. 

Marine wetlands are able to store the carbon for very long periods, but scientists worry that these “critical ecosystems” are being destroyed around the world at a rapid rate by development and pollution.  It is estimated that this destruction releases as much as 1 billion tons of carbon dioxide each year into the atmosphere and oceans.  That is almost the equivalent of Japan’s yearly emissions.

The Nigerian military says it has killed 14 Boko Haram militants and arrested 20 others.  The military says three soldiers died in the fighting Sunday and another is missing.

It was only last Tuesday that Nigerian President Goodluck Jonathan ordered the immediate deployment of thousands of soldiers to the north to fight Boko Haram, a militant group that has been blamed for thousands of deaths in the past four years.  But as of Sunday, the military says 24 Boko Haram members have been killed and another 85 captured in the offensive.

It could not independently verify the military claims because roads to affected areas are blocked and communications networks are sporadic at best.  Some analysts fear the military, which international rights groups have accused of extra-judicial killings and other abuses, could alienate the people by killing civilians along with suspected militants.

A senior Obama administration official says the White House had no knowledge of misdeeds being committed by America’s tax collecting agency - one of several scandals engulfing the administration. 

The Internal Revenue Service has admitted to singling out conservative political groups for heightened scrutiny in recent years.  The IRS is a politically-independent agency within the Treasury Department, which is headed by a member of the president’s Cabinet.  And so the question arises: did the White House know of improper IRS behavior before an independent investigator’s report was released earlier this month? 

White House senior adviser Dan Pfeiffer says no. “The first that the White House was made aware of it was from the Treasury Department a few weeks ago.  And not the details of what happened, not the results of the investigation, but that an independent investigation was about to conclude," he said.

Last month I devoted a column to the ongoing disgrace of the Claims Conference and the failure by the management to take appropriate action to provide financial assistance to ailing survivors unable to afford food, medicine and other basic necessities to enable them to live out their remaining years with a modicum of dignity.

I also drew attention to the scandal of the $57 million embezzled over a 15 year period by Claims Conference employees in the New York head office. I maintained that it was outrageous that the management responsible for overseeing these funds, failed to accept any responsibility or accountability. Instead, they shamelessly manipulated the board to carry resolutions expressing “complete confidence in the leadership and management”, extolling their purported “commitment to the principles of transparency … integrity, fairness, accountability, dialogue and … the highest ethical standards”.

In The Forgotten Presidents, University of North Carolina law school professor Michael J. Gerhardt looks at a dozen presidents, beginning with Martin Van Buren and ending with Jimmy Carter, and argues that each had more of an impact than many people -- not simply a public at large that may only be vaguely familiar with their names, but also professional historians more likely to interested in more prominent figures -- and suggests their impact has been greater than is commonly recognized. As his subtitle makes clear, Gerhardt is not arguing that these presidents had compelling personalities, or that their political gifts or tactics were especially notable. Instead, he argues that each made essentially administrative decisions that either marked a precedent in the history of the presidency itself or quickened a tendency in the nature of office. Much of Gerhardt's analysis focuses on topics like presidential appointments, vetoes, and relationships with other branches of government, especially the courts and the U.S. Senate.

Insofar as there's a narrative trajectory in this series of profiles, it's that presidents of all times and parties have tended to guard and strengthen the prerogatives of the office. To be sure, there have been any number that have been avowedly in favor of limited government. But, as Gerhardt shows, these figures (Van Buren, Franklin Pierce, Grover Cleveland the first time around) are among the least successful in U.S. history. He also shows that the two Whig presidents elected to office, William Henry Harrison and Zachary Taylor, began their terms avowing deference to the legislative branch, in large measure as a reaction to the perceived high-handedness of Andrew Jackson. But both men, as well as the vice presidents (John Tyler and Millard Fillmore) who succeeded them, found this theory of government wanting. Indeed, even those executives who did profess a federalist approach to governing, from Cleveland to Coolidge, nevertheless fought hard to maintain and extend their power in their own domain when it came to things like removing cabinet officers or naming Supreme Court justices. And others, notably Cleveland the second time around -- he gets two separate chapters for each of his administrations -- became increasingly convinced of the need for presidential initiative in lawmaking.

