Overseas Exile caught this one in his writeup of a provision that was slipped into a jobs bill at the end of last year. The New York Times writes

Legislation meant to help the United States government locate overseas assets of American tax cheats created little stir when it was quietly slipped into a jobs bill last year.

But the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act, or Fatca, as it is known, is now causing alarm among businesses outside the United States that fear they will have to spend billions of dollars a year to meet the greatly increased reporting burdens, starting in 2013. American expatriates also say the new filing demands are daunting and overblown.

As pointed out by the above, this will likely mean that foreign banks will simply not deal with US citizens as a result since the costs of maintaining accounts will be too high due to the costs of compliance and potential penalties.

NPR details the case of a teenage set free after a coerced confession when she was 16 years old:

Homicide detectives are often required to confront the people they question. But in the case of a teenage girl whose baby has been dead for 27 hours and who pleads and cries through much of the interview, Truong’s attorney, Ed Ryan, says this is psychological torture.

“Their interrogation was designed not to determine the truth, not to get at the facts,” says Ryan, who wasn’t present for the interrogation, when Truong didn’t yet have a lawyer. “Their intention was designed to force her to confess to doing it in the way they figure she did it. They are the ones that force-fed her the word ‘suffocation.’ “

It seems like the way this confession was extracted deserves more investigation into the methods used by these detectives.

Here’s a link to the entire article, with audio at the top.

During her first six years of teaching in this city’s struggling schools, Tiffany Johnson got a series of small raises that brought her annual salary to $63,000, from about $50,000. This year, her seventh, Ms. Johnson earns $87,000.

That latest 38 percent jump, unheard of in public education, came after Ms. Johnson was rated “highly effective” two years in a row under Washington’s new teacher evaluation system. Those ratings also netted her back-to-back bonuses totaling $30,000.

“Lots of teachers leave the profession, but this has kept me invested to stay,” said Ms. Johnson, 29, who is a special-education teacher at the Ron H. Brown Middle School in Northeast Washington. “I know they value me.”

That is exactly the idea behind what admirers consider the nation’s most advanced merit pay system for public school teachers. This fall, the District of Columbia Public Schools gave sizable bonuses to 476 of its 3,600 educators, with 235 of them getting unusually large pay raises.

(Read more in the linked New York Times article.)

Newer economic Cuban emigrants are starting to outnumber the anti-Castro political refugees, and they are pushing for more ties to Cuba.

The Atlantic: The media has deaf, dumb, and blind in covering the GOP nomination race http://t.co/aO9qrYNI

Some GOP presidential nomination candidates are saying things so far outside of the mainstream that we are left questioning where the mainstream actually is.

Steven Pinker reviews Whose Freedom?: The Battle over America’s Most Important Idea by George Lakoff

A rebuttal to Steven Pinker’s review. 

It’s probably important to know that in Linguistic science, there are two major schools—the old Generativist school, centred on the work of Noam Chomsky and whose intellectual home is MIT, and the newer Functionalist school, which is represented by George Lakoff. 

The Atlantic: Lie, damn lies, and #Politifact http://t.co/yJidOafj

People have opinions and Poltifact is staffed by people, so they end up being pundits just like everyone else.