Call it a parting gift, or maybe a bribe. Refugees claimants who failed in their claims for asylum in Canada are being given up to $2,000 and a one-way plane ticket home if they leave voluntarily, the Toronto Star reports. A pilot program being run in the Greater Toronto area is being greeted with some approval by lawyers who work with refugee claimants but some say the money is little more than bribe, and a puny one at that, to get claimants to forego further appeals.

The Assisted Voluntary Return and Reintegration pilot program, launched last week, is run jointly by the Canada Border Services Agency and the International Organization for Migration. "Currently, many failed refugee claimants do not respect their obligation to leave Canada, which leads to deportation, costly enforced removals by the CBSA and a permanent bar on returning to Canada," the agency says on its web site.

"Often this happens because people are unaware of the consequences of failing to comply with removal orders or simply do not have the means to leave or to support themselves when they return to their home countries." The CBSA says the program could achieve up to 6,955 voluntary returns, allowing its enforcement officers to focus on higher-priority cases, such as catching suspected war criminals and foreign crooks.

"It's a win-win situation," Peter Showler, a law professor at the University of Ottawa told the Star. Failed applicants retain their ability to reapply to come back to Canada and get some money to re-establish themselves, while the government gets prompt, trouble-free removal, he said.

Shocking news this morning from journalist Bryan Seymour in Australia. In a story for the program TodayTonight that took him more than a year to put together, Seymour blows the lid off a re-education camp operated by Scientology in a suburb of Sydney, where children as young as eight years old have worked long hours for no pay. One of those kids, Shane Kelsey, now 21, finally left the camp last year, and Seymour was there to film Shane's reunion with his father, who now feels horrible guilt for leaving the boy in the camp to begin with. At only 8 years old, Shane signed a billion-year contract with Scientology's Sea Organization and was working 35 hours a week -- by the time he was 15, he was working 100 hours, for about $35 a week.

In a statement, Scientology made its standard claim that its "Rehabilitation Project Force" (which Shane experienced at 16) is a voluntary program, and is intended for Sea Org members who "commit serious breaches of ecclesiastical rules."

Let that sink in a minute. A prison-like camp for members who break ecclesiastical rules -- while only 16 years old.

Reporter John Sweeney's previous investigation into the Church of Scientology resulted in an explosive confrontation with church officials. This time, in a Panorama Special, one of those officials has turned whistleblower to help him reveal the dark secrets of the church, which boasts Hollywood A-listers Tom Cruise and John Travolta among its devotees.

Two former Argentine dictators were handed heavy prison sentences for overseeing the systematic kidnapping of babies from leftist activists killed during the 1976-1983 dictatorship.

Jorge Videla, 86, was sentenced to 50 years in prison and Reynaldo Bignone, 84, was given a 15-year jail term, presiding judge Maria Roqueta said as she read the ruling before a packed courtroom in Buenos Aires.

Hundreds of people -- relatives of the victims, children reunited with their families and activists -- cheered the ruling, which they watched on a giant television screen set up outside the courthouse. Many were in tears.

Several other former military officers were handed sentences of up to 40 years for their roles in a "systematic plan" to kidnap the babies of activists, in a trial that started in February 2011. Two of 11 defendants were acquitted.

MEXICO CITY - Mexico's next president denied that his party had been involved in any form of intimidation during his party's campaign, in the wake of allegations by at least one observer that Sunday's elections were "perhaps the biggest operation of vote-buying and coercion in the country's history."

"I am totally, totally certain that the party acted within the law," Enrique Pena Nieto of the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, told a journalist from BBC News on Wednesday.

Leftist runner-up Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador has refused to concede and demanded a new tally, alleging vote-buying and coercion by the PRI, whose seven decades of rule until it lost power in 2000 were marked by widespread allegations of vote-rigging.

Three brothers from Stratford - home to the Olympic Games - have been arrested in a pre-planned counter-terrorism operation.

The three were among six individuals - including one woman - whom investigators arrested on Thursday. The group is understood to have included a former police and community support officer for the Metropolitan police, but Scotland Yard would not confirm that detail.

The raids were carried out by counter-terrorism officers investigating a suspected plot to attack targets in Britain. Although police said they were not linked to any threat to the Olympics, officials say they will intervene quicker than usual in disrupting suspected plots in the runup to the event, which counter-terrorism forces fear is a major target.

A convoy of NATO warships has left Turkey for the Mediterranean Sea purportedly to carry out anti-terrorism operations in the region, a report says.

According to a July 5 report published by the Turkish Hurriyet Daily, the Standing NATO Maritime Group 2 set off from Istanbul.