Up and down the Atlantic coast, US ports are abuzz. Dredging machines, tunnel excavators, and highway pavers from Miami to New York are preparing metropolitan economies and their ports for a newly expanded Panama Canal. As the thinking goes, an expanded Canal promises bigger ships, bigger cargo loads--and each metro wants a piece of the bigger business.

But lost in this port-related arms race is what the newly-widened Panama Canal means for the US economy . Too many metropolitan areas simply assume they’ll immediately acquire new freight business when the expanded Canal opens, or that there will be more business at all. These billion-dollar assumptions ignore a more fundamental question: how and where will the Panama Canal affect US’ global goods trade?

Two new medical discoveries are raising hopes of containing malaria - the mosquito-borne parasitic disease that each year infects more than 200 million people and claims an estimated 660 thousand lives.  Meantime, the World Health Organization is warning about dire consequences if a drug-resistant form of malaria spreads beyond southeast Asia.

Artemisinin has helped cut global malaria deaths by more than 25 percent over the past decade. But now, in parts of Southeast Asia, this drug no longer works. And the World Health Organization's Dr. Shin Young-Soo warns of serious setbacks if drug resistance continues to spread. 

"The truth is, that malaria will beat us all unless we do more than what we are doing now, and we do it better," he said. Controlling malaria involves a range of strategies: using insecticidal bed nets to prevent mosquito bites, spraying insecticides, preventive treatment for children  and pregnant women, and controlling or changing mosquitoes, or the malaria parasites they carry.

A new report by Save the Children finds that India leads the world in the highest number of babies dying within the first 24 hours of their birth, more than 300,000 a year.

Afsana Begum lost her second son to jaundice, just a month after he was born in a neighboring slum. Now pregnant again, she is determined that her baby enter the world in a safer environment. “If you have a baby in the house, they only get a tetanus shot. If you have a child in a hospital, they will get all the necessary immunizations. That’s why I think it’s better to go to the hospital,” she explained.

It’s a message that Save the Children wants more expectant mothers to hear. The international non-governmental organization sounded the alarm this week with its annual State of the World’s Mothers report, which says India accounts for 29 percent of all global first-day deaths.

Students at the University of Maryland want to make aviation history by building the world's first human-powered helicopter. In 1980, the American Helicopter Society announced an award for the first person to accomplish such a feat.

The $250,000 Sikorsky Prize would go to a vehicle that could hover for 60 seconds, not stray beyond a three-meter-square area, and at some point in the flight reach an altitude of three meters.

The prize has gone unclaimed for 33 years, but the student engineers are confident they can bring it home.

What seemed impossible when William Staruk began his PhD studies at the University of Maryland three years ago, is now within reach. He's part of a 50-member team developing a flyer called the Gamera II. “It has flown for 60 seconds and on a different flight gone to an altitude of nine feet [2.7 meters]." Staruk said. "We’re hoping now to combine both of those into a single flight, get that little bit of extra altitude we need and keep the helicopter controlled and stable so that we can take home the $250,000 Prize.”

House Democrats left Washington on Friday insisting they're not worried about political fallout after one of the most difficult weeks the Obama administration has endured.

Democrats know their fate in the 2014 elections hinges to a large degree on Obama's popularity, and they say the president has responded appropriately to a trio of controversies involving the IRS, the Justice Department and the terrorist attack last year in Benghazi, Libya.

The Democrats are also cheering the aggressive approach Obama used in the latter half of the week, saying the feistiness has quelled criticisms that the president is steering from the back seat of his own administration. "The president's done a good job of stabilizing the situation, working to try and get ahead of the curve so that we can focus on jobs and the economy," Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) said Friday. "When it comes right down to it, those are the issues of the most concern to people."

When Joe Klein writes of President Obama in ways that read like Sean Hannity talks, and when Maureen Dowd writes of Hillary Clinton in ways that read like Sarah Palin thinks, we might ask: What would the great columnists such as Walter Lippmann and James “Scotty” Reston write about the president at a moment like this?

