The U.S. state department has issued its annual report on human trafficking. According to the report, Thailand, Malaysia and Venezuela have not been doing enough to combat modern slavery. And the report includes a warning to American importers of seafood: Clean up supply chains that include Thailand, where fish may be caught or processed using slave labor.
This week the big medical device company Medtronic said it was moving its legal headquarters from Minneapolis to Ireland. It's part of a $43 billion merger with another medical company, Dublin-based Covidien.
The move is a tax-saving strategy called an inversion and it's growing more common in the corporate world.
U.S. companies make huge amounts of money overseas every year and much of it stays there, stashed away in foreign accounts.
"They have billions and billions of dollars offshore and they're generating billions and billions more each year," says Martin Sullivan, chief economist at the nonprofit firm Tax Analysts.
He says the problem is a quirk in the tax code. American companies can make all the money they want overseas, but once they bring the money back home they have to pay U.S. taxes. And the official U.S. corporate tax rate, before deductions and exemptions, is high compared to other industrialized countries.
"We've created this crazy system where instead of taxing profits when they are earned we only tax them when they are brought back home," Sullivan says. "Therefore, there's a tremendous disincentive to bring the money back home."
Much of the money ends up sitting for years in foreign bank accounts, often in tax havens such as the Cayman Islands, says Edward Kleinbard, a law professor at the University of Southern California and author of We Are Better Than This, a book about government spending.
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YANAKIYEVE, Ukraine (AP) — Seven Ukrainian troops were killed in overnight fighting in the restive east, Ukrainian officials said Friday, as clashes between government forces and pro-Russian rebels flared two days after the president said he would soon call a unilateral cease-fire.
Rebels were operating tanks in the region, a particular sore spot for Ukraine, which accuses Russia of letting the vehicles cross the border.
Vladislav Seleznev, spokesman for Ukrainian forces in the east, said the seven soldiers had been killed since Thursday and 30 injured in fighting against pro-Russian separatists outside the village of Yampil in the Donetsk region. He said 300 rebels were killed, but that could not be immediately verified.
An Associated Press reporter saw pro-Russian fighters moving in a column with two tanks and three armored personnel carriers near the town of Yanakiyeve in the direction of the town of Horlivka in the Donetsk region. The tanks flew small flags of a pro-Russian militia but otherwise had no markings. The fighters declined to say what they were doing, other than that it was a "secret operation."
Russian President Vladimir Putin has voiced concern about the Ukrainian military onslaught, while NATO on Thursday reported that Russia was resuming a military build-up at the Ukrainian border.
Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko discussed details of his peace plan in a telephone call to Putin on Thursday. Poroshenko's office said he emphasized the need for introducing effective border controls and quickly releasing hostages.
Putin's spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, said Russian officials were surprised at Western expressions of concern over the renewed troop buildup, saying it was merely a previously announced measure to tighten border controls.
"This is not a matter of some sort of concentration of forces, but of the strengthening of border controls of the Russian Federation," Peskov was quoted as saying by the Itar-TASS news agency.
Separately, Putin's foreign policy aide, Yuri Ushakov, said the Russian president is committed to dialogue on Ukraine and is planning to have a phone conversation with U.S. President Barack Obama in the coming days.
Ushakov also mentioned that Putin, on a visit to Austria next week, would be meeting with the chairman of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe to discuss Poroshenko's peace plan for Ukraine.
The U.N. says at least 356 people, including 257 civilians, have been killed since May 7 in eastern Ukraine.
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Vasilyeva contributed from Moscow.
SPANISH TOWN, Jamaica (AP) — Corpses, the suspected victims of violent deaths, are wrapped in plastic bags or covered loosely in stained sheets. There is no air conditioning and the room quickly becomes sweltering as the tropical sun beats down on the metal roof. A black fly buzzes around the room amid the smell of decay.
A Jamaican forensic pathologist and his sweating assistants can merely shrug at the primitive conditions.
"What can I say? The lack of resources is definitely a challenge," Dr. S.N. Prasad Kadiyala said as he waited for police officers to show up so he could start autopsies on a recent morning inside a hospital complex in gritty Spanish Town, on the edge the Jamaican capital.
Jamaica has had one of the highest homicide rates in the world for years, but its capacity to deal with the wave of killings has not kept pace. While the Caribbean country has made some gains in the gathering and processing of evidence, one of its biggest challenges is simply finding a place to store and study the dead.
The island has not had a national morgue since the 1970s despite widespread agreement that autopsies are often performed in facilities so inadequate that investigations are placed in jeopardy, said Hayden Baldwin, who has worked as forensic consultant to Jamaica's police force.
"I have never seen such deplorable conditions and lack of support from a government to resolve these issues," said Baldwin, a retired Illinois state police officer and director of Forensic Enterprises, Inc. of Orland Park, Illinois.In a report on global homicides released earlier this year, the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime listed Jamaica as having the world's sixth highest homicide rate. About a decade ago, it had the highest. The island of 2.7 million people has seen 1,000-plus killings every year since 2004, mostly in slums far from the beach resorts.
Relatively few murders are solved. The conviction rate for homicides is 5 percent, according to a 2013 U.S. State Department report.
Political leaders have vowed over the years to construct a modern public morgue, especially after the botched 2007 death investigation of Pakistan cricket coach Bob Woolmer, who died unexpectedly while the island hosted the sport's World Cup. That year, Peter Phillips, then national security minister, said the Woolmer case "brought into focus the need for the most up-to-date forensic capabilities possible, including most importantly the construction of a new public morgue."
Seven years later, Jamaica has steadily improved some aspects of its forensic investigations, including securing more specialized microscopes to evaluate ballistics. But officials say the cost of building a morgue must be considered against competing budget demands.
Under a system revamped several years ago, just over a dozen private funeral homes around the island have government contracts to collect and store corpses awaiting autopsies. Several mortuaries also provide space and equipment several times a week for the country's three forensic pathologists.
Pathologists and some morticians say the funeral homes are paid so little — just $6 to $10 per body per day for storage — that they have little interest in keeping the corpses at the correct temperature because of the high cost of energy, about five times the cost in much of the United States.
"The remuneration from the government is not commensurate with what the private funeral homes put into it," said Joseph Cornwall, director of the House of Tranquility, an established Kingston funeral home that stores bodies for the government. He said his business keeps the corpses to be autopsied at the right temperature, but Kadiyala believes funeral homes often don't do so.
Activists and some politicians say officials could resolve the protracted problem if they wanted.
"Whatever the government really wants to do, they usually find the money. What we lack is the political will to get this done because it mostly impacts on poor, disenfranchised people," said Yvonne McCalla Sobers, a prominent human rights activist.
The country's health ministry declined comment.
But Angela Patterson, special services director for Jamaica's police force, said the situation has steadily improved since 2010, when there was a big backlog of bodies awaiting autopsies. She said contracting with established funeral homes helps the government get autopsies done quickly, generally within two to three days of being requested.
"That is a significant achievement," Patterson said.
Desmond McKenzie, a former Kingston mayor who has led calls to build a morgue for years, said that's not enough. The opposition lawmaker believes the lack of urgency displayed by successive administrations is illogical for a nation with such high levels of gun crime.
"The simple fact is the government has failed miserably," he said.
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David McFadden on Twitter: http://twitter.com/dmcfadd