The group consists of Turkey's TCG Gediz, France's Courbet and Germany's Bayern warships and the three frigates have a total of 545 crew members on board, with Germany leading the mission.

German Rear Admiral Thorsten Kahler said on Wednesday that the mission of the maritime group is "to give a clear message to terrorists in the region that NATO is on duty.""We are not telling our whole schedule, but we will stay in the region."

The PA agreed on Wednesday to exhume Arafat's body after new allegations that he was poisoned with the radioactive element polonium-210 in 2004

Tunisia has called for Arab ministers to meet to discuss the death of former Palestinian President Yasser Arafat after new suspicions that he was murdered, a senior official in the Arab League said on Thursday.

The Palestinian Authority agreed on Wednesday to exhume Arafat's body after new allegations that he was poisoned with the radioactive element polonium-210 in 2004, the same substance found to have killed a former Russian spy in London in 2006.

"The general secretariat received a request today from the Tunisian representative to convene a ministerial meeting to study the circumstances of the death of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat," League Deputy Secretary-General Ahmed Ben Helli told a news conference.

• Shelly Miscavige is credited as the cupid to Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes' doomed alliance
• Theories surrounding the disappearance of Shelly from running away to death from cancer
• A more extraordinary claim is that she was locked up in 'The Hole', after allegedly being caught filing job applications without her husband's consent
• Others claim she was sent on an intense 'behavior modification program' at a remote, confidential location

He is the reclusive and enigmatic leader of the world's most famous cult who played best man at TomKat's wedding.

But perhaps the biggest mystery shrouding Scientology chairman David Miscavige concerns his wife, Shelly, who has not been seen since 2007.

Once a leading Scientologist herself, Shelly Miscavige is even credited as the cupid to Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes' doomed alliance.

Always by her husband's side, it was her to whom Mr Miscavige turned when a lovelorn Cruise begged for help in finding love following the break down of his second marriage to Nicole Kidman.

Believing the role of Hollywood matchmaker to be somewhat beneath him, it was claimed Mr Miscavige handed the task to Shelly who led the hunt for the Cocktail star's perfect match.

After scouring the list of Hollywood's most eligible maidens, her finger fell on the fresh-faced star of Dawson's Creek. Not long after, the couple were married in a lavish ceremony in 2006.

But within a year the organisation's famous First Lady was gone.

She was no longer present at meetings, and her post title, 'COB Assistant', disappeared from internal dispatches.

A campaign by group Why We Protest has been launched to find her, but so far without success.

Very little is known about Shelly's life inside the mysterious world of Scientology and almost no pictures of her appear to remain.

We always knew that the financial markets were rigged, but this is getting ridiculous. It is now being alleged that 20 major banks have been systematically fixing global interest rates for years. Barclays has already been fined hundreds of millions of dollars for manipulating Libor (the London Inter Bank Offered Rate). But Barclays says that a whole bunch of other banks were doing this too. This is shaping up to be the biggest financial scandal in history, and criminal investigations have been launched on both sides of the Atlantic. What those investigations are likely to uncover could shake the financial markets to their very core. In the end, this scandal could absolutely devastate confidence in the global financial system and it could potentially bring down a number of major global banks. We have never seen anything quite like this before.

What Is Libor?

As mentioned before, Libor is the London Inter Bank Offered Rate. A recent Washington Post article contained a pretty good explanation of what that means....

In the simplest terms, LIBOR is the average interest rate which banks in London are charging each other for borrowing. It's calculated by Thomson Reuters - the parent company of the Reuters news agency - for the British Banking Association (BBA), a trade association of banks and financial services companies.

Why Does Libor Matter?

If you have a mortgage, a car loan or a credit card, then there is a very good chance that Libor has affected your personal finances. Libor has been a factor in the pricing of hundreds of trillions of dollars of loans, securities and assets. The following is from a recent article by Maureen Farrell....

These traders influenced the pricing of the London Interbank Offered Rate or Libor, a benchmark that dictates the pricing of up to $800 trillion of securities (yes trillion).

$800 trillion?

That is a number that is hard to even imagine.

Most American consumers do not even know what Libor is, but it actually plays a key role in the U.S. economy as the Washington Post recently explained....

In the United States, the two biggest indices for adjustable rate mortgages and other consumer debt are the prime rate (that is, the rate banks charge favored or "prime" consumers) and LIBOR, with the latter particularly popular for subprime loans. A study from Mark Schweitzer and Guhan Venkatu at the Cleveland Fed looked at survey data in Ohio and found that by 2008, almost 60 percent of prime adjustable rate mortgages, and nearly 100 percent of subprime ones, were indexed to LIBOR.