My guess is that Lippmann and Reston might remind readers that when former President Reagan reached a crisis point in his presidency, he named former Senate Majority Leader Howard Baker (R-Tenn.) to be his chief of staff.

Lippmann and Reston might also remind readers, who today read much verbiage about “the second-term curse,” that Reagan, in his second term, achieved breakthroughs in Cold War history that historians will be praising in 100 years, and that former President Clinton, in his second term, created vast prosperity and tidal waves of jobs for which Americans remain greatly thankful today.

If a column could whisper into the ear of a president, my whisper to Obama would include this: name former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle (D-S.D.), one of the most experienced and connected figures in the modern history of our government and politics, to a very high-level position in your White House.

I am not suggesting a “White House shake-up,” which would be unnecessary and unwise. The stampeding herd of the media will ultimately grow tired of the current chase. The gathering storm of overheated rhetoric will soon subside. The taxpayer-financed inquisitions of House Republicans will soon inspire a backlash, as they did for Clinton.

The Joe Kleins of the media herd and the Maureen Dowds of the media mob will calm down and realize that Obama’s name should not be mixed with Nixon’s on the dignified pages of Time magazine, and that implying a moral equivalence of Hillary Clinton and the Republican attack dogs hungrily seeking to hunt her down does not elevate the standards of The New York Times.

In an exceptional political signal, a senior Israeli official contacted Mark Landler of the New York Times and explained that the Israeli government was determined to continue to prevent the transfer of advanced weapons to Hizbullah. The official, who remained anonymous throughout the report, added that if Syrian President Bashar al-Assad reacts to this policy by attacking Israel – either directly or indirectly through a proxy force – he will “risk forfeiting his regime, for Israel will retaliate.”

Israel’s policy of preventing the supply of advanced weapons to Hizbullah has been in place for some time, but in the past was primarily the responsibility of the Israeli Navy which intercepted Iranian weapons ships in the Mediterranean. According to U.S. sources, Israel has more recently concentrated this effort in Syrian territory. The Syrians may have had an interest in assuring that some of their more advanced weaponry not fall into the hands of the Sunni extremist groups they have been fighting that are linked to al-Qaeda, like Jabhat al-Nusra.

If you are one of some 600,000 subscribers to the Financial Times, you may wish to change your account's password. Recently, a few of the paper's Twitter accounts and a blog were compromised by Bashar Assad's thugs, bragging on their Twitter, "Hacked by the Syrian Electronic Army." Earlier the FT reported that a member of the Syrian Electronic Army was interviewed by the paper's reporters via email, and that the hacking was facilitated by phishing attacks on some of the FT's email accounts. Yet no link was made between that correspondence, which exposed FT email accounts, to today's hacking.  

In what can best be described as English subtlety, the article describing the attack did not even made headlines on the FT's home page. "We have now locked those accounts," announced the FT official, who praised Twitter's help. Nothing was said about the paper's subscribers' accounts. Clearly, the new two-step authentication that Twitter was supposed to establish, after the Associated Press account was hacked last month, failed.

As a record three scandals engulf Barack Obama’s presidency at once, the three-pronged effect of their damage — a corrosion of the public’s trust in our government and its trust in him, as well as any prospects for leadership in the rest of his term — seems lost upon him. The president doesn’t get it, or he doesn’t really care. Neither response is acceptable.

The bungled, incomplete and political reaction to the attack on our diplomatic outpost in Benghazi, Libya, last September that killed four Americans, including Ambassador Chris Stevens, the revelation that Internal Revenue Service employees singled out conservative groups for heightened scrutiny, and the Department of Justice seizure of the records of nearly 100 people at The Associated Press have outraged Republicans and Democrats alike, but inexplicably these scandals appear to have upset President Obama the least of anyone.

In the decade following the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Western analysts' search for a 'moderate Islamist' alternative to Al-Qaeda often brought them to the Muslim Brotherhood, whose rhetorical rejection of terrorism and embrace of electoral politics was seductive. Much of the resulting literature thus touted the Brotherhood's supposedly 'democratic' and 'non-violent' nature, all of which left the international community wholly unprepared for the very undemocratic and violent reality now emerging in Brotherhood-ruled Egypt.

