US Drones Deployed in Search for Kidnapped Nigerian Girls -- TIME "White House Press Secretary Jay Carney said 'unmanned, unarmed' aircraft had joined reconnaissance flights over a swath of Nigeria where Boko Haram is believed to be holding the girls hostage. Carney cautioned during a news conference that the area of greatest suspicion still covering an expanse of land 'along the size of West Virginia.' The announcement comes as some U.S. lawmakers are urging the use of force to rescue the Nigerian girls. Senators in both parties recently floated the idea of using special forces to aid in the search, and Arizona Republican Sen. John McCain went further on Tuesday. 'I certainly would send in U.S. troops to rescue them,' McCain told to the Daily Beast. Carney, however, said U.S. counterterrorism experts dispatched to Nigeria would limit their activity to an 'advisory capacity,' focused on finding the girls." source:  Overpass Light Br...

How Many People Are Wrongly Convicted? Researchers Do the Math. -- National Geographic "It’s impossible to say whether this 4.1 percent false conviction rate [among death row inmates] applies to defendants who never went to death row. But I’ll leave you with one last depressing thought. Of all of the people found guilty of capital murder, less than half actually get a death-penalty sentence. And when juries are determining whether to send a defendant to death row or to life in prison, surveys show that they tend to choose life sentences when they have 'residual doubt' about the defendant’s guilt. That means, then, that the rate of innocent defendants serving life in prison is higher than those on death row. 'They are sentenced,' the authors write, 'and then forgotten.'" Democracy's Deepening Recession -- The Atlantic "The democratic recession we're witnessing has been particularly visible in big 'swing states'—the non-Wes...