Palestinian detainee Khader Adnan agreed today to end his 66-day hunger strike after his lawyers reached a deal with the state over his detainment status.

Adnan was arrested last December, but he has not been charged with any crimes, and his lawyers have not been allowed to see any of the evidence that the state allegedly has against him. The 33 year-old baker serves as a spokesperson for the militant group Islamic Jihad, and on January 8 a military judge dispensed a four-month administrative detention order, which can be renewed indefinitely without charges being brought against the detainee. The state has now agreed not to renew Adnan’s administrative detention, which ends April 17, if no new evidence is presented. 

This announcement comes on the heels of a surprising amount of attention to Adnan’s protest in the mainstream media. His hunger strike has been the longest in the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and successfully focused attention on the draconian military justice system to which Palestinians in the Occupied Territories have been subjected since 1967.

In an unusually effective interview yesterday on CNN International, reporter Hala Gorani tries several times to get Israeli spokesperson Mark Regev to explain why Adnan hasn’t been charged, firing back at Regev’s flippant insistence that “he’s no boy scout.”

The month of February marks the one-year anniversary of the beginning of protests against the now fallen Gaddafi regime in Libya. While many Libyans have been in the streets celebrating the fall of one oppressive regime, several leading human rights agencies are fearful of what the country has become and where it may be headed.

A report published by Amnesty International (AI) on Wednesday documents widespread human rights violations by the very militia groups that fought to topple the Gaddafi government. The report, Militias threaten hopes for new Libya, describes the militias as being “largely out of control.” Amnesty's representatives expressed grave concern over the near-universal impunity for crimes committed by the anti-Gaddafi militias.

A recent online spat between Jonathan Chait of New York Magazine and Veronique de Rugy, a research fellow at George Mason University, has illuminated a corner of public policy that’s usually concealed by the dark shadows of ideological battle.

It all started when de Rugy wrote a column arguing that, compared to other wealthy countries, the United States actually has a relatively progressive tax system. Chait, having spotted a flaw in her logic (she suggests that the U.S. is more progressive because the rich pay a higher proportion of all taxes, but that’s partly because they earn a higher proportion of all income), jumped on the opportunity.

After several rounds of accusations of stupidity (by Chait) and meanness (by de Rugy), a political scientist at The Monkey Cage showed up to settle the dispute in an unusually interesting way.

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In recent days, national polls have shown Rick Santorum leading Mitt Romney for the first time in the GOP race. Santorum is 15 points ahead in Romney's home state of Michigan, and enjoys almost twice as much support as Romney among conservatives, Tea Party supporters and white evangelicals.

Santorum has been playing to the evangelical base of late, picking up the endorsement of evangelical leaders in January. But signs of support among the Catholic community from which he hails are so far decidedly more mixed.

In a Huffington Post article entitled, “Is Rick Santorum an Evangelical or a Catholic?” David Brody, the chief political correspondent for Pat Robertson's Christian Broadcasting Network, is quoted as insisting that “Rick Santorum is an evangelical at heart.”

Many of his positions are also more in line with those of evangelicals. As a House member and Senator, Santorum built a career on social conservative issues while citing his Catholic faith.  He opposed LGBTQ rights, teaching evolution, contraception and a woman's right to choose. But he has recently been asked to account for some key areas where his positions diverge from those of the Church—including health care and immigration reform. 

Some clues to Santorum’s political apostasy come from his roots in Illinois, where he graduated from Carmel Catholic High School. Last weekend, the school held its annual fundraiser, where far-flung alumni gathered and criticism of Santorum abounded. 

Presidential hopeful Rick Santorum, in the latest addition to his "foot-meets-mouth" campaign series, said during a CNN interview with John King last week that he had “concerns” about women in combat because of the “types of emotions that are involved.”

I think that could be a very compromising situation, where people naturally may do things that may not be in the interest of the mission because of other types of emotions that are involved.

Santorum has since had to backtrack on the statement, saying he meant that men would not be able to resist saving the fair damsels in distress from the line of fire and would be distracted. While all this is fairly unsurprising coming from Santorum, a recent report from the Pew Research Center confirms that his claims are unsubstantiated.

This piece originally appeared at the Investigative Fund's blog. It is a follow-up to Nelson's Investigative Fund article, "Torn Apart," which appeared in In These Times on December 20, 2011

The fate of children whose undocumented immigrant parents are swept into an unyielding immigration dragnet has largely escaped the attention of mainstream media, which is precisely why the recent ABC News investigation on this subject does well to bring the story into American living rooms.

The series from the Brian Ross Investigative Unit's 2011 Carnegie Fellows profiles two women faced with the loss of their children while fighting their own deportation. Each case reveals a fractious immigration system apparently incapable of coordinating with child welfare agencies, and with little regard for the consequences of tearing families apart.

The Obama administration announced today that it would grant waivers to ten states to free them of some of the requirements of No Child Left Behind. In return, Obama said, the states "have agreed to raise standards, improve accountability, and undertake essential reforms to improve teacher effectiveness."

Obama also acknowledged that his administration has “determined we need a different approach" than that set forward in the Bush-era NCLB legislation.

What might this different approach be? So far, it's looking like one upshot of the rhetoric around increased accountability will be even more standarized testing. Now that 48 states, two territories and the District of Columbia have joined the Common Core State Standards Initiative, national examinations may be administered up to eight times a year beginning in 2014. 

The Environmental Protection Agency on Thursday approved a ban on all sewage discharges from large ships along California’s 1,624-mile coast, making it the largest coastal no-discharge zone in the nation. The measure would stop the dumping of over 22 million gallons of waste, bilge water, and other sewage each year into the state’s marine waters, according to the EPA. 

The ban, which was introduced in August, goes into effect in March and will stop large passenger and oceangoing vessels weighing over 300 gross tons from dumping even treated sewage, which can contain pathogens and contaminants harmful to human and marine life.

Remember the new privacy policy from Google you've been neglecting to read? Well, according to one privacy watchdog group, it could be putting “literally hundreds of millions of Internet users at grave risk.” The ominous statement comes from The Electronic Privacy Information Center, which filed a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) Wednesday in an attempt to stop the new privacy policy before it goes into effect March 1.

EPIC alleges that Google is in violation of an October consent order with the FTC. The order was the result of EPIC's complaint over failed social networking site, Google Buzz.  EPIC accused Google of disclosing personal information acquired from Gmail accounts without user consent as a way to kickstart the social media website.  The FTC determined the practices were “unfair and deceptive” and issued an order prohibiting Google from “misrepresenting the extent to which it maintains and protects the privacy and confidentiality of personal information” and failing to comply with other privacy safety measures. 

Rick Santorum’s sweep of the races in Colorado, Minnesota and Missouri on Tuesday didn’t just revive his campaign for the GOP nomination. It also made war with Iran in the near future more likely than it was two days ago.  

The GOP has been in an unfamiliar place for most of the early election season. With the economy improving, their traditional advantage in the realms of defense and foreign affairs will be critical to their prospects in the fall election. But President Obama’s successes in the “war on terror” and in Libya have left them searching for a foreign-policy foothold.

Enter the Iran factor. It’s been an on-again, off-again issue for a long time. As the ex-GOP Congressional staffer Mike Lofgren writes in this trenchant essay, Iran has been perpetually been “two or three years away from obtaining a nuclear weapon” for the last three decades. Each time the issue flares again, war hawks claim that Iran is right on the verge of having nuclear weapons, and that it poses a danger so immense that we have no choice but to act.