Thankfully, however, not all analysts were so deluded. In her excellent book, The Muslim Brotherhood: From Opposition to Power, Alison Pargeter offers a much-needed dose of realism, weighing the Brotherhood's lofty assertions against its aggressive actions. Through her examination of the Brotherhood's early history in Egypt and subsequent spread throughout the Middle East and Europe, Pargeter depicts an organisation that faces the constant dilemma of either widening its base through pragmatic outreach or solidifying its base through a more hardline approach. And, as Pargeter tells it, the Brotherhood has almost always embraced the latter, favouring its 'conservative' tendencies over its more 'reformist' ones.

More than 4 million people in the U.S. are long-term unemployed, a number that has more than tripled in the last five years. Because the probability of reemployment drops significantly the longer someone is out of work, this situation suggests the possibility that the U.S. economy will suffer a permanent increase in structural unemployment.

Perhaps counter-intuitively, to avoid this becoming reality, Congress would do well to let the current extended unemployment benefits wind down and in the future refrain from leaping to fund nearly two years of benefits for unemployed workers.

Economists and pundits alike have been discussing the plight of the long-term unemployed and proposing policies to assist this group. Notably absent from these discussions is an attempt to understand how we ended up in this dire situation.

When Ed Sheehy looked at his mail one day last fall, he was startled to see his face staring back at him, posed alongside the notorious “Christmas Day Killer.” Sheehy, as a public defender, had represented the man a year earlier. Now Sheehy was running for a seat on the Montana Supreme Court and someone was using the double-murder to accuse him of being soft on crime.

“I was furious,” the 60-year-old Sheehy, who was born in Butte, Mont., and now resides in Missoula, told the Center for Public Integrity. “It was misrepresenting what I did and what I do as a lawyer.” So who was behind the attack?

The mailer showed only that it was paid for by the “Montana Growth Network,” a “social welfare” nonprofit, registered under Section 501(c)(4) of the U.S. tax code. Montana election records revealed next to nothing about the organization, which, because of its tax status, is not required to disclose its donors. The nonprofit’s website says its goal is to make Montana “more business friendly.”

The so-called Elephant's Tomb in the Roman necropolis of Carmona (Seville, Spain) was not always used for burials. The original structure of the building and a window through which the sun shines directly in the equinoxes suggest that it was a temple of Mithraism, an unofficial religion in the Roman Empire. The position of Taurus and Scorpio during the equinoxes gives force to the theory.

The Carmona necropolis (Spain) is a collection of funeral structures from between the 1st century B.C. and the 2nd century A.D. One of these is known as the Elephant's Tomb because a statue in the shape of an elephant was found in the interior of the structure.

The origin and function of the construction have been the subject of much debate. Archaeologists from the University of Pablo de Olavide (Seville, Spain) have conducted a detailed analysis of the structure and now suggest that it may originally not have been used for burials but for worshipping the God Mithras. Mithraism was an unofficial religion that was widespread throughout the Roman Empire in the early centuries of our era.

Researchers have identified four stages in which the building was renovated, giving it different uses.

"In some stages, it was used for burial purposes, but its shape and an archaeoastronomical analysis suggest that it was originally designed and built to contain a Mithraeum [temple to Mithras]," as explained to SINC by Inmaculada Carrasco, one of the authors of the study.

Russia has sent at least 12 naval warships to patrol its naval base near Syria, an aggressive move warning the U.S. and the west against intervention in Syria's bloody civil war, several news sources reported Friday.

The New York Times reported that Russia has also sent advanced anti-cruise missiles to Syria. Previously, the Russians had delivered missiles called Yakhonts to Syria, but reportedly, this new shipment includes missiles with a more effective advanced radar.

The United States and Russia have been planning an international conference aimed at ending the conflict in Syria, which has resulted in some 70,000 deaths.

Meanwhile, the Times also reported that Israel has warned Syria to stop the transfer of advanced military weapons to Islamic militants. Israel has repeatedly signaled more military strikes will be considered to keep that from happening.

Wassim el Abd Fadel in Paraguayan custody.

