Car bombs tore through mainly Shi'ite Baghdad districts on Sunday after Iraq's fugitive Vice President Tareq al-Hashemi was sentenced to death, as more than 100 people were killed across the country in one of the bloodiest days this year.

Hashemi's sentencing in absentia and the violence threatened to further stoke sectarian tensions in Iraq where a Shi'ite-led government is battling political deadlock and a Sunni Islamist insurgency nine months after U.S. troops left.

A senior Sunni politician, Hashemi fled Iraq after the authorities issued a warrant for his arrest in December, a move that threatened to collapse a fragile power-sharing deal among Shi'ite, Sunni and Kurdish blocs.

After Sunday's court ruling, bombs tore through six mainly Shi'ite neighborhoods around Baghdad, one going off outside a restaurant and another in a busy commercial district, following earlier bombs that had hit other cities nationwide.

Every single year, millions of young adults head off to colleges and universities all over America full of hopes and dreams. But what most of those fresh-faced youngsters do not realize is that by taking on student loan debt they are signing up for a life of debt slavery. Student loan debt has become a trillion dollar bubble which has shattered the financial lives of tens of millions of young college graduates. When you are just starting out and you are not making a lot of money, having to make payments on tens of thousands of dollars of student loan debt can be absolutely crippling.

The total amount of student loan debt in the United States has now surpassed the total amount of credit card debt, and student loan debt is much harder to get rid of. Many young people view college as a "five year party", but when the party is over millions of those young people basically end up as modern day serfs as they struggle to pay off all of the debt that they have accumulated during their party years. Bankruptcy laws have been changed to make it incredibly difficult to get rid of student loan debt, so once you have it you are basically faced with two choices: either you are going to pay it or you are going to die with it.

But we don't warn kids about this before they go to school. We just endlessly preach to them that they need a college degree in order to get a "good job", and that after they graduate they will easily be able to pay off their student loans with the "good job" that they will certainly be able to find.

Sadly, tens of millions of young Americans have left college in recent years only to find out that they were lied to all along.

As I have written about previously, college has become a giant money making scam and the victims of the scam are our young people.

Back in 1952, a full year of tuition at Harvard was only $600.

Today, it is over $35,000.

Why does college have to cost so much?

At every turn our young people are being ripped off.

For example, the cost of college textbooks has tripled over the past decade.

Has it suddenly become a lot more expensive to print books?

Of course not.

The truth is that an entire industry saw an opportunity to gouge students and they went for it.

The amount of money being spent on higher education in this country is absolutely outrageous. One father down in Texas says that he will end up spending about 1.5 million dollars on college expenses for his five daughters before it is all said and done.

Unfortunately, most young adults in America don't have wealthy fathers so they have to take out large student loans to pay for their educations.

Average student loan debt at graduation is estimated to be about $28,720 right now.

That is a crazy figure and it has absolutely soared in recent years. In fact, student loan debt in America has grown by 511 percent since 1999.

And student loan debt will follow you wherever you go.

If you do not pay your loans when you graduate, you could send up having your wages, your tax refunds and even your Social Security benefits garnished.

In addition, your account could be turned over to the debt collectors and they can be absolutely brutal.

Obama justice officials have all but granted asylum to Sánchez de Lozada - a puppet who payrolled key Democratic advisers

In October 2003, the intensely pro-US president of Bolivia, Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada, sent his security forces to suppress growing popular protests against the government's energy and globalization policies. Using high-powered rifles and machine guns, his military forces killed 67 men, women and children, and injured 400 more, almost all of whom were poor and from the nation's indigenous Aymara communities. Dozens of protesters had been killed by government forces in the prior months when troops were sent to suppress them.

The resulting outrage over what became known as "the Gas Wars" drove Sanchez de Lozada from office and then into exile in the United States, where he was welcomed by his close allies in the Bush administration. He has lived under a shield of asylum in the US ever since.

As clashes between farmers and herders in southeast Kenya escalated Monday with 38 people killed, including nine police officers, the Red Cross suggested the military be deployed to the area.

The tit-for-tat cycle of killings may be related to a redrawing of political boundaries and next year's general elections, the U.N. Humanitarian coordinator for Kenya, Aeneas C. Chuma, said late last month, although on the surface it seems driven by competition for water, pasture and other resources. As the next year's general election in March approaches, political tensions and tribal animosities have increased due to competitions among potential candidates.

In the latest bloodshed, armed farmers allegedly attacked a village of their semi-nomadic livestock-herding neighbors, the Red Cross said. Eight children were among those killed in the dawn attack in which over 300 people from the Pokomo tribe allegedly raided Kilelengwani village of the Orma tribe of herders, said Kenya Red Cross Secretary General Abbas Gullet. The raiders torched 167 houses.