In December 2012, Paraguayan authorities detained Wassim el Abd Fadel, a suspected Hezbollah member with Paraguayan citizenship, and charged him with human trafficking, money laundering, and narco-trafficking. International authorities had connected Fadel to Nelida Raquel Cardozo Taboada, a Paraguayan national arrested in France the same month with 1.1 kilograms of cocaine in her stomach. Cardozo Taboada had claimed that Fadel and his wife hired her as a drug mule, prompting an Interpol investigation into Fadel’s finances.

According to Paraguayan police, Fadel deposited the proceeds of narco-trafficking and pirated music and movies into Turkish and Syrian bank accounts linked to Hezbollah.The Fadel arrest cast new light, and fresh international attention, on a long-running phenomenon.

Ever more credible claims by France, Britain, and some Israeli officials that the Bashar al-Assad regime has used chemical weapons have upped the pressure on the Obama administration to respond more decisively to the situation in Syria, and specifically to act on the president's chemical weapons "red line" warning. And the administration appears to be reconsidering its previous hesitancy. During a recent hearing of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Secretary Chuck Hagel announced that the United States would be sending some 200 troops to Jordan from the 1st Armored Division at Fort Bliss, Texas, to work alongside Jordanian personnel to "improve readiness and prepare for a number of scenarios" relating to the conflict in neighboring Syria. The Los Angeles Times reports that the Pentagon has drawn up plans to possibly expand the force significantly.

In late April, the Obama administration blacklisted two Lebanese money exchanges for allegedly facilitating Hezbollah's use of narcotics trafficking profits to fund terrorist activities. In an email interview, Matthew Levitt, director of the Stein Program on Counterterrorism and Intelligence at The Washington Institute and author of the forthcoming Hezbollah: The Global Footprint of Lebanon's Party of God, explained the broad range of Hezbollah's illicit activities and the growing savvy of its criminal network.

What are Hezbollah's main illicit business activities, and where is it most active
Hezbollah is engaged in an amazingly broad array of illicit activities, from counterfeiting currencies, documents and goods to credit card fraud, money laundering, arms smuggling and narcotics trafficking. Hezbollah, one investigator quipped, is like the "Gambinos on steroids."

As American troops were pulling out of Iraq in 2010, the U.S. effort to stabilize the country resembled the task of an exhausted man who had just pushed a huge boulder up a steep hill. Momentum had been painstakingly built up and the crest approached. Was it safe to stop pushing and hope that the momentum would take the boulder over the top? Or would the boulder grind to a halt and then slowly, frighteningly roll back toward us?

Now we know -- and to be honest, the answer is hardly a surprise. Iraq is a basket case these days, and none of its problems came out of the blue. In the latest bout of sectarian and ethnic bloodletting, coordinated bomb attacks ripped through Shiite neighborhoods in Baghdad and also northern Iraq, killing more than 30 people. The spasm of violence followed clashes between the Iraqi army and Sunni protesters and insurgents last month, where the federal government temporarily lost control of some town centers and urban neighborhoods in Kirkuk, Nineveh, and Diyala provinces.

Negative indicators abound: Armed civilian militias are reactivating, tit-for-tat bombings are targeting Sunni and Shiite mosques, and some Iraqi military forces are breaking down into ethnic-sectarian components or suffering from chronic absenteeism. Numerous segments of Iraq's body politic -- Kurdish, Sunni Arab, and Shia -- are exasperated over the government's inability to address political or economic inequities, and are talking seriously about partition.

This week's summit between President Barack Obama and Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan reflects the extraordinary development of relations between the United States and Turkey.

Ankara faces a civil war in Syria that is forcing Turkey to contend with a weak and divided state on its borders. This disintegration brings the dangers of chemical weapons proliferation and al Qaeda infiltration on Turkey's doorstep. Coping with these challenges will be near impossible without U.S. support, particularly after the May 11 bombings that devastated Reyhanli, a Turkish border town near Syria. Erdogan is therefore sure to make the Syria issue one of his key "asks" during his conversations with Obama on Thursday.

The fact is that Turkey has not faced a threat on the scale of the Syrian crisis since Stalin demanded territory from the Turks in 1945. In 2011, hoping to oust the al-Assad regime, Turkey began to support the Syrian opposition. But, thus far, this policy has failed, and exposed Turkey to growing risks.

An Iowa federal judge who frequently attends business-friendly judicial education conferences slashed a landmark $240 million verdict to $1.6 million for 32 mentally disabled workers who suffered abuse and discrimination at the hands of their employer.

It might appear that a pro-business judge made a predictably pro-business ruling. Turns out the judge had no choice. The 22-year-old Americans with Disabilities Act — designed to protect the rights of disabled workers — is to blame for the paltry award.

On Tuesday, U.S. District Judge Charles R. Wolle of the Southern District of Iowa ordered Henry’s Turkey Service to pay $50,000 in damages to each of the workers involved in a discrimination lawsuit brought by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. In total, the judge ruled, the company must pay the workers $1.6 million.

Wolle’s decision came two weeks after a federal jury awarded each of the workers a total of $7.5 million in damages — $240 million in all. Jurors found that Henry’s, a now-defunct Texas company, violated the Americans with Disabilities Act by subjecting the disabled workers to years of unfair treatment and harassment.

Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto's approach to combating Mexican drug cartels has been a much-discussed topic since well before he was elected. Indeed, in June 2011 -- more than a year before the July 2012 Mexican presidential election -- I wrote an analysis discussing rumors that, if elected, Pena Nieto was going to attempt to reach some sort of accommodation with Mexico's drug cartels in order to bring down the level of violence.

Such rumors were certainly understandable, given the arrangement that had existed for many years between some senior members of Pena Nieto's Institutional Revolutionary Party and some powerful cartel figures during the Institutional Revolutionary Party's long reign in Mexico prior to the election of Vicente Fox of the National Action Party in 2000. However, as we argued in 2011 and repeated in March 2013, much has changed in Mexico since 2000, and the new reality in Mexico means that it would be impossible for the Pena Nieto administration to reach any sort of deal with the cartels even if it made an attempt.

The most recent victim of the Arab boycott of Israel is the Lebanese-born film director Ziad Doueiri. His crime? Filming in Israel. The Arab League instructed its member states to ban his film, "The Attack," about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Moreover, he was forced to cancel a private screening in Beirut because of a threat to arrest his wife.

The Arab League Council established the boycott against Israel on December 2, 1945 (more than two years before creation of the Jewish state). The boycott prohibits all Arab states, companies, and individuals from any financial or trade relations with Israel. Companies worldwide are blacklisted for doing business with Israel, as are companies doing business with boycotted firms. The OIC high commissioner for the boycott of Israel coordinates the efforts of its 57 member states from the Central Boycott Office in Damascus.

In response, the United States made it illegal for individuals or companies to cooperate with the Arab boycott. The law mandates reporting of boycott requests and imposes civil and criminal penalties against boycott participants. Arab boycott requests have risen sharply in tandem with the U.S. financial crisis and the rapid growth of Islamic banking. The Commerce Department's Bureau of Industry and Security reported a 20 percent increase in Arab boycott requests overall from 2005 to 2006, and the Congressional Research Service reported 24 boycott requests to U.S. companies in fiscal 2007 from little Bahrain alone.

On April 5, 2006, Congress unanimously condemned Saudi Arabia for its continued enforcement of the boycott--which violated commitments the Saudis made to the World Trade Organization in 2005. Nonetheless, last August Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states threatened to boycott Nissan, which aired a commercial on Israeli television promoting a fuel-efficient car, and demanded the Japanese car-maker's apology. Not a word from Washington.

Residents of the northern Syrian town of Saraqeb said government helicopters had dropped at least two devices containing poisonous gas, the BBC reported Thursday.
Saraqeb, a town south-west of Aleppo, came under artillery bombardment in April from government positions. Doctors at the local hospital told the BBC's correspondent they had admitted eight people suffering from breathing problems. Some were vomiting and others had constricted pupils, they said. One woman, Maryam Khatib, later died. 

A number of videos passed to the BBC appear to support these claims, but the BBC said it is impossible to independently verify them. Khatib's son Mohammed, the report said, had rushed to the scene to help his mother and was also injured in the attack.