Gullet said the government should consider dispatching the military to the area to reinforce police patrols and impose a curfew in the area to prevent further escalation of the deadly counter-attacks.

A senior Syrian military source reported major rifts among armed groups fighting President Bashar al-Assad government, adding that 85% of the terrorists fighting in Syria are foreign nationals coming from other Arab states.

"The Syrian Army is fighting groups 80% to 85% of which are formed of foreign nationals coming from different Arab countries," the source told al-Ajel news website on Monday.

He revealed that al-Qaeda forces are also among the members of the armed groups fighting against the Syrian people.

The military source also referred to the widening gaps among the members of these armed groups, and said some of them have defected from their relevant groups and formed new gangs.

In relevant remarks yesterday, a French surgeon who treated terrorists in Aleppo said that half of the rebels in Syria are from foreign countries recruited by a number of foreign countries, and that most of his patients in Syria were wounded militants and not civilians.

Yemeni armed forces have killed Said al-Shehri, a man seen as the second-in-command of al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), a government website said on Monday.

The Ministry of Defense website said Shehri was a Saudi national who was killed, along with six other militants, in an army operation in the Wadi valley in south-east Yemen. It gave no more details.

The United States has used unmanned drones to target AQAP, which has planned attacks on international targets including airliners and is described by Washington as the most dangerous wing of al-Qaida.

A Yemeni security source said Shehri was killed in an operation last Wednesday which was thought to have been carried out by a U.S. drone, rather than the Yemeni military. The source said another Saudi and an Iraqi national were among the others killed.

The death toll from a car bomb in Syria's largest city has risen to 30, state media said Monday, as the new international envoy to the country said the Syrian people are desperate to see peace and stability.

The Sunday night blast ripped through the northern city of Aleppo, which has become one of the main battlegrounds of the country's civil war. Activists say at least 23,000 people have been killed since the conflict erupted in March 2011.

On Monday, the new U.N.-Arab League envoy, Lakhdar Brahimi, said he will travel to Syria this week to meet with regime officials as well as civil society.

"I answer to no one except the Syrian people," Brahimi told reporters in Cairo, where he was meeting with Arab League officials and Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi. "Syrians aspire to peace, stability and to realizing their goals of freedom and political progress."

Germany's equivalent of the FBI has put out a notice inquiring about highly-trained computer professionals who know how to exploit windows, speak different languages, and fight the bad guys. In short, Germany is developing its own spyware.

­Although the Bundeskriminalamt's (BKA) job offer is not overt, it is neither by any means secret. Germany is seeking to develop its own state brand of spyware in an effort to fight crime and curb terrorism. According to the advert, job applicants must "demonstrate a sound knowledge of C++...have a very good knowledge of low-level programming and the security mechanisms of Windows," and exhibit a "high degree of creativity."

Also, if selected, the applicant will be "tenured", meaning that he or she can only be fired through a difficult mutual decision, essentially guaranteeing the applicant a long career with the agency.

In keeping with Germany's equal opportunity laws, female candidates will "be strongly considered."

The leaders of the three parties in Greece's coalition government have failed to agree on a package of spending cuts worth 11.5 billion euro, which the Prime Minister says are crucial to restoring the country's financial credibility.

On Sunday conservative Premier Antonis Samaras, socialist Evangelos Venizelos and Fotis Kouvelis of the Democratic Left, disagreed on cuts on pensions and wages and decided to meet again Wednesday.

Venizaelos and Kouvelis asked international creditors to give them more time to implement austerity measures, AP says.

"We haven't finished and there hasn't been a specific decision. One thing is certain, I'm pushing for the measures to be just and not uneven," Democratic Left's Kouvelis told reporters.

"We cannot touch the disability benefits. We cannot make what we call horizontal cuts in pensions," Venizelos said.

As Iranians reel under the pressure of international sanctions, a Russian Deputy Foreign Minister said Washington's unilateral sanction regime against Iran is a violation of international law.

­Saying that Russia has found no evidence that Iran is intent on developing a weapon, Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov warned the United States and Israel on the "disastrous" consequences of attacking Iran.

"We warn those who are no strangers to military solutions...that this would be harmful, literally disastrous for regional stability," Ryabkov told reporters on Thursday.

A military attack on Iran "would set off deep shocks in the security and economic spheres that would reverberate far beyond the boundaries of the Middle East region," he said.

Saying there were no indications of a weapon component to Tehran's nuclear program, Ryabkov pushed for continuing monitoring by the UN nuclear agency was a strong guarantee.

"As before, we see no signs that there is a military dimension to Iran's nuclear program. No signs," Ryabkov, the head of Russia's delegation on Iran, as saying.

Meanwhile, as Iranians reel under the pressure of international sanctions, the Russian diplomat said Washington's unilateral sanction regime against Iran is a violation of international law.