In a nation of immigrants, with a 'melting pot' culture, it should not be surprising that American music is also an international blend.

That's especially true of Flamenco, brought to southern Spain by 18th-century Romanis-Gypsies from North India, and performed today by a California band that incorporates Arabic and other Islamic influences from Turkey, the Black Sea, Persia and North Africa. 

The unmistakable sound of flamenco - Spanish guitar and heels - is transformed by the members of the San Francisco band, La Ruya.

One of the band’s founding members is Sam Foster. He’s a rock and jazz drummer who became fascinated with Arabic and Turkish percussion, and from there to Flamenco. He brought in flamenco dancer and choreographer Melissa Cruz, and other musicians to create La Ruya’s unique sound.

In a vote Wednesday at the U.N. General Assembly, support for Syria’s opposition was weaker than previously, with a symbolic resolution garnering less outright support and nearly double the abstentions than a similar vote nine months ago.

Reacting to the continued paralysis in the 15-nation U.N. Security Council, Qatar and several other countries decided several weeks ago to push for a resolution in the U.N. General Assembly on the situation in Syria, which continues to deteriorate.

In the meantime, the United States and Russia put forward an initiative aimed at getting representatives of both the Syrian government and opposition to the negotiating table next month. Despite the objections of Russia, Syria and several other countries that General Assembly action now would be counter-productive, the draft resolution was approved Wednesday with a vote of 107 in favor, 12 against and 59 abstentions.

In the 1946 classic It’s a Wonderful Life, James Stewart stars as George Bailey, the director of the Bailey Building and Loan Association in the fictional community of Bedford Falls, N.Y. Bailey faces numerous challenges to keep the Building and Loan afloat in order to continue supporting the people and businesses of his hometown. His chief challenge is Mr. Potter, the wealthy slumlord who repeatedly schemes to force Bailey out of business.

Although It’s a Wonderful Life is fictional, the Building and Loan is a prototype of a real, modern institution, the community bank. And in 2013, community banks are finding themselves under significant threats to their existence. Instead of being Pottered, they’re being Franked. Real towns, like the fictional Bedford Falls, will suffer if a miraculous change in policy doesn’t occur quickly.

The Dodd-Frank Act was intended to fix the perceived inefficiencies and failures in the American banking system that supposedly led to the financial crisis. However, my new research with the American Enterprise Institute suggests that it’s having at least one detrimental effect: The act is placing unwarranted and unsustainable pressure on community banks.

The latest Social Security Administration data document that Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) rolls reached a record high of 8.85 million in March 2013, an increase of 1.6 million or 21 percent since the start of the Great Recession in 2007.

This recession-induced growth exacerbates the long time trend in SSDI program growth that has resulted in its real expenditures increasing sevenfold, from $18 billion (2010 dollars) in 1970 to $128 billion in 2010, a trend the CBO reports will result in program insolvency as early as 2016.

This long running disability epidemic, which hit its pandemic stage in the aftermath of the 2007 recession, has almost nothing to do with a decline in the overall health of working age Americans or in the severity of their health-based impairments. Rather, it is primarily the consequence of fundamental flaws in the SSDI program and its administration which have increasingly made it a long term unemployment program rather than the last resort transfer program for those unable to work due to their health-based impairments that Congress intended it to be. These flaws become most evident during severe during economic downturns but will remain long after we recover from the Great Recession.

The U.S. Navy recently made history with its flight of the X-47B UCAS, the first unmanned carrier drone (unmanned systems) to launch from an aircraft carrier. In 2009 and 2011, the Center for 21st Century Security and Intelligence at Brookings had the pleasure of hosting then Chief of Naval Operations, ADM Gary Roughead, to discuss the future of unmanned operations. The vision he laid out is well on its way to fruition, making it especially useful to place what happened today in the context of the larger U.S. defense strategy and to look at what lessons have been learned in the development of unmanned systems. As I explored in a look at the past and future of naval aviation after 100 years of flight, this success is only one part of a much bigger story.

The imminent demise of the Assad regime has been announced on numerous occasions over the last two years of civil war in Syria. But the regime has held on. Despite some advances by rebels in the south of the country in the early months of 2013, Assad shows no signs of cracking.

Indeed, in the last few weeks, the momentum of the fighting has somewhat shifted. Regime forces have clawed back areas of recent rebel advance. The government side, evidently under Iranian tutelage, has showed an impressive and unexpected ability to adapt itself to the changing demands of the war. As long ago as the summer of 2012,the government side demonstrated that it was able to adjust creatively, if ruthlessly, to events. When it became apparent that determined attempts by the regime army to crush the revolt in the northern Syrian countryside were proving fruitless, Assad’s forces carried out a strategic withdrawal.

Detecting alien worlds presents a significant challenge since they are small, faint, and close to their stars. The two most prolific techniques for finding exoplanets are radial velocity (looking for wobbling stars) and transits (looking for dimming stars). A team at Tel Aviv University and the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) has just discovered an exoplanet using a new method that relies on Einstein's special theory of relativity.

"We are looking for very subtle effects. We needed high quality measurements of stellar brightnesses, accurate to a few parts per million," said team member David Latham of the CfA.

"This was only possible because of the exquisite data NASA is collecting with the Kepler spacecraft," added lead author Simchon Faigler of Tel Aviv University, Israel. Although Kepler was designed to find transiting planets, this planet was not identified using the transit method. Instead, it was discovered using a technique first proposed by Avi Loeb of the CfA and his colleague Scott Gaudi in 2003. (Coincidentally, they developed their theory while visiting the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, where Einstein once worked.)

Most Americans want the U.S. to place more emphasis on developing solar power, recent polls suggest. A major impediment, however, is the cost to manufacture, install and maintain solar panels. Simply put, most people and businesses cannot afford to place them on their rooftops.

Fortunately, that is changing because researchers such as Qiaoqiang Gan, University at Buffalo assistant professor of electrical engineering, are helping develop a new generation of photovoltaic cells that produce more power and cost less to manufacture than what’s available today.

One of the more promising efforts, which Gan is working on, involves the use of plasmonic-enhanced organic photovoltaic materials. These devices don’t match traditional solar cells in terms of energy production but they are less expensive and - because they are made (or processed) in liquid form - can be applied to a greater variety of surfaces. Gan detailed the progress of plasmonic-enhanced organic photovoltaic materials in Journal Advanced Materials. The paper, which included an image of a plasmonic-enhanced organic photovoltaic device on the journal’s front page,

Francisco Illarramendi often called on Moris Beracha when he needed an infusion of cash.

The Venezuelan-born Illarramendi was a manager of a Connecticut-based investment advisory firm. Beracha was a Venezuelan financier close to the Hugo Chavez government who, a lawsuit against him claims, could produce multi-million-dollar advances of cash with relative ease — for the right price. On Nov. 2, 2007, Beracha emailed Illarramendi instructions to deposit more than $10 million — Beracha’s share of profits from a transaction — into three HSBC bank accounts in Switzerland, via an HSBC account in New York. “Dude, I am your biggest producer hahahahaha,” Beracha wrote in Spanish before he sent the message off to Illarramendi.

Greek citizens who own or direct offshore companies in the British Virgin Islands and other tax havens rarely declare them to Greek tax officials, an International Consortium of Investigative Journalists' review of more than 100 companies shows. Just four out of 107 offshore companies investigated by ICIJ are registered with tax authorities as the law usually requires, particularly when the firms hold assets or conduct business in Greece.

Officials apparently have no record of the other 103 firms — or whether the owners declared any assets held by these entities or paid taxes on them. After learning about ICIJ's findings, the Greek Finance Ministry said it would examine the data and determine whether there's any evidence of improper or illegal conduct by owners of offshore companies. The companies’ owners are a surprising cross-section of Greek society, from the richest districts in Athens to remote northern villages. They include retail executives, shipping magnates and middle-class families. What these people have in common is that they are connected to offshore companies that appear to operate under the radar of tax authorities at a time when endemic tax evasion is fueling a financial crisis that has devastated Greece’s economy and threatened the future of the